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A fire broke out on the Moss Landing Vitality Plant, not too faraway from San Francisco, on January 16, 2025, prompting the evacuation of roughly 1,500 residents and the momentary closure of Freeway 1. No person was harmed inside the incident. Given the massive growth in grid storage battery strategies, is that this one factor everyone should be frightened about, and is it extra prone 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 following day after air prime quality exams confirmed protected circumstances. The first half facility has 300 MW of functionality and about 40% of it was destroyed, roughly 120 MW. Half 2 and three added one different 450 MW. Given the value that batteries have been providing in flattening the duck curve inside the state, that’s going to have some grid impacts. Nonetheless, the state has over 10,000 MW of battery functionality, so missing 1.2% of it isn’t going to be an enormous deal.

In america California is the storage chief, unsurprisingly, nevertheless there’s one different 5,500 MW or so scattered spherical completely different states. Globally, there are about 400,000 MW of battery functionality on grids, so this represents 0.03% of the world’s current functionality. In several phrases, this isn’t a great portion of California’s, america or the world’s battery functionality that’s out of service. To put US battery storage strategies in context, the roughly 15,500 MW it has deployed is decrease than a single December public sale in China, throughout which 76 bidders averaged US$66 per kWh for 16,000 MW of requested functionality.

Let’s do some powerful statistical comparisons to some present hydrogen for energy info out of South Korea. Testing on 147 hydrogen buses after one exploded at a refueling station in December found that 11%, one in 9, have been leaking. Testing on hydrogen cars inside the nation found that 1,463 out of 9,482, 15.4%, have been leaking. There have been three explosions and fires on the 203 hydrogen refueling stations inside the nation that I’m aware of, so 1.5% of them, killing two people and hospitalizing 9 thus far. Statistically, hydrogen cars and their refueling strategies appear a minimum of equally extra prone to see fires as gasoline cars, although the numbers of cars and stations are so small that the regulation of small numbers cognitive bias should be considered so we don’t over rely on the information. We now have vastly additional surety regarding the quite a bit lower worth of fires in electrical cars than any worth of points about hydrogen cars on account of there are 40 million battery electrical cars on roads globally.

You wouldn’t perceive it from many media commenters, fossil gasoline propagandists and hydrogen followers in spite of everything. On LinkedIn, many people are battling the flames of disinformation. I’ll share the insights from diversified people proper right here.

Half 1 of the ability, commissioned in December 2020, is housed inside a repurposed turbine developing on the previous Moss Landing Vitality Plant in California. The power incorporates 4,500 battery racks organized in sections, each equipped with devoted cooling and hearth suppression strategies. On the time of growth it was one in every of many largest battery storage facilities on this planet. There have been a couple of earlier thermal incidents in 2021 and 2022 which have been contained and attributed to a faulty sprinkler system.

As one in every of many earliest storage strategies, the ability predates important practices for battery strategies. Authorities having jurisdiction for the time being are mandating Big-Scale Fireplace Testing (LSFT) to verify safety and compliance. Typical evaluations, resembling UL 9540A, assess thermal runaway and hearth propagation on the cell, module, and system ranges. Nonetheless, these exams couldn’t on a regular basis finish in exact hearth circumstances, leaving uncertainties about real-world hazards. To deal with this gap, LSFT procedures, similar to the CSA TS-800:24, have been developed to simulate and think about the implications of a very involved hearth in a single BESS unit on adjoining gadgets and exterior exposures.

Extra, fashionable grid storage strategies are normally outside on concrete pads with containerized and air gapped battery gadgets. Tesla was a western chief in containerized batteries with its Megapack, as Wärtsilä’s Vice President of Vitality Storage & Optimization Andy Tang suggested me quite a few years up to now as soon as we recorded a CleanTech Talk about, nevertheless it’s now the dominant model by far on account of they’re usually inbuilt factories and delivered like each different container. The air gaps signifies that if thermal runaway happens in a single container, it’s quite a bit a lot much less extra prone to unfold to completely different containers. The 182.5 MW of Tesla Megapacks on the Moss Landing facility are deployed like that and have been unaffected by the fireside.

Subsequent up is that as an older facility, the batteries have been nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) lithium ion batteries. The dominant chemistry for up to date grid storage batteries, and increasingly more for electrical cars, is lithium iron phosphate (LFP), which has a quite a bit lower likelihood of thermal runaway.

EPRI and TWAICE used their world info set of battery incidents, utilized by the enterprise for root set off analysis, to judge the change in statistical likelihood of battery energy storage strategies over time, making it publicly obtainable in Might of 2024. The prospect of failures has plummeted on account of altering chemistries, air gapped open air containerized deployments and the model new necessities for battery and thermal administration strategies to world enterprise is using.

Discover that these aren’t fires which destroyed battery strategies, nevertheless all failures of all kinds in battery strategies. The blue bars, by the way in which through which, aren’t GW, nevertheless incidents. Given the massive scale of the enterprise, a worldwide database having one failure of any sort per GW of deployed functionality makes it clear that grid storage batteries are extraordinarily protected.

That’s the data from the AutoinsuranceEZ analysis of auto fires for cars. They took info from the US Nationwide Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to search out out the number of fires for varied drive trains. Statistically, it’s clear that battery electrical cars are vastly a lot much less extra prone to catch hearth, although the traits of the fires are completely completely 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 reinforce firefighting effectiveness. Furthermore, hearth departments are current course of specialised teaching to take care of thermal runaway risks and the complexities of extinguishing EV fires, which usually require prolonged cooling durations and completely completely different strategies compared with typical vehicle fires.

Similar to the comparability between EVs and inside combustion cars, it’s worth asking what the comparability is between pure gasoline electrical know-how mills and battery grid storage. Apparently, there is no such thing as a such factor as a world info set on turbine fires and failures, so researchers should assemble their very personal. That talked about, a paper provided on the sixth European Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Administration in Portugal in July of 2023 on decreasing fires at turbine facilities is pertinent.

“There are a selection of explosion incidents which have occurred in gasoline vitality crops and resulted in quite a few accidents and monetary losses before now. In 2010 a catastrophic explosion has taken place in North Carolina that killed 6 employees and better than 50 people have been injured, when a cleaning course of was initiated inside the gasoline pipe using pure gasoline at extreme pressure it begins to ignite and it triggered an explosion in accordance with NBC Connecticut, 2020. Simply these days the number of gasoline turbine explosion incidentshas significantly decreased after the nicely being and safety guidelines. Nonetheless quite a few accidents have occurred. In 2019 a big explosion occurred in New Orleans inside the US that destroyed a big electrical vitality plant. It was introduced on by an operator error, and it resulted in injuring two employees with excessive burns (David, 2021). Moreover, in accordance with New Indian Xpress 2020, an explosion of a gasoline vitality plant in Karnataka was initiated by an undetected oil leakage that triggered a fire and 15 workers have painful burn accidents. The ultimate accident triggered the fatality lack of 1 employee and two others have been severely injured on account of a leakage concern of one in every of many pumps that triggered an infinite explosion in Mumbai 2022 (Mendonca 2022).”

These are merely the large ones at these facilities. As there is no such thing as a such factor as a statistical info on prevalence of fires at gasoline mills, it’s unattainable to draw a clear conclusion, nevertheless when your whole focus of the placement is transferring a flammable and explosive gasoline into the placement and burning it, my assumption is that it’s pretty possibly extra possible from an incident per GW perspective.

As a distinction, there are not any recorded fatalities on account of fires at working grid battery storage system facilities that I have been able to find. That is sensible on account of battery strategies are secure state. There are some transferring parts inside the HVAC parts, nevertheless that’s it. They’re lights out facilities with no employees on web site apart from attainable security guards, not like gasoline know-how facilities. A 565-MW gas-fired combined-cycle vitality plant might want spherical 27 full-time employees, they usually’re clearly additional uncovered to hazard should an incident occur.

As quickly as as soon as extra, battery fires have distinctive traits and there are potential nicely being points, subsequently the precautionary evacuation. Air prime quality monitoring at Moss Landing has thus far detected no very important ranges of toxic gases resembling hydrogen fluoride or particulate matter.

Within the meantime, when used as directed, combustion of pure gasoline releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gasoline contributing to native climate change, along with nitrogen oxides, which can sort smog and acid rain. Incomplete combustion could produce carbon monoxide and trace portions of unstable pure compounds. Furthermore, methane leaks all through manufacturing and transport can significantly amplify greenhouse gasoline emissions.

Nitrogen oxides contribute to respiratory factors resembling bronchial bronchial asthma and bronchitis by forming ground-level ozone and advantageous particulate matter. Publicity to these air pollution has been linked to cardiovascular diseases and elevated hospital admissions, notably amongst prone populations. Pure gasoline crops can emit trace portions of hazardous air air pollution, along with benzene and formaldehyde, which have been associated to long-term nicely being risks resembling most cancers.

Points about occasional battery fires, in several phrases, are vastly out of proportion to the harm introduced on by what they displace. The nicely being problems with officers and the rapidly displaced residents — they’ve been once more dwelling after sooner or later — are on account of this being an unknown quantity, nevertheless the mounted nicely being impacts of the 1,060 MW, twin turbine, pure gasoline know-how facility that’s moreover positioned on the Moss Landing facility. This side of the story is completely missing as everyone focuses on the weird and short-lived battery hearth. The pure gasoline portion of the plant is making native residents and their kids sick.

The 2022 functionality difficulty of the Moss Landing facility was about 58%, fairly typical for crops inside the USA. Nonetheless, the ability has decommissioned seven of its oil and gasoline burning know-how gadgets. That’s correct, it was burning oil, which is kind of a bit worse than even the nonetheless unhealthy burning of pure gasoline for human nicely being. An infinite part of the story of the battery strategies in California is that they are displacing burning fossil fuels for electrical vitality, so everyone’s air prime quality has gone up considerably, along with that of the 1,500 residents evacuated throughout the time of the fireside. The two remaining gasoline mills on the power are high-efficiency, low-emission combined cycle gadgets. Furthermore, the plant employs dry low nitrous oxide combustors to scale back emissions that set off smog.

All of that’s to say that the Moss Landing hearth is an individual bites canine story. It’s unusual, so it would get quite a few press. It’s moreover being amplified by delayers and deniers, every institutional and specific particular person. It feeds the affirmation biases of people who suppose batteries are dangerous hearth hazards and it matches the narratives of the fossil gasoline enterprise and a reasonably distinctive proportion of right-wing media. Whole, the Moss Landing battery system is part of what’s making everyone in California breath easier and battery storage strategies are protected grid parts.