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.
The fact that it didn’t burst into flames while every building did means that the battery plants are resilient enough for anywhere else.
That’s because Oil FAMOUSLY Never Burns!
Only if you ignore all the leaking pipelines, oil refinery fires, leaking methane, oil spills, coal emissions, etc…
it’s a bit rich. “opponents of carbon-free electricity” are suddenly opposed to burning things huh?
anyway, there is actually a way to reduce our need for batteries AND fossil fuels. Nuclear.
Of course they’re conveniently ignoring refineries catching fire or even gas station explosions. That seem to be regular events.
New nuclear is dead in the water, there’s just no economic argument for building it.
that’s just nonsense.
Solid rebuttal, good job 👍
I put as much effort into my rebuttal as you did in your initial comment. If you want an actual conversation, by all means begin any time you like.
I already did. New nuclear isn’t economically viable.
rebuttal: yes it is.
great conversation! feel free to add any context, reasoning, or citations to support your opinion.
Difficult to extinguish you say?
A massive battery fire in California could cast a dark shadow on clean energy expansion
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.
I was reading the other day about advances in zinc ion batteries as a possible replacement for lithium ion batteries in applications like this. They’re heavier than lithium ion, which is just fine for energy storage facilities like this, but they retain their capacity through a lot more charge/discharge cycles (the article I was reading said they drop to 80% capacity after 100,000 cycles - if that’s one cycle a day then that’s nearly 300 years) and most importantly for this specific situation they’re not flammable.
Yeah I like Iron-air for this type of thing too, super cheap but super stable
I’m sure the right wing will use this s as an excuse to bash renewables while conveniently ignoring all the unburied power lines that have burned down half of California.
Meanwhile, most battery installations are moving to sodium ion and it’s far less flammable.
What do you think about lithium iron phosphate? From what I understand, it has a lot less thermal runaway potential as well.
Fires in California, you say? Yeah…about that…
gestures towards every year for the past 20 years
Only if the media paints it that way for ad impressions.
This place has caught fire several times now?
Seriously not a good look for the industry if events like this keep happening.
Moss Landing uses NMC batteries instead of LiFePO4. NMC lithium batteries are more energy dense (they’re often used in long range EVs), but they can also produce hydrogen and can autoignite if they go into thermal runaway. LiFePO4 batteries cannot autoignite and can’t produce hydrogen. They last longer, and the reduced density is worth it for the safety benefits, which is why more recent grid storage setups use them and not NMC. A BESS using the right chemistry could not have gone up in flames like this.
As opposed to all the leaking oil pipelines, petroleum fires, leaking methane, etc? No, this place has a pretty poor track record, but let’s not make it “the industry”.
I’m talking about the renewable energy industry, smart person. It’s a very bad look for them as a whole having multiple large fires at one location.
I think the keepers of this facility themselves already said they were not prepared for this situation, so that’s the problem right there. The technology is fine.
