A nearly two-week-long fire at a battery energy storage facility in California highlighted the risks associated with emerging battery storage technologies that are central to the clean energy transition.
Fire crews took 24 hours to “get a handle on” the flare that erupted May 15 at the 250-megawatt Gateway Energy Storage Facility in Otay Mesa near San Diego, reports Fox 5 News. Two days later it reignited—and then smouldered for more than a week.
Surrounding businesses were evacuated and a 600-foot safety barrier was established to keep civilians away from possibly dangerous levels of hydrogen near the facility.
“The fire is what we call ‘thermal runaway’—(meaning) the lithium-ion batteries are kind of ignited in their burning, so what we are doing right now is trying to contain the toxic fumes and the smoke, and the fire obviously,” said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Patrick Walker, during the response to the second fire.
“But it’s one of those processes that could be long-duration.”
The facility’s lithium-ion batteries are believed to be the source of the fire. They are prone to thermal runaway, a chain reaction that results in the battery producing heat more rapidly than it can dissipate. Internal battery temperatures can spike to around 400°C (752°F) in milliseconds, and the intense heat driving the fires make them extremely difficult to put out.
Fires like the one at Gateway have made people wary of battery energy storage facilities. Polling by Heatmap shows them to be the least popular form of carbon-free power. While fires at large energy storage facilities may be rare, Heatmap says respondents may have lumped them together with the relatively more common fires seen in lithium-ion-powered devices like scooters and e-bikes.
About an hour’s drive north from Otay Mesa, residents of Eden Valley are fighting a battery storage project of up to 320 megawatts at the site of a former equestrian school, reports KPBS.
“I don’t feel safe, and my kids don’t feel safe either,” Amanda Black, who lives next to the proposed site, told the regional news outlet.
But experts say battery energy storage will be crucial to the clean energy transition, especially to harness intermittent sources like wind and solar. California has been pushing the deployment of storage batteries for its transition to clean energy and is already a world leader in battery storage capacity.
Your article states “California has been pushing the deployment of storage batteries for its transition to clean energy” and my question is…at what cost?!! The proposed Sugero BESS is smack in the middle of a residential equestrian community. This technology is known to have toxic issues with thermal runaway. How would my family evacuate 7 horses, 5 dogs, 2 goats, and my elderly mother down the same road this proposed project would sit. Where would be even go for a week while they let this burn? Not to mention Palomar Hospital is about 1600 feet down wind of this location.
We feel like we would be the “sacrifice zone” while an out of state, Fortune 500 company, makes a heafty profit. There needs to be more regulation of placement of these BESS facilities. A residential neighborhood is that LAST place these should be located.
Please find and report back a fire at any US solar/battery facility that has escaped containment to burn anything outside the facility.
Do you fear and oppose anything/everything that can catch fire/has caught fire or merely solar farm batteries that have never caught fire and escaped their facilities to burn anything?
Thanks, Andrew. Actually, I covered a two-day conference on that very topic a little over a decade ago. That news is now old, the tech has changed remarkably since then, but the concern — at the level of being watchful, not of slowing down deployment — is very much warranted.
Your note gives me an opportunity to clarify something important. The point of this story was not to undercut batteries as an essential, practical, affordable part of the transition that is ready and beginning to scale. It was to fulfill our role as community media to reliably tell the whole story, not just issue a quasi-news release. There will inevitably be cautions or even very bad news in any sector, clean energy included, and we don’t help anyone or anything if we just wash it away — that’s what the fossil, nuclear, and CCS industries do, and clean energy needs to be better than that. When we run something cautionary, we’re just doing our job and, I hope, making our contribution to the greater goal.
In my part of California we fear catastrophic wild fire caused by climate change. People have lost their homes and many have died. And California is shaping up to have its earliest and possibly worst fire season ever. That’s why I support battery facilities in spite of their relatively minor risk of fire compared to climate change-enabled fire risks.