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- cross-posted to:
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Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
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So uh. I guess those coal and natural gas power plants would fare better in a fire. Something seems wrong there but OP clearly wouldn’t possibly post something on the Internet that was utterly detached from reality.
Energy storage is just that. Fire is frequently quite good at releasing said energy.
Lithium? poof.
Oil? yup.
Nat gas? mmhmm.
wood? yup.
Coal? dang.
Guess all we got left is water - I’m sure that doesn’t have any specific regional requirements…
So tell us champ: what energy storage you got all figured out from that armchair?
Nuclear though, never had a problem with excess heat at one of those. /s
Was gonna list it but I figured our energy-tzar OP would just complain about radioactive minerals being like batteries with more steps.
Nobody’s ever died from a dam collapse.
Hey! It puts out fires so it’s like… better!
This is why you don’t use battery chemistries that can
thermally run awayautoignite in grid storage. The plant was using LG JH4 batteries, which use an NMC chemistry. I don’t think that LiFePO4 cells were as ubiquitous when this plant was first constructed, so the designers opted for something spicy instead.This shit is why you use LiFePO4. It can’t
thermally run awayautoignite, it lasts longer, and the reduced energy density doesn’t really matter for grid storage. Plus, it doesn’t use nickel or cobalt so the only conflict resource is lithium.EDIT: LiFePO4 batteries can enter thermal runaway, but they can’t autoignite.
I don’t think we should be storing and reselling electricity at all.
What are the alternatives?
Mechanical energy storage, like pumped hydro or flywheel. Thermal energy storage, like molten salt.
Electrochemical isn’t entirely off the table either: less-volatile chemistries are available, and better containment methods can reduce risks.
Non-electrical chemical storage methods are available: electrical energy can be used for hydrogen electrolysis, or Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon fuels. Fuel cells, traditional ICE generators, or export it from the electrical generation industry to the transportation industry.
There’s also avoiding (or minimizing) the need for storage at all, with “demand shaping”. Basically, we radically overbuild solar, wind, wave, tidal, etc. Normally, that would tank energy prices and be unprofitable, but we also build out some massive, flexible demand to buy this excess power. Because they are extremely overbuilt, the minimal output from these sources during suboptimal conditions is more than enough to meet normal demands; we just shut off the flexible additional demand we added.
Lifting your mom with a pulley.
A really strong elastic band.
I believe there is battery tech that is newer but being deployed into production that is iron based. It is heavier and less energy dense than lithium. But for power grid level deployment that should be fine and iron is a bit harder to catch on fire.
Pumped hydro
No, it’s not, at least not at scale, because you need specific geography and plenty of water. Why do you think we are not massively using it?
Can prob dig a whole system the same as they did to get all the materials for this mess.
The water would also not be useless like all the water used to process the battery materials.
Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.
Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.
We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.
Build a tower, use excess power to lift heavy weights. Drop them when you need electricity to spin generators
Video on weight storage. Pumped hydro is proven and efficient, but it’s location specific.
Weight lifting is slightly less efficient due to friction and heat generated by pully system, and the vast amount of weight and space needed may limit available storage possibility and scalability. But its simple, and safer.
We lack the materials and engineering necessary to make lifted weight storage systems enter the order of magnitude of energy storage needed to compete with batteries, let alone pumped hydro. It’s just really, really hard to compete with literal megatons of water pumped up a 500 meter slope.
I believe that the plant in question was using something besides Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. This press release mentions LG JH4 which are deffo not LiFePO4. LiFePO4 batteries are far, far safer than other Lithium chemistries, and are now the norm for BESS (not cars tho, since they have lower energy density but better a better lifetime than NMC/NCA). This fire would not have happened with a BESS using LiFePO4 batteries.
Now that batteries with aqueous sodium-ion chemistries are becoming available, we should begin transitioning pre-LiFePO4 sites to those wholesale. Aqueous sodium-ion batteries should be even safer than LiFePO4, and while they have kinda shit energy density, they’re still fine for grid storage.
EDIT: correction, LiFePO4 batteries can run away, but they are incapable of autoignition.
LiFePO4 batteries are safer and harder to ignite, but they can still go into thermal runaway and can burn. If a fire started in a battery that big, it would still spread and it wouldn’t be practical to extinguish it.
You’re correct that they can enter thermal runaway, they just can’t autoignite. I really suspect that if this site has been using LiFePO4 cells instead of NMC, it wouldn’t have gone up like it did. 3000 MWh of NMC cells sounds absolutely bugnuts crazy to me.
… 3000-megawatt Moss Landing energy storage …
“megawatt” is not a quantity of energy.
Also, are those battery fires more frequent // important than petrol ones ?Also, are those battery fires more frequent // important than petrol ones ?
Petrol fires use oxygen from the air. They can be extinguished by removing the oxygen: covering it in firefighting foam, or displacing it with CO2, for example.
Batteries contain both their fuel and their oxidizer together in one case. You can’t remove the oxygen. So long as they are hot enough, they keep burning, even if they are underwater. The only way to extinguish them is to remove the heat. Which is practically impossible.
No. And the petrol fires are many and ongoing in everyone’s cars. Also large petrol fires are not always reported in the US. I can think of one specific instance that tho’ a major fire, producing a wall of smoke, yet I could only find one news report of it’s existence.
We shouldn’t have either.
Per the AP, “There were fires at the Vistra plant in 2021 and 2022”.
Agreed, yet, you know that, since this is a new technology in development, it is more subject to accidents. What’s more is that media are more inclined to report any even small accidents about it. So, finally, information and news here are not necessarily representative of the whole reality.
Thanks anyway for this striking breaking news i didn’t know about 😌
How is a Megawatt not a measure of energy?
It’s power, not energy.
MegaWattHours is energy for example.
And power is a measure of energy over time.
Yes, and? Measuring an energy storage facility in terms of power is not a good idea.
If you asked someone how big a water tank was and they said “five liters per second”, would that be useful?
It would be very useful if you were asking the right question. The storage facility from the article has a 750 MW storage capacity (energy) which it can deliver at a max output (power) of 3000 MW/hr Power plant and storage facility capacities are measured in MW since what they are intended to do is supply power at a steady rate. Who cares if you can store a billion TW of power if you can only output it at 5mW/h. It does no good if you can’t get it out. Supply is what we really care about here.
True to your name, you’re using those backwards. You’re thinking of MW hours per hour, or just MW. Put differently, MW is a rate, MWh is a quantity.
Lol didn’t see the name 😂
Enlighten us with better approach. Also there are battery types that are less flammable.
Edit: is -> us
Here’s another article from AP: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/g-s1-43268/fire-battery-storage-plant-california-moss-landing
