Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.
A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.
Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.
Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.
Fire may be a risk for grid-scale battery storage, but I’m not sold that it’s a fundamental one.
The article points out that this isn’t intrinsically tied to battery storage – one can store the batteries outdoors so that heat gets vented instead of trapped in a building if one battery catches fire, and that the reason that these were indoors is because the facility was one repurposed from non-battery-storage.
But even aside from that, the energy industry works with a lot of very flammable materials all the time – natural gas, oil, coal, flammable fluids in large transformers. While there’s the occasional fire, when one happens, we don’t normally conclude that the broader electricity industry isn’t workable due to fire risk.
I feel like the author is aware of that, it’s just that any issue with renewable energy or batteries gets exaggerated and exploited by the fossil fuel industry.
For example with electric car battery fires, which happen, but are less frequent than ICE fires. However, any time a Tesla catches fire it’s national news somehow (not that Tesla are helping themselves with their door handles trapping people inside).
In this case, it’s a company cramming a bunch of batteries indoors instead of leaving them outside where they can burn out more safely, which made the fire a lot worse and harder to put out. If you’re trying to sell ‘clean’ energy, you should probably avoid creating a situation where you’re pumping heavy metals into the surrounding atmosphere. And if people hear about this happening, they’re not going to want a battery near their house, even if it’s a safer type.
The fire risk can be reduced by using safer battery types like sodium ion and LiFePO4.
Yeah Tesla released a video of one of their PowerPacks burning back around 2017. It burned to the ground, surrounded by gravel. Nearest pack to it was like 20 feet away per their typical installation methods. No biggie.