California’s Battery Storage Fireplace: Precursor Or Outlier?

Join day by day information updates from CleanTechnica on electronic mail. Or comply with us on Google Information!

A fireplace broke out on the Moss Touchdown Energy Plant, not too removed from San Francisco, on January 16, 2025, prompting the evacuation of roughly 1,500 residents and the short-term closure of Freeway 1. Nobody was harmed within the incident. Given the large development in grid storage battery methods, is that this one thing everybody must be anxious about, and is it more likely to recur? No and no.

Firefighters allowed the blaze to burn out, citing the challenges of extinguishing lithium-ion battery fires. Authorities lifted evacuation orders the next day after air high quality checks confirmed protected circumstances. The primary part facility has 300 MW of capability and about 40% of it was destroyed, roughly 120 MW. Section 2 and three added one other 450 MW. Given the worth that batteries have been offering in flattening the duck curve within the state, that is going to have some grid impacts. Nonetheless, the state has over 10,000 MW of battery capability, so lacking 1.2% of it isn’t going to be an enormous deal.

In the USA California is the storage chief, unsurprisingly, however there’s one other 5,500 MW or so scattered round different states. Globally, there are about 400,000 MW of battery capability on grids, so this represents 0.03% of the world’s present capability. In different phrases, this isn’t a good portion of California’s, the USA or the world’s battery capability that’s out of service. To place US battery storage methods in context, the roughly 15,500 MW it has deployed is lower than a single December public sale in China, by which 76 bidders averaged US$66 per kWh for 16,000 MW of requested capability.

Let’s do some tough statistical comparisons to some current hydrogen for vitality information out of South Korea. Testing on 147 hydrogen buses after one exploded at a refueling station in December discovered that 11%, one in 9, had been leaking. Testing on hydrogen vehicles within the nation discovered that 1,463 out of 9,482, 15.4%, had been leaking. There have been three explosions and fires on the 203 hydrogen refueling stations within the nation that I’m conscious of, so 1.5% of them, killing two folks and hospitalizing 9 up to now. Statistically, hydrogen automobiles and their refueling methods seem no less than equally more likely to see fires as gasoline automobiles, though the numbers of automobiles and stations are so small that the regulation of small numbers cognitive bias must be taken into consideration so we don’t over depend on the info. We have now vastly extra surety in regards to the a lot decrease fee of fires in electrical automobiles than any fee of issues about hydrogen automobiles as a result of there are 40 million battery electrical automobiles on roads globally.

You wouldn’t realize it from many media commenters, fossil gasoline propagandists and hydrogen followers after all. On LinkedIn, many individuals are battling the flames of disinformation. I’ll share the insights from varied folks right here.

Section 1 of the ability, commissioned in December 2020, is housed inside a repurposed turbine constructing on the former Moss Touchdown Energy Plant in California. The ability comprises 4,500 battery racks organized in sections, every outfitted with devoted cooling and hearth suppression methods. On the time of development it was one of many greatest battery storage services on this planet. There have been a few earlier thermal incidents in 2021 and 2022 which had been contained and attributed to a defective sprinkler system.

As one of many earliest storage methods, the ability predates main practices for battery methods. Authorities having jurisdiction are actually mandating Massive-Scale Fireplace Testing (LSFT) to make sure security and compliance. Conventional evaluations, akin to UL 9540A, assess thermal runaway and hearth propagation on the cell, module, and system ranges. Nonetheless, these checks could not at all times lead to precise hearth circumstances, leaving uncertainties about real-world hazards. To handle this hole, LSFT procedures, just like the CSA TS-800:24, have been developed to simulate and consider the consequences of a completely concerned hearth in a single BESS unit on adjoining models and exterior exposures.

Additional, trendy grid storage methods are usually outside on concrete pads with containerized and air gapped battery models. Tesla was a western chief in containerized batteries with its Megapack, as Wärtsilä’s Vice President of Vitality Storage & Optimization Andy Tang advised me a number of years in the past once we recorded a CleanTech Talks, however it’s now the dominant mannequin by far as a result of they are often inbuilt factories and delivered like every other container. The air gaps implies that if thermal runaway occurs in a single container, it’s a lot much less more likely to unfold to different containers. The 182.5 MW of Tesla Megapacks on the Moss Touchdown facility are deployed like that and had been unaffected by the fireplace.

Subsequent up is that as an older facility, the batteries had been nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) lithium ion batteries. The dominant chemistry for contemporary grid storage batteries, and more and more for electrical automobiles, is lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which has a a lot decrease probability of thermal runaway.

EPRI and TWAICE used their world information set of battery incidents, utilized by the trade for root trigger evaluation, to evaluate the change in statistical probability of battery vitality storage methods over time, making it publicly accessible in Could of 2024. The probability of failures has plummeted as a consequence of altering chemistries, air gapped open air containerized deployments and the brand new requirements for battery and thermal administration methods to world trade is utilizing.

Notice that these aren’t fires which destroyed battery methods, however all failures of every kind in battery methods. The blue bars, by the way in which, aren’t GW, however incidents. Given the large scale of the trade, a world database having one failure of any type per GW of deployed capability makes it clear that grid storage batteries are extremely protected.

That is the info from the AutoinsuranceEZ examine of auto fires for vehicles. They took information from the US Nationwide Transportation Security Board (NTSB) and the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to find out the variety of fires for various drive trains. Statistically, it’s clear that battery electrical vehicles are vastly much less more likely to catch hearth, though the traits of the fires are totally different. Specialised hearth extinguishers designed for lithium-ion batteries, hearth blankets to comprise and isolate burning EVs, and superior cooling brokers are being deployed to enhance firefighting effectiveness. Moreover, hearth departments are present process specialised coaching to deal with thermal runaway dangers and the complexities of extinguishing EV fires, which regularly require extended cooling durations and totally different ways in comparison with typical car fires.

Just like the comparability between EVs and inside combustion vehicles, it’s value asking what the comparability is between pure gasoline electrical era generators and battery grid storage. Apparently, there is no such thing as a world information set on turbine fires and failures, so researchers should assemble their very own. That stated, a paper offered on the sixth European Convention on Industrial Engineering and Operations Administration in Portugal in July of 2023 on decreasing fires at turbine services is pertinent.

“There are a number of explosion incidents which have occurred in gasoline energy vegetation and resulted in a number of accidents and financial losses prior to now. In 2010 a catastrophic explosion has taken place in North Carolina that killed 6 workers and greater than 50 folks had been injured, when a cleansing course of was initiated within the gasoline pipe utilizing pure gasoline at excessive stress it begins to ignite and it prompted an explosion in line with NBC Connecticut, 2020. Not too long ago the variety of gasoline turbine explosion incidentshas considerably decreased after the well being and security rules. Nonetheless a number of accidents have occurred. In 2019 a large explosion occurred in New Orleans within the US that destroyed a significant electrical energy plant. It was brought on by an operator error, and it resulted in injuring two workers with extreme burns (David, 2021). Furthermore, in line with New Indian Xpress 2020, an explosion of a gasoline energy plant in Karnataka was initiated by an undetected oil leakage that prompted a fireplace and 15 staff have painful burn accidents. The final accident prompted the fatality lack of one worker and two others had been severely injured as a consequence of a leakage challenge of one of many pumps that prompted an infinite explosion in Mumbai 2022 (Mendonca 2022).”

These are simply the large ones at these services. As there is no such thing as a statistical information on prevalence of fires at gasoline generators, it’s unattainable to attract a transparent conclusion, however when the whole focus of the location is shifting a flammable and explosive gasoline into the location and burning it, my assumption is that it’s fairly in all probability more likely from an incident per GW perspective.

As a distinction, there are not any recorded fatalities as a consequence of fires at working grid battery storage system services that I’ve been capable of finding. This is smart as a result of battery methods are stable state. There are some shifting elements within the HVAC parts, however that’s it. They’re lights out services with no workers on web site besides potential safety guards, in contrast to gasoline era services. A 565-MW gas-fired combined-cycle energy plant would possibly want round 27 full-time workers, and they’re clearly extra uncovered to hazard ought to an incident happen.

As soon as once more, battery fires have distinctive traits and there are potential well being issues, therefore the precautionary evacuation. Air high quality monitoring at Moss Touchdown has to date detected no vital ranges of poisonous gases akin to hydrogen fluoride or particulate matter.

In the meantime, when used as directed, combustion of pure gasoline releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gasoline contributing to local weather change, together with nitrogen oxides, which may type smog and acid rain. Incomplete combustion might also produce carbon monoxide and hint quantities of risky natural compounds. Moreover, methane leaks throughout manufacturing and transport can considerably amplify greenhouse gasoline emissions.

Nitrogen oxides contribute to respiratory points akin to bronchial asthma and bronchitis by forming ground-level ozone and tremendous particulate matter. Publicity to those pollution has been linked to cardiovascular illnesses and elevated hospital admissions, significantly amongst susceptible populations. Pure gasoline vegetation can emit hint quantities of hazardous air pollution, together with benzene and formaldehyde, which have been related to long-term well being dangers akin to most cancers.

Considerations about occasional battery fires, in different phrases, are vastly out of proportion to the hurt brought on by what they displace. The well being issues of officers and the briefly displaced residents — they had been again dwelling after in the future — are as a consequence of this being an unknown amount, however the fixed well being impacts of the 1,060 MW, twin turbine, pure gasoline era facility that’s additionally positioned on the Moss Touchdown facility. This facet of the story is totally lacking as everybody focuses on the weird and short-lived battery hearth. The pure gasoline portion of the plant is making native residents and their children sick.

The 2022 capability issue of the Moss Touchdown facility was about 58%, pretty typical for vegetation within the USA. Nonetheless, the ability has decommissioned seven of its oil and gasoline burning era models. That’s proper, it was burning oil, which is loads worse than even the nonetheless unhealthy burning of pure gasoline for human well being. A giant a part of the story of the battery methods in California is that they’re displacing burning fossil fuels for electrical energy, so everybody’s air high quality has gone up significantly, together with that of the 1,500 residents evacuated across the time of the fireplace. The 2 remaining gasoline generators on the facility are high-efficiency, low-emission mixed cycle models. Moreover, the plant employs dry low nitrous oxide combustors to attenuate emissions that trigger smog.

All of that is to say that the Moss Touchdown hearth is a person bites canine story. It’s uncommon, so it will get numerous press. It’s additionally being amplified by delayers and deniers, each institutional and particular person. It feeds the affirmation biases of those that suppose batteries are harmful hearth hazards and it fits the narratives of the fossil gasoline trade and a fairly exceptional share of right-wing media. General, the Moss Touchdown battery system is a part of what’s making everybody in California breath simpler and battery storage methods are protected grid parts.