From CFACT
By David Wojick
America faces a growing threat from box-scale lithium battery fires. Construction of massive battery arrays without concern for fires can lead to uncontrollable disasters. There are no established standards and the authorities allow the locals to be unaware of this real danger.
The following is a brief introduction to the issue. To start, take a look at this photo of an existing grid battery array called Desert Sunlight: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desert_Sunlight_(52290008686).jpg#file
The batteries are integrated with large solar facilities because until now this was the only way to get battery subsidies. Each lithium battery unit is the size of a tractor trailer or a large shipping container and there are more than a hundred of them, with a storage capacity of 230 MW. This is a medium sized storage facility.
That this unit can spontaneously burst into flames has been established. The question is how to plan and prepare for this devastating event?
To scale the problem consider the following events. A battery powered tractor trailer rig recently crashed and the battery caught fire on an interstate in California. The lithium battery fire could not be extinguished, so it burned for about eleven hours. To prevent the fire from spreading to create a wildfire fire crews continue to spray using 50,000 gallons of water reported in the process. The interstate was closed due to toxic fumes from the fire.
One of these square-sized battery units is easily 10 to 20 times the size of a truck battery. If the use of water is required so that the battery box fire does not spread the scale measures 500,000 to a million gallons of water. The actual amount is an engineering calculation that must be established and incorporated into the battery facility design standards.
Note that we are not talking about the fire spreading to create a fire, although that is a concern. The important thing is to avoid burning nearby batteries. If this happens all the facilities can go up with a hundred or more blind batteries burning. That would be catastrophic.
So now look at the Desert Sunlight photo and note that there is no water tank. There should be a million gallon water tank with a high volume system to deliver that water to every unit in the facility. Clearly there isn’t.
There are also engineering questions about how far the units should be placed so that water can be used to prevent the fire from spreading. I doubt the Desert Sunlight space is even close to big enough. It looked like there was only room to walk between them.
Now let’s turn to allow this facility where I have another example that says volume. This is a facility permitted by Washington State. It is a combined wind, solar and battery project with a storage capacity of 300 MW, which is larger than Desert Sunlight. There may be 200 lithium battery units that are too big. The number was not disclosed.
The project is named Horse Heaven Wind Farm despite its extensive solar and battery components. The name, usually shortened to Horse Heaven, is ironic because it will never be a place for horses. Horse Hell might be better.
The permitting authority is the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Board or EFSEC. The permit is called a Site Certification Agreement or CSA and Horse Heaven just got one, with a big push from the Governor.
The surprising point is that there is no discussion, or even recognition, of the fire threat posed by these massive lithium battery facilities. CSA has many requirements for many problems, large and small, from facilities that have water to keep road dust down. Nothing has a million gallons to prevent dangerous fires, or even environmental impact.
This is a fire country, so there should be liability insurance for injury to others from fire. Other potential sources of danger are contaminated water flows and toxic air emissions, especially if the entire facility burns.
Ignoring this definitely flows from the Horse Heaven App. The app is over 500 pages long and I could find only one sentence about battery fires. Buried in a long paragraph on page 366 of the PDF we read “Storage of lithium-ion batteries may pose a risk of fire and explosion due to the tendency of lithium-ion batteries to overheat.”
This one sentence doesn’t even refer to the project. In this matter there are only a few paragraphs about the battery facilities in the entire App, usually only describing them in general terms. There is nothing about the number of giant battery containers or the huge project itself, which poses the same fire threat. In fact App said they can double this group of battery units the size of the container which is unreasonable given the risk of setting off a chain reaction in the whole complex.
One can easily think from the App that the battery is not important and it looks like it is happening in EFSEC.
This systematic neglect seems to be happening all over the country. We need a national code or standard covering this issue. The National Fire Protection Association says it is working on one, but it depends on the authorities allowing it to happen.
The threat of battery fires on a grid scale is a serious problem that requires equal action.
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