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.
I work in Energy storage. Pretty much all new plants are outdoor in shipping containers, placed far enough apart with venting and deflagration panels to limit any particular thermal runaway from affecting the whole plant.
There are definitely other concerns, but fires aren’t.
I think the bigger issue for clean energy is how many poor nations rely on fossil fuel engines and what have you. Do we force them further behind the rest of the world? Or do we pick up their slack? I hope its the latter but idk.
“A massive oil spill in the gulf of mexico could cast a dark shadow on fossil fuel expansion”
Humans are fucking stupid and I hate having to share this planet with y’all
It’s a war situation, but - Russian tankers having mysterious problems spilling oil are destroying Black Sea ecosystems right now. Nobody even hears of that FFS.
That can be interpreted in favor of oil too. I’ll explain - what they cry about in media more is what the weaker side does bad, or the stronger side does good, and vice versa, and also lies on both. If the general publicity is in favor of oil, it means oil is objectively in such demand now that it gives power bigger than renewables, despite geopolitical access to natural resource not being required for renewables, despite renewables being autonomous and nicer, etc.
Until using renewables makes one more powerful than using oil, this won’t change. This requires not demanding more use of the or fighting use of fossil fuels, this requires technology improvements.
(I’ve got migraine now, sorry for using too many words)
For real, the people just accept oil tankers spilling around, but nobody pays a shit.
The biggest problem with batteries is that people think that we need them.
What we need is for big consumers (heavy industries) to learn to take the electricity when it is cheap.
I have to disagree with that, because this solution isn’t free either.
Asking them to regulate their use requires them to build excess capacity purely for those peaks (so additional machinery), to have more inventory in stock, and depending on how manual labor intensive it is also means people have to work with a less reliable schedule. With some processes it might also simply not be able to regulate them up/down fast enough (or at all).
This problem is simply a function of whether it is cheaper to a) build excess capacity or b) build enough capacity to meet demand with steady production and add battery storage as needed.
Compared to most manufacturing lines battery tech is relatively simple tech, requries little to no human labor and still makes massive gains in price/performance. So my bet is that it’ll be the cheaper solution.
That said it is of course not a binary thing and there might be some instances where we can optimize energy demand and supply, but i think in the industry those will happen naturally through market forces. However this won’t be enough to smooth out the gap difference in the timing of supply/demand.
Bravo - very well-reasoned response.
That’s because Oil FAMOUSLY Never Burns!
The fact that it didn’t burst into flames while every building did means that the battery plants are resilient enough for anywhere else.
Difficult to extinguish you say?
Fires in California, you say? Yeah…about that…
gestures towards every year for the past 20 years
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.
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.
Or depending on the location and water availability, a two tier reservoir system that pumps water to a higher reservoir to store the energy and let’s the water flow back to the lower reservoir to create electricity.
Different risks of course (if there’s a damn failure there’s a flood), but there are more energy storage options than just batteries.
I’ve also seen the concept of weighted cars on tracks that move uphill during the day then fall at night. (Probably a horrible description but that’s the best my brain can do right now.)
This place has caught fire several times now?
Seriously not a good look for the industry if events like this keep happening.
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.
