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Tesla’s Megapack Battery Burned For Days In Grid Storage Fire

 3 years ago
source link: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/12/teslas-megapack-battery-burned-for-days-in-grid-storage-fire/
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Tesla’s Megapack Battery Burned For Days In Grid Storage Fire

Lithium rechargeable batteries have been heralded for their high-density energy storage, enabling all manner of technologies to come to fruition. From drones to practical electric cars to large-scale grid storage, the applications are endless.

E7iNDHrXMAI13p9.jpg?w=400The fire as seen from a drone overhead. Source: Twitter/@FireRescueVic

However, the lithium rechargeable battery has always had one major flaw–flammability. Pushed outside their operating range or otherwise tipped into thermal runaway, and they can burn ferociously as a result.

This came to pass in late July, at the Victorian Big Battery in Geelong, Australia, and it took significant effort to extinguish the blaze. Let’s take a look at the project and see how this came to occur.

Grid-Scale Storage

The Victorian Big Battery is a grid storage project similar in construction to the Hornsdale Power Reserve in neighboring South Australia. However, where the Hornsdale facility fields 194 MWh of capacity and 150MW peak power delivery, the new project aims to go much further. The Victorian project aims to install 450 MWh of capacity and deliver a peak power output of 300 MW.

firesmokeB.jpg?w=400Concerns were raised about the smoke from the blaze, though local authorities gave downwind areas the all-clear soon after. Credit: CFA

Operated by Neoen, the facility is built using Tesla Megapacks, large battery installations designed for grid storage purposes. Each Megapack contains batteries, inverters, and thermal management systems inside for a turnkey, plug-and-play solution to grid storage.

Initial testing of the battery was undertaken on July 30, with fire breaking out at approximately 10:15am according to official reports. The site was quickly disconnected from the grid with no interruption to the local electricity supply.

The fire burned for days, with firefighters announcing the blaze had been brought under control by 3PM on August 2. Lithium batteries tend to burn quite fiercely, and will often reignite after a time, so crews were left on site to monitor the battery for some time afterwards. Temperature readings were taken every two hours so that any heating or reignition could quickly be subdued.

Water Was Used, But Not Directly on the Fire

The fire was fought by the members of the Country Fire Authority as well as Fire Rescue Victoria. CFA incident controller Ian Beswicke spoke on the blaze, noting the difficulty of tackling such fires. “They are difficult to fight because you can’t put water on the Megapacks… all that does is extend the length of time that the fire burns for.” Acting on advice from Tesla, Beswicke noted that “…the recommend process is you cool everything around it so the fire can’t spread and you let it burn out.”

firehot.jpg?w=400Visible are the individual Tesla Megapack units, each with its own thermal management system built-in. Credit: CFA

The fire began less than 24 hours after the battery began operating on the grid, according to sources quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald. Quick action by firefighting crews kept the entire facility from burning down, limiting the flames from spreading beyond a second battery pack.

Out of an abundance of concern for people in surrounding areas, a warning was given to those downwind of the incident. Two mobile units were deployed to the area by the Environment Protection Authority of Victoria. Despite early concerns and a warning for residents to shut windows and remain indoors, official reports soon gave the local atmosphere the all clear.

Obviously, a large fire lasting multiple days in a grid storage facility is an outcome that nobody wants. However, the events that followed serve as an indicator that authorities were well prepared to deal with the situation. No injuries were reported throughout the incident, and the fire was contained to a limited area of the facility. Only two battery packs caught fire out of the many on site (210 are planned in total), and electrical risks were properly managed to avoid disaster.

Questions remain as to how the fire started in the first place. Whether it comes down to an installation error or faulty equipment or batteries will likely be revealed by investigators in due time. For now, it’s a black mark against Victoria’s new battery project. However, in time, it may serve as an example of how through proper emergency management, lithium battery fires can be managed safely. The future of the electrical grid, and indeed, personal transport, may depend on it.

Posted in Current Events, Featured, News, SliderTagged battery, grid storage, neoen, tesla

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144 thoughts on “Tesla’s Megapack Battery Burned For Days In Grid Storage Fire”

  1. Antron Argaiv says:

    You would think they’d space them out a bit more so one burning module couldn’t ignite its neighbours…

    1. Dude says:

      Land and cabling costs money.

      1. MrSVCD says:

        I have a sneaking suspicion that this is Teslas recommended spacing as well.

      2. Nick says:

        Land in almost all of Australia is *empty*

        1. Dude says:

          You can’t just plop things down anywhere, you have to make foundations

          1. Foldi-One says:

            Exactly this, though after this event they may spread out more in future installs when land is almost free, so its only the cost of a little extra foundation.

            Somewhat surprised its so densely packed in Aus, I mean the place is renowned for being big, very empty, for horrible hot weather and catching fire on its own! I always assumed the ‘big battery’ they had built were much more distributed arrays, if only to spread out the heat generation and allow more airflow, but also because it wouldn’t cost much to do so…

          2. Dude says:

            It’s the logistics of it. You can see they’re using a crane to access the modules, so if you space them out too far you have to drive the crane all the way around to reach all the modules in one “block”.

          3. Foldi-One says:

            I was thinking more the fact that it seems to be a very large x-y plane with little space – I had expected greater gaps between row – both to allow service access and just keep the modules apart enough that if anything goes wrong only that column is at much risk.. Using a mobile crane more like the ones used in dockyards that straddle the loads, rather than just a giant single spot of contact with the ground style less mobile one.

            Just not knowing what logistical model they had chosen I assumed they would keep each of their battery crates in rows and the rows further apart using something like a forklift or dockyard crane… And that method allows you to put the rows however far apart you feel like, even over multiple satellite locations sharing the crane(s), the only limitation is the rows can’t get too close together that the service vehicle can’t get access – which with a system all about vast scale at the outset seems like a more scaleable model to further increase scale as/when needed.

          4. Kanniget says:

            Australian land is extremely expensive, you would pay less for land in Texas than almost anywhere within cooee ( Oz Slang for Short distance ) of any constructed environment in Australia.

            I know, it makes absolutely no sense but it is true….

          5. BemusedAussie says:

            @Kanniget

            Without knowing land prices in Texas I’ll lean on your knowledge/experience for the comparison, but saying “it makes absolutely no sense” is a just silly. Instead, you could say “I don’t understand why that’s the case”.

          6. Kanniget says:

            I said it doesn’t make any sense, because It doesn’t make any sense. Real estate should have a value somewhat relative to the general demographics of the area. i.e. the ability of the land to pay for itself, through available local income for the owner or through direct earned returns.

            https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/1051-S-Highway-67-Cedar-Hill-TX/23071478/

            population approx 45000. median income $72K USD, 70% employment rate, on/near highway 6 Acres…$799K USD

            https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/property/111-lillkar-road-goulburn-nsw-2580-2015927188
            population approx 22000, median income $32K AUD, 85% employment ( 30% part time ) and on/near highway, 3.3 acres $2.2M AUD ( roughly $1.6M USD ).

            and some of the reasons for this are :
            1) There are taxation loopholes that are extremely favourable to real estate land banking,
            2) Banks have no interest in loaning for business.
            3) A general population with an obsession that real estate is the only investment game in town and that thinks value is what someone else will pay for it in 3 years time.
            4) Essentially very low or almost non existent holding costs.
            5) Politicians at all levels who have large property holdings and use them to build wealth. Hence policies designed to prop up the market when it is already very strong.

          7. Bret Tschacher says:

            I didn’t see where anyone took into consideration the part about reaching down from a crane with some sort of lifting device to attach to a FLAMING HOT MEGA watt battery pack ! Now who is supposed to go in there to disconnect all that power while flames are wafting around then attach lifting clamps to the battery pack so it can be raised out of there on fire and then where to go with it? Lithium batteries may be nice for the power they can store but I don’t think enough engineering has been put into them for the reason they are so dangerous. We need a better solution and it’s coming, just not fast enough.

        2. BemusedAussie says:

          So why didn’t they build it on less valuable land, then, so they could purchase more of it?

          1. so basically spongebob patrick meme “why dont we take all the batteries here and move them over there”

      3. Not-Dude says:

        So does the labor in fighting the fires, environmental fallout should the blaze not be contained, etc. At the very least there should be proper fire breaks between the packs to contain individual fires. It’s not if, it’s when. If this kind of thing catch on, there’s eventually going to be a Texas City-like incident.

        1. Phil says:

          For grid scale transformers, there’s usually a high concrete wall and a bit of space. More or less designed to be able to buen out without taking out their neighbours. I’d assume that grid transformers are probably less likely to fail and cach in the first place too – just because theyre simplier.

          So perhaps design the concrete wall structure such that dumpung a truck full of sand on it will smother a fire? Or invent the lithium-asbestos battery :)

          1. optionsedu says:

            Grid scale transformers are typically filled with a highly toxic liquid for heat management and to act as a dielectric. The concrete walls are designed to act as a tub to capture those chemicals in case of a failure. It helps contain the chemicals and prevent large scale environmental contamination.

            You will normally see crushed rock under the transformers but below that is another layer of concrete that makes the bottom of the containment area.

            It has a secondary effect of preventing problems from spreading to other transformers but that isn’t their primary function.

      4. Tom Szabo says:

        well that is the same reason we started building tilt panel houses and modern ghettos (townhouse complexes) and allowed 400m2 blocks…. to save on infrastructure so the council officials could shuffle more money elsewhere…. and now we have lots of people in small places, easier to control them if needed and they are really dependent on handouts, high demand for services and supplies. ..

    2. GS says:

      There are hundreds of engineers looking into this but as far as I know there is no evidence that the fire spread even inside the 1 damaged Megapack. For the fire to spread, or propagate, means that a cell in a neighboring section or pack has to ignite. While the many pictures show damage it doesn’t seem to show the fire spreading beyond on of the 13-14 half cabinet sections in the first Megapack. If it did propagate it would loose it’s UL listing.

      1. Nick says:

        I don’t think UL is an Australian thing.

        1. NorthernDIY says:

          Regardless of the potential Ameri-centric discussion, UL is probably still applicable in this case in terms of the design. Tesla is based in the US and undoubtedly subjects their designs for UL testing as they want to push their products onto American soil as well.

          1. Oprah's minge says:

            UL isn’t required in America. The companies that use it, do it for the insurance rates.

            Not common in industrial stuff. Never seen one UL listed end mill.

          2. Murray says:

            In former UK colonial parts of the world CE tends to be more relevant than UL. Now that we have Brexit, we will have to see what happens.

          3. Morberis says:

            An end mill isn’t electrical. Yes even and especially in industrial environments all electrical components have a UL OR equivalent rating. Literally the law. Yes putting in that chinese smart relay as a switch replacement could screw you over bad if it is the cause of an electrical fire.

            To over-simplify it electronics (but not low voltage or extra low voltage) is different, that’s covered by different code and I can’t comment on whether something needs UL rating.

            I say this as a Red Seal Industrial Electrician.

          4. volt-k says:

            In reply to Murray:
            “In former UK colonial parts of the world CE tends to be more relevant than UL. Now that we have Brexit, we will have to see what happens.”

            There’s a new thing already, it’s called UKCA.

        2. Alex says:

          IEC is used

    3. drop in the bucket. says:

      would be better to literally bury them individually with a wooden roof structure, so when they caught fire, they could self extinguish, or just keep all that carbon local into said pile of dirt or sand, or other cheap/free extinguishing material.

      Part of the reason they have these ‘cells’ is modularity…. while they technically shouldn’t have to shut down the entire park for this one cell, i don’t doubt that they did for safety and investigation as to why they set fire.

      while lead acid batteries are not as efficient, etc etc… they do not have as much of a tendency to spontaneously combust under load. If they don’t figure out this burning issue, they’re never going to reach the goals set fourth.

      They have to figure out better monitoring and safety mechanisms.

      however, it’d be better time and money spent to stop the military from literally scorching the earth with all of it’s backward policies including burn piles toxic waste, and using depleted uranium for munitions.

      1. Steven Naslund says:

        Maybe buried installation would be a wise choice or underground compartments. The danger is heat from the intense fire overheating other packs. Lithium batteries are inversely stable with temperature. The hotter they get the more conductive they become increasing current flow. They will have to come up with some kind of suppression system. “Just let it burn itself out” is not going to fly in a lot of jurisdictions.

    4. Jellmeister says:

      Didn’t this event show they’ve pretty much picked the optimal spacing? At most they lit one adjacent pack (may have been part of the fault) under a full burn to the ground event for 2 units. Given rarity of the event and effectiveness of containment, it’s not really worth spacing them further. I am slightly surprised they don’t have sprinklers to remove dependency on fire crew arrival times. That might not go so well next time.

      1. GS says:

        It’s and and or situation. Suppliers globally can design and certify their modules/assemblies to not propagate, case of Tesla, OR they can build in sprinklers, typically actually it’s a water supply with a temperature controlled valve that floods the battery module to control the temp so the fire does not spread.

    5. Shamrock says:

      Does this foretell what could happen in a new Tesla coming off final assembly, or after it’s sold?

      1. rpavlik says:

        Unlikely, there’s a lot more power in this unit than any car.

        (Also gasoline/other petroleum product fires are definitely a thing. Any sufficiently energy-dense thing has its risks.)

        1. Shannon says:

          Witnessing the aftermath of a car fire on the road and the nearby structures is quite something.

    6. fnorkn says:

      It might be prudent to have a crane and bottomless concrete box on site. In case of Unit On Fire, apply box.

    7. John says:

      Anything that burns for three days and can’t be extinguished with water is a problem. They and emergency response for car crashes will need to come up with something better. In this case they were lucky. Maybe they could Design a type of snuffer, similar to a candle snuffer that can be placed over the burning unit and let the fire burn the oxygen out, thus removing one portion of the fire triangle.

      1. GS says:

        Isn’t that the case with the peaker plants these batteries are replacing? They are in their way out but there’s still tons of diesel and fuel oil peaker plants around the world and there are several MJ of energy in those huge million gallon fuel tanks. They do catch fire and they take a long time to put out, the plume of smoke is toxic.

        1. Foldi-One says:

          This is very true, while Lithium battery techs do pose a different fire fighting challenge it is not like the various fuels, which are fuels because they burn reasonably easy do not pose significant risks themselves.

          All you can really say in favour of the old systems is everyone is more familiar with how to deal with, so it seems old hat. The ol’ familiar breeds a degree of complacency and blindness to the problems – as that is just the way life is.

          Its not just the end user of fossil fuels own stockpile you have to consider either – as they need to actively receive shipments of whichever fuel from the refinery, so there is a risk of a big fire on the road/rail/ship/pipeline. And to actually create fuel the refinery needs still pretty flammable crude oil, which has to be shipped in from somewhere – so even if these batteries prove a little more unstable than ideal all the various fire risks – and the scale of the devastation (see the tanker the front fell off for instance) when a step in that line does go wrong means they are probably worth it!

          Plus one small well managed fire with huge potential energy here and a few toasty wrecks is far to early to cry wolf over the whole lithium battery technology – though I would like to see safer chemistries and other energy storage methods in use more, especially when there is not a real need for the highest possible electrical potential density, but still lets see what the final analysis of this grid battery event, and just how common runaway EV fires become in the real world actually turns out to be before even thinking that…

          So far it seems to me as nasty as lithium batteries can be they are not inherently worse, if anything they are safer on many fronts including fire risk – as all the many steps of generally much worse fires if there is an accident they are largely replacing with just one step – the electric transmission (though perhaps electric generation should also be counted, at least for now, as there is enough fossil fuel in use to make it, and that won’t disappear overnight).

  2. Brian says:
  3. Andy says:

    Actually, the site layout could be designed differently, in a way, that when a container unit would have a thermal run-away event it could be safely disconnected from grid and be ejected away from the other containers to an empty row safe area.

    Perhaps even with moveable brick walls made from aerated concrete (light, non-flamable and good insulation) that could be shifted to heat/water shield the other containers.

    This way the firefighting/cooling would be easier and the danger from igniting other containers would be significantly reduced and the site would not need to be shut down and can continue to operate.

    1. Hirudinea says:

      Why not bury the batteries in the ground?

      1. Dan says:

        Not great for getting rid of heat. And a massive pain for maintenance.

        1. Hirudinea says:

          I suppose I see the heat problem, but those Tesla Megapacks don’t look like solid individual batteries, but battery systems, I’d think you could enter the packs (from the top if buried) for mnaintenance.

      2. notspam says:

        I guess you didn’t read the part about water and Li batteries

        1. Hirudinea says:

          Rubber liner? if a battery catches fire just have a remote dozer push tons of earth over it.

  4. Steven Gann says:

    I look forward to Thunderf00t’s obligatory video rant about this.

  5. Dude says:

    >well prepared to deal with the situation

    You can always say so when there’s literally nothing you could do about it.

    1. mwdonlon says:

      The fact they knew “there’s literally nothing you can do about it” was already a sign they were prepared to deal with the situation.

    2. Troepje says:

      And still only 2 packs burned down while the rest is saved. Also no dangerous gasses were released. Id say this is a great practice run.

  6. Leonard says:

    This is where the “ditch in bath ‘o water under it”-switch comes in handy.

    1. Kevin says:

      Somehow I think dumping a building’s worth of lithium directly into water would make things worse.

      1. Leonard says:

        ah well, it’s what they do here with a burning EV, ditch it in a large container of water, to cool it, then wait when it is done, it requires a lot of water, and well, this may be a tad too much energy indeed, this is not your average car battery pack.

        1. Dude says:

          The water also reacts with the battery chemicals to consume them without sustaining a flame. It doesn’t actually stop “burning” under the water – it only slows it down to a more controlled rate.

      2. Phil says:

        This sounds fun. Can I watch?

  7. M says:

    Lithium grid storage batteries are a ‘one-round’ terror target. Heard of the vanadium redox flow battery? You will.

    1. Dude says:

      Price of vanadium says you won’t.

    2. pelrun says:

      Pfff, no self-respecting terrorist targets these things, especially since the grid is distributed – you might make a mess at the site (which is isolated anyway) but the grid will chug on regardless, and it might rate a news article or two. Not worth the effort.

      1. ONV says:

        Are you really sure about that?

        Distributed means “spread out”, it does not necessarily equate to redundancy. The fact that a grid might be relying on secondary storage (remember these grid pack do not generate any new power, merely store excess) could result in a relatively easier way to destabilise the grid because generating capacity has been taken out (i.e. coal, gas etc.).

    3. Erik Christiansen says:

      Australia has its own redox battery, using cheaper zinc-bromine chemistry. It’s made by Redflow. Also marketed to households, it’s now getting a lot more traction with telcos around the world, and beginning to be put into big container-sized units for grid-scale storage.

      As each quarter-ton 10 kWh unit contains 190 L (that’s 200 quarts in Texas) of fire-retardant electrolyte, they are claimed to be more than a little resistant to burning. Redflow is working on a 2 MWh installation stateside now, I hear.

      For my off-grid build, it’s a choice between a pair of them or a bunch of Lithium Titanate batteries, which are also claimed to be long-life and less self-immolating than other lithium chemistries. Now that we have choices, all we can ask is that prices decline. Yeah, the early adopters have to drive up the quantities for that to happen.

      While most flow batteries are humungous, the plan here is to drive economies of scale by spitting out thousands of the smaller units from an automated factory. If one goes bung, it switches off-line, and the installation keeps on trucking.
      A massive reflow battery can’t do that.

    4. Artenz says:

      So are distribution transformers.

  8. HackJack says:

    I assume the other batteries are shut down? What is the plan for the rest of the batteries? Will they be reused once the fire is put off?

    1. Kanniget says:

      The facility was still in the process of being commissioned, it was not operational and the only batteries that would have been effected are those in the single unit itself. There has been lots of misreporting on this from Australian media ( backed by anti renewables ‘news media’ ) so I am not surprised.

      1. Jehu says:

        I live in Australia and this article is the first I’ve heard of this fire. I usually watch the news every night and there has been nothing about it.

  9. Dean says:

    Good thing there were no thunderstorms to drench it from above. *That* might have been interesting

  10. Michael Brown says:

    It wouldn’t have happened if they’d used
    VRFB ‘s

  11. MikeR says:

    The solar farm they built on my friends grandfather’s old sod farm had quite a few growing pains. The units that take all the solar energy and send it to the distribution point, think there’s inverters and transformers in them would just spontaneously explode! He still lives on the property surrounded by 800 acres filled with panels and he heard them going off and said it put off a bad smell, so probably transformers magic smoke. They never told him why almost every single one had to be replaced. Now it’s a lot rarer but still occasionally happen during heavy rains.

  12. Mike says:

    The real question is why aren’t there any sprinkler systems installed in each rack.

    1. rclark says:

      Well, with a Lith-poly R/C battery that I was ‘disposing’ of by driving a nail through it (usually get a nice little fire going) , I tried putting water on it…. Seems to ‘increase’ the chemical reaction that is going on :) .

    2. Truth says:

      Pouring water on an alkali metal fire will produce heat and hydrogen gas, so in effect you are adding more fuel into the fire. It would be like filling a traditional sprinkler system with petrol, it is not going to help.

      1. Evan Benn says:

        There’s not much lithium metal in a lithium ion battery. It’s all dissociated already.

        1. AKA the A says:

          if it’s charged, it’s all stuck in the carbon anode…lots of surface to make the reaction go faster

    3. MohawkSpock says:

      I think this is a good idea for use on neighboring battery packs to help cool them and prevent the fire from spreading. Obviously on the battery pack that has the fire should not have sprinklers running on it. Some automation on this could help prevent an expensive nuisance turn into a full catastrophe.

  13. Truth says:

    was there no option to lower an upside down box over the battery with a crane and flood the battery in argon starving the fire of oxygen and any external sources of moisture ?

    1. Morberis says:

      This is exactly what I though. Even if it wouldn’t stop the fire it would limit its ability to spread. Maybe it would even have to have a way of venting.

      1. Erik Christiansen says:

        In contrast, a data center generally has twenty or more large cylinders of CO2 or nitrogen piped to the server rooms. Fire alarm goes off, everyone scarpers, and the air is flushed out. If the battery units were sealed, with heat exchangers in lieu of simple ventilation, then fire suppression could be fully automatic.

        Zinc bromine flow batteries would be an alternative, I figure.

      2. Truth says:

        Toxic gases produced by the Lithium-ion battery fires might be why.
        https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z
        hydrogen fluoride (HF) may be generated, ranging between 20 and 200 mg/Wh
        I do not think that anyone who reads here does not know what HF does – totally scary stuff.
        phosphoryl fluoride (POF3) was measured in some of the fire tests 15–22 mg/Wh
        (Poison, corrosive, can form HF on contact with H2O)

        1. Jehu says:

          Yup. The electrolyte in lithium batteries is lithium hexafluorophosphate. When it comes in to contact with water, it splits and combines with the water to make lithium phosphate and hydrofluoric acid. Nasty stuff.

  14. Saabman says:

    it was kept largely out of the eyes of mainstream media as well

  15. vib says:

    in 10 years from now, car accidents will kill people not by the shock itself, but by the resulting fire.
    We start seeing those in the news, where the driver could not escape and died by the fire, and the firemen could not do anything either.
    There aren´t much electric cars with big batteries on the roads yet, so it´s still anecdotal… for now.

    1. Foldi-One says:

      It certainly could happen, but I don’t think it is all that likely to happen, any more so than stuck in a burning ICE. Both can happen, and there isn’t a great deal to do once the fire is really going to save the poor trapped sod – its not like petrol or diesel is easily put out safely, or you can just walk up to something that may decide it does want to explode, being on fire and full of fuel vapours to cut your way in…

      The thing that is bound to happen is the serious EV accidents taking longer to clear up safely because the battery is cascading and hard to get too with the right sort of fire suppression to kill that chain reaction.

      But many if any extra deaths from being stuck inside the burning car assuming crash safety cells continue to be a thing required in new cars are very unlikely – a crash bad enough to get you properly stuck and actually rupture the battery probably caused you enough injury you are dead and just don’t know it yet anyway…

      That said I’d rather not check out of this life that little bit early burning to death, even if I was going to die of other injury soon anyway. It seems like one of the nastiest ways to die, and more burnt dead in the accident I do see as more likely with the current battery chemistry being so volatile…

      1. Dude says:

        >probably caused you enough injury you are dead

        One only needs to be unconscious or with broken bones so you can’t move.

        1. Foldi-One says:

          I would not call that stuck myself – as anybody coming to help can move you. To me Stuck meant car is a crumpled mess that you have to cut into to free the person.

          It is a good point though, just not how I had considered ‘not able to escape’ – as first responders should with all the crash safety stuff be able to get you out rapidly if there is a need to in almost all crashes.

      2. RobHeffo says:

        Having heard my father’s tale of when he was witness and first responder to a single vehicle accident where the drive shaft to the rear wheels snapped, kicked out sideways, then simultaneously flipped the vehicle and tore through the fuel tank into the cabin area suddenly filling the whole car with fuel mist, which ignited in a massive fireball engulfing the occupants who were trapped alive on fire breathing nothing but flames, I can tell you I would prefer an EV fire any day.

        1. Dude says:

          It’s a tradeoff: chance of a bad fire in a bad crash vs. easy to ignite even in a milder accident.

          https://www.eenewspower.com/news/tesla-car-battery-fires-caused-road-debris-damage

        2. Dan says:

          Wouldn’t have happened with a front-wheel Drive.

        3. Oprah's minge says:

          Driveshaft failure pole vaults are common enough that racers have required retainers under the shaft. Even then they will total a car.

          But either you or your dad are letting the story grow and screwing up the details.
          Where was this gas tank? Really?

      3. Murray says:

        For some action wait for the hydrogen fuel cell crowd. Accidents will be self clearing.

        1. AKA the A says:

          hydrogen goes up, it doesn’t pool under the vehicle like liquid fuels nor is it a chunk weighing a 1/4 to 1/2 the cars weight

          1. Murray says:

            At 70 MPa it doesn’t go up. It goes out, in every direction.

      4. batteries don't stop says:

        firefighters can easily put out a fire in an ice powered car. They actually practice this all the time, and I have first hand experience seeing them do such a thing.

        1. Chris Maple says:

          That invites so many jokes. Are they ice wagons? Are tongs used to refuel the car? Does the engine consist of uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials pushing the vehicle?

    2. misterfixit1952 says:

      Electric car fires are rare per capita. petrol car fires are not. Once ecars catch fire they are hard to put out, petrol fires, on the other hand, usually put themselves out more quickly when they explode.

      1. Phil says:

        I like your thinking. Clearly this thread leads to suggesting nitroglycerin powered cars as beng the most fire safe as they would have she shortest burn time.

        Over on the Museum Of Retro Technology, there’s various articles about steam engines using things other than water for the steam. Boiling petrol and ether are mentioned and the resulting fires commented on.

        Seems we humans have been attempting flammable transport and energy solutions for a while. When will we lears?

  16. Hirudinea says:

    Well it’s still doing it’s job storing and releasing energy, just sometimes it’s electrical and sometimes it’s thermal.

  17. Gary Camp says:

    I guess the foam they use to fight aluminum fires does not work. Too bad. Seems like the initial testing after install needs to be broken up and stretched out with maybe more sensors (temporary?) to track current, temperature and such. And temperature checks every 2 hours seems very risky too.

    1. rpavlik says:

      Not sure if it’s the same stuff, but military aircraft firefighting foam is made of some nasty, persistent chemicals that really enjoy getting into groundwater.

      Given that I have temperature sensors around my house reporting every few seconds, I assume they didn’t go 2 hours between internal temp checks. Something probably got mangled in reporting. Maybe they took a thermal camera around every 2 hours?

  18. James says:

    Lots of comments about spacing the batteries out more… but as far as I can see, the fire didn’t propogate to adjacent batteries so the spacing appears adequate

    1. Foldi-One says:

      That it proved to be enough this time doesn’t mean it really is enough – the environmental conditions can play a really big part in how easy a fire spreads, and until this is properly studied we just won’t have enough information to draw on to know if this spacing is enough to prevent issues in almost all weathers, with any delay in the containment activities for whatever reason, etc.

      I have to say it seems it was handled well, and sounds like the spacing might be enough with the safety systems as designed. But its too early to really tell if the design is behaving as well as expected and should therefore really be safe – and pushing them further away definitely has advantages to preventing a larger cascade – so when its cheap and easy to do so perhaps it should be done…

    2. John says:

      To me it looks like there are two packs per group.

  19. Steven-X says:

    How much more efficient is Lithium over lead-acid? I know there are size & weight savings considerations, but in a application like this that should not matter.

    Plus lead acids are cheap, and easily recycled.

    1. Dude says:

      Much. Lead-acid batteries consume about as much energy to make as they can ever store in their life time.

      1. Anti-dude says:

        I doubt that’s true. They contain lead plates and sulfuric acid. Not exactly rare earth minerals.

        1. Dude says:

          They make up the difference with poor energy density, low efficiency and short lifespan.

        2. Laurens says:

          IIRC the charge/discharge efficiency of a lead acid battery is around 60%, while lithium gets to 90% or so.
          Aside from that, lithium cells are hermetically sealed and maintenance free. The type of lead acid battery suitable for grid storage (Yuasa has 1 series of grid storage suitable, deep cycle, long life batteries) has to be checked regularly to see if the acid needs to be topped up.
          The efficiency is really quite important, for as long as we don’t have a true energy excess.

          Finally, when overcharged or short circuited – both very realistic situations – they will generate hydrogen and the explosions can be intense. That doesn’t typically cause a fire, but you can imagine what the acid does to the whole installation.

          1. Chris Maple says:

            wikipedia says lead-acid batteries have a cycle efficiency of 50% to 95%. I presume the high and of the range can be achieved if the conditions are ideal: don’t overcharge, don’t deplete, keep the temperature comfortable, and charge/discharge slowly.

      2. Observer says:

        The national highway traffic safety administration used to argue against drunk driving on the basis of the statistic that “half of all highway fatalities involve the use of alcohol.”

        Ironically, on the basis of that statistic alone, an uninformed individual could logically argue that an equal number of lives could be saved by banning *sober* driving.

        The point is that statistics don’t always mean what they appear to mean and logical deductions based upon them can result in incorrect conclusions.

        Where do you get your metrics, and what is being presumed about the energy cost of lead acid battery manufacture? Are you including the cost to mine and refine the lead? If so, since lead is one of the most recyclable metals there is, the systemic energy cost of lead acid batteries goes down the more often used up batteries are recycled.

        Now how much of a lithium cell is recyclable? It may have higher energy density, but if the only thing you can do with spent lithium batteries is to landfill them, thats not really a sustainable solution, either. Thus, the lead acid solution may well be better, both from a cost and environmental impact standpoint.

        Mind you, I’m not arguing a position here one way or the other, just saying that figures don’t always mean what they appear to mean at first glance.

        By the way, if you measured every joule that came out of your average solar panel over its usefull life, I strongly suspect that it would not offset the total energy expended to refine silicon, grow purified photovoltaic crystals, convert petro chemicals into insulation, adhesives and coatings, and mine and refine the aluminum, glass, copper, and other materials needed to produce that panel.

        This is a more damning indictment of the solar panel than a lead acid battery, for example, because the lead acid battery is just a storage device, while the solar panel is alleged to be a viable primary power source.

        1. Dude says:

          It’s called the ESOEI – energy stored per energy invested.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#ESOEI

          In the ideal case, probably requiring more optimized designs, a lead-acid storage battery can store about five times the energy spent in constructing it. Previous studies I’ve read said 2-3.

          The number represents the optimal use of the battery. For example, in the source article, the figure for 32 lithium-ion comes from assuming a 6,000 cycle lifespan. If you only every use the battery for say 500 cycles then the ESOEI will be proportionally worse.

          The ESOEI also attempts to count in the round-trip efficiency of the battery. Lead acid batteries are terrible in this sense because they self-discharge and they are trickle-charged etc. for maintenance which represents additional energy losses, which counts against their ESOEI but this is harder to quantify. In the article the PbA battery is assumed to have 90% efficiency for 700 cycles, but in practice you may get 50% efficiency for 300-400 cycles (or full cycle equivalent partial discharges).

        2. Foldi-One says:

          You can definitely count every joule no matter how remotely tied to the making of a solar cell and get way less than it should produce over its lifespan!

          Just how much less is going to be very variable – for instance if you set up a fixed install pointing at the mid-day sun you will get a greater amount of power out of it than pointing at the morning or evening sun – but evening sun is actually a good idea sometimes as that is when in many households the peak of consumption is. Then you have the environmental conditions where you set up – if its a really dusty environment and the panels are never/rarely cleaned that will be worse than somewhere less dusty but otherwise comparable etc etc.

          But the biggest variable is what you call the Solar cells lifespan – modern ones really don’t degrade the way early ones did (and those ones still work at very reduced output if they avoided physical damage). So saying the lifespan is 20 years is low, looked after the useful lifespan is probably going to approach infinite in human terms -for longer than you will live it is likely to output a very useful amount of power (though the electronics behind it will probably need replacement a few times in its life), and averaged out for all the ones that do get damaged still well into the multiple decades…

          1. Dude says:

            The EROEI of various crystalline silicon panels is around 10-20 in an ideal location, like equatorial Africa. Going up north drops it to around 3-6 in places like Scandinavia.

            CdTe panels were supposed to be around 30-40 but then the Chinese dumped prices and competed all the western thin film manufacturers out of the market.

            Just because a solar panel can theoretically make ends meet with a good margin, doesn’t mean the panels you buy actually do. Cheap price comes with tradeoffs, and the usual tradeoff is that the cheap panel is made somewhere that gets power from an ancient coal plant without emissions controls at a terrible efficiency.

          2. Foldi-One says:

            Oh I agree @Dude where you get your panel, and how its made changes its green credentials. But in terms of Energy in to out it really doesn’t change much.

            But as the panel lifespan is near as we can tell going to be basically infinite, just at reduced output with current generation panels the EROEI numbers become very woolly.. As with near infinite time producing power they have to pick a lifespan that makes sense more from an economics return on investment point of view than would be the case with most techs were the lifespan or cycle count are very much more finite. I think those numbers you quoted were for 5 years, possibly even less…

            So when the panel has much much much more life than that even the dirtiest produced panel should vastly pay back its carbon cost over even a shortened lifespan, and they will every single time pay back the energy cost in very little time – as that is independent of how dirty the power source for the factory is.

  20. J.Cook says:

    ” For now, it’s a black mark against Victoria’s new battery project.”

    Shouldn’t that be a skid-mark?

    *gets coat, heads towards the exit in a brisk manner*

  21. 𐂀 𐂅 says:

    These installations are exquisitely vulnerable to extortion and terrorism as a single cheap drone and a thermite payload is all it takes to cause this sort of chaos. They should put them in tunnels under the ground and have an inert atmosphere.

  22. Thorsten says:

    Recent comment by a friend: “a few months ago, a pizzeria in town had a major fire – some electric scooter standing outside had a runaway battery meltdown, and took all the nearby scooters with it – firemen had a very hard time, ended up letting them burn out – the pizzeria + apartments above had massive smoke and water damage”. Sounds like we will see more of this…

    1. neb says:

      Illinois had an industrial lithium fire in late june / early july at an old paper mill. Their solution was to dump 28 tons of portland cement on it. https://abc7chicago.com/morris-fire-update-evacuation/10849672/

  23. ben says:

    They have a crane running around there. Seems like a sarcophagus over the unit would help choke & contain it.

  24. Simon says:

    Never understood why Lithium is used for grid level storage. We have enough space in Australia – why not good old serviceable and non flammable lead acid? Need to vent excess hydrogen but much more robust I would think.

    1. Ostracus says:

      Sodium-ion perhaps.

      https://youtu.be/TVrlbMrEcCY

    2. neb says:

      There’s a lot of different lithium batteries. In what one might call a tragic twist, Tesla switched its grid chemistry offering to LiFePO4 in May of this year (LFP in the linked article). Lower energy density, but higher thermal stability and tailored for permanent installations.

      https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tesla-shifts-battery-chemistry-for-utility-scale-storage-megawall/600315/

    3. Lewin Day says:

      The facility would be an order of magnitude larger and still not deliver anywhere near the same instantaneous power.

      Australia is large, but land is still expensive anywhere near cities. You can go further out but then you have logistical difficulties in install and maintenance, and often agricultural land isn’t cheap either.

    4. Phil says:

      Lots of reasons, including low cycle life for resonable depth of discharge, not getting as much energh back out as you can with lithium chemistry’s, and bigness. Rather limited operating temperature range which might be a problem in some places.

      But they are inexpensive and easy to recycle so perfect for small home solar setups. They still seem quite viable for UPS solutions too, where cycle life is less of an issue.

      However, they too can catch fire too. Anything that can supply a high short circuit current can. Seen a few charred bits of wall in old battery rooms. But at leastthe rooms are mostly still there.

  25. cyberteque says:

    still better than the coal mine that caught fire and burned for 45 days

    burning battery pack -> send the EPA out to warn people

    burning coal mine -> don’t warn people until they start dropping like flies

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-19/hazelwood-power-station-latrobe-valley-2014-mine-fire-fine/12261858

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-02/hazelwood-coal-mine-fire-morwell/5711564

    and now we are getting a nuclear waste dump!!

    1. Dan says:

      There’s coal fires which burned much longer than that. In South Wales, there’s places where digging produced smoke years later.

      1. Brian says:

        There’s a coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania that has been burning for more than 50 years.

      2. BemusedAussie says:
      3. Magpie says:

        There are a few coal mines that caught fire, the one fire in South Wales seems to burn for thousands of years already, and there are some newer fires that were started in the industrialization period that still burn. In the end, we are all kinda floating on a bed of molten rock, and i hope that our core fire does not stop any time soon…

        1. Oprah's minge says:

          IIRC there is one in the Balkans that has been burning since the Romans let it catch fire.

  26. volt-k says:

    In reply to Murray:
    “In former UK colonial parts of the world CE tends to be more relevant than UL. Now that we have Brexit, we will have to see what happens.”

    There’s a new thing already, it’s called UKCA.

    1. volt-k says:

      Sorry for duplicate, the reply didn’t work for some reason. This can be removed. Too bad one cannot delete or edit own comments.

  27. abjq says:

    I just watched a demonstration of a fire blanket that can be draped over a burning EV.
    (On the “Guy Martin” program about electric cars)
    Seems like a larger version would be ideal to contain this problem, you just pull it over the battery pack, and it excludes the O2. Then you leave it for many days for the pack to cool down.

    If done early enough it would be possible to save some of the cells in the pack, to boot. Probably.

  28. spritle says:

    End of June – lithium battery fire in my home town – https://abc7chicago.com/morris-battery-fire-jb-pritzker-grundy-county-industrial/10863114/. Small town fire department couldn’t get it stopped quickly, eventually put tons of dry cement on it after it had burned out quite a bit.

  29. Sam Matthews says:

    For anyone interested, I track battery fire and explosion incidents as a part of my job doing fire prevention research. Here is a link to a web page for viewing some of the data.

    http://tools.utfireresearch.com/apps/incident_map

    The things about lithium-ion battery fires is that there is a lot of disinformation. In general, assertions that lithium reactivity with water means that it shouldn’t be used are incorrect. A lot of this comes from confusion with lithium batteries (think watch batteries) for which this is true. Lithium-ion batteries have comparatively little lithium and it is not in its elemental state.

    The concern with lithium-ion systems is typically that water could cause electrical faults and shorts in undamaged cells. For example, a fire aboard a Norwegian hybrid electric ferry several years ago was probably made worse because of a seawater sprinkler system installed in the battery room. For cases in which you aren’t trying to save some portion of the system, this goes away. Water is frequently used as a tool in fighting these fires. However, the goal is usually not extinguishing, but cooling to keep the thermal runaway from propagating between cells. This requires copious amounts of water though and is often only marginally effective.

    As others have mentioned, a common strategy for EVs is to fully submerge them in a large container of water. This also has the added benefit of providing a discharge pathway for any remaining energy in the system. Reactivity and fire potential drop rapidly with state-of-charge.

  30. Chuckz says:

    I told my township’s Fire Marshall about using a battery tender to charge my neighbor’s car and he told me they had at least two fires and lost a fire truck or more that burned down. I was told to be careful or not do it and unless you can be there and watch it, there isn’t always something you can do about it.

    I may not want a battery backup in my house for this reason. I’m extremely concerned about lithium fires. If you want the risk for your house, I have nothing to do with that but I can’t afford to have my house burn down because that would be bad and its not something people can recover from.

    A Tesla Model S Burned Down Someone’s House

    https://www.motorbiscuit.com/tesla-model-s-burned-down-house/

  31. Chuckz says:

    Watch the EXPLOSIVE moment a phone battery is stabbed with a kitchen knife

  32. Michael Julian. says:

    It would have been great if the whole lot went up and we stop this nonsense and go for a proper energy source, like nuclear, which can supply basal demand without storage.

    1. NiHaoMike says:

      Nuclear isn’t very good about rapidly changing demand, could work well when combined with automated load management.

  33. Christian says:

    Did all of you miss THAT this was initial testing?
    This was a TEST. A single iteration.
    Not the final solution, that went up in flames?.
    Very misleading.

  34. Olivier says:

    Tesla stuff not up to snuff? What a surprise! lmao.

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