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’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.
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.
Difficult to extinguish you say?
“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
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.
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.