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 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.
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.
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.
“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)
I heard it, the boats knicked in half, because they were made for river but crossing the sea (i think semi legally). One could say Russia was forced to do due to sanctions… Not that I would be against sanctions, just saying.
The fact that it didn’t burst into flames while every building did means that the battery plants are resilient enough for anywhere else.
Is it the same fire?
Yeah. And I mean, yesterday we removed our Christmas tree sacrifice and I put it in our wood burning chimney. PNW. Dude, that pine tree was so dry that it burst into flames immediately. I freaked out for a sec. So if you got a battery plant and it’s in the middle of a big ass fire and it doesn’t burn on the first 24hrs, that means you did something good.
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.
New nuclear is dead in the water, there’s just no economic argument for building it.
that’s just nonsense.
France auditors recently put out a report in which they criticized the high cost of their nuclear program and requested a moratorium for new projects in other countries.
well yes at 70% of its energy supply, France probably has too much nuclear now that renewables are cheaper. They are a massive outlier in that regard. This is not about making nuclear the one single energy source everywhere, but to provide a baseline load for stability and to reduce grid infrastructure upgrades like storage and new connections to distributed solar and wind farms. The article also says they hope to export their nuclear expertise to countries who are interested in nuclear, so they clearly do believe in the technology.
But the issue is, it’s too expensive to build. And the small reactor startup project is also not producing power and seems to be built on hype
too expensive compared to what?
SMRs specifically are a new developing technology. I suppose it’s possible they are all hype, but with many big tech firms investing in them to power datacenters, I tend to think there’s a good chance they’ll work out in the end. China’s first SMR will be up and running soon, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Of what I’ve read about French recent problematic projects, the high cost there was due to French bureaucracy, organizational mess and probably corruption, not due to anything about technology itself.
One should factor that in always. Building roads in Russia is so expensive definitely not because of anything unclear with the technology or the climate.
But the technology requires this amount of bureaucracy, else you get big problems. I trust physics, but i don’t trust humans. Especially if they can get money by skimping on security. The risks with renawables (except dams) are way smaller.
Solid rebuttal, good job 👍
I put as much effort into my rebuttal as you did in your initial comment. If you want an actual conversation, by all means begin any time you like.
I already did. New nuclear isn’t economically viable.
rebuttal: yes it is.
great conversation! feel free to add any context, reasoning, or citations to support your opinion.
That’s because Oil FAMOUSLY Never Burns!
Difficult to extinguish you say?
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.)
Pumped hydro is much better than battery storage, but it’s only possible if you have the correct geography for it.
Yeah Tesla released a video of one of their PowerPacks burning back around 2017. It burned to the ground, surrounded by gravel. Nearest pack to it was like 20 feet away per their typical installation methods. No biggie.
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.
What do you think about lithium iron phosphate? From what I understand, it has a lot less thermal runaway potential as well.
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.
Yeah I like Iron-air for this type of thing too, super cheap but super stable
Fires in California, you say? Yeah…about that…
gestures towards every year for the past 20 years
Only if the media paints it that way for ad impressions.
This place has caught fire several times now?
Seriously not a good look for the industry if events like this keep happening.
Moss Landing uses NMC batteries instead of LiFePO4. NMC lithium batteries are more energy dense (they’re often used in long range EVs), but they can also produce hydrogen and can autoignite if they go into thermal runaway. LiFePO4 batteries cannot autoignite and can’t produce hydrogen. They last longer, and the reduced density is worth it for the safety benefits, which is why more recent grid storage setups use them and not NMC. A BESS using the right chemistry could not have gone up in flames like this.
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.
I think the keepers of this facility themselves already said they were not prepared for this situation, so that’s the problem right there. The technology is fine.
