Photonic energy storage is on fire

Are electric vehicles causing a 'battery energy storage fire'?

With the growing number of electric vehicles and batteries for energy storage on the grid, more high-profile fires have hit the news, like last year’s truck fire in LA, the spate of e-bike battery fires in New York City, or one at a French recycling plant last year. “Battery energy storage systems are complex machines,” Mulvaney says.

Is a 300 MW battery fire a learning opportunity?

The fire that destroyed a 300-MW battery installation is a “learning opportunity” for a safety-conscious industry, experts say. Will non-lithium chemistries benefit? A fire at Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing battery storage facility on Jan. 16, 2025. The image by Guy Churchward is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Are battery storage systems flammable?

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.

Can a lithium battery fire escape a concrete enclosure?

It’s now considered best practice to let lithium battery fires exhaust themselves, which meant the plant burned well into the night. According to Monterey County spokesperson Nicholas Pasculli, by Friday morning there was “some containment” of the fire, which was still burning but had not escaped its concrete enclosure.

Are battery systems a fire hazard?

Despite this incident, utility-scale battery systems for electricity grids have experienced a 97 per cent drop in failures worldwide – which are often fire-related – between 2018 and 2023, according to a report by the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC.

How does a battery fire spread?

The fire spreads first within a cluster of surrounding cells that share electronics, known as a module, and then onto others, until a whole rack of batteries is ablaze. In 2019 a grid battery system in Surprise, Arizona, caught fire and exploded after fire suppressants mixed with burning batteries.