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Power Earth

Massive Lithium Ion Battery Fire/Explosion Shows Challenges of Renewable Energy Storage (apnews.com) 211

Pursuing a renewable energy strategy, Arizona's largest electric company "installed massive batteries near neighborhoods with a large number of solar panels, hoping to capture some of the energy from the afternoon sun to use after dark," reports the Associated Press.

Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares their report on what happened next: But an April fire and explosion at a massive battery west of Phoenix that sent eight firefighters and a police officer to the hospital highlighted the challenges and risks that can arise as utilities prepare for the exponential growth of the technology. With an investigation ongoing and no public word on the fire's cause, the incident is being closely watched by energy storage researchers and advocates... "Absent battery storage, the whole value proposition of intermittent renewable energy makes no sense at all," said Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of battery storage company Ambri...

Nearly all of the utility-scale batteries now on the grid or in development are massive versions of the same lithium ion technology that powers cellphones and laptops... Arizona Public Service (APS) has assembled a team of engineers, safety experts and first responders to work with the utility, battery-maker Fluence and others to carefully remove and inspect the 378 modules that comprise the McMicken battery system and figure out what happened....

The APS fire was the third involving a utility-scale battery. One was at an APS-owned battery in Flagstaff in 2012, and the other was in Hawaii. APS has shut down its two similar batteries while awaiting the investigation's results, but the utility is not slowing down its plans to deploy new massive batteries, said Alan Bunnell, a company spokesman. "We believe energy storage is vital to a clean energy future here in Arizona," Bunnell said.

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Massive Lithium Ion Battery Fire/Explosion Shows Challenges of Renewable Energy Storage

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  • by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @08:46PM (#58848014)
    hrmmmm [mit.edu]
  • by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @08:54PM (#58848030)

    If something is energy-dense enough to work as a compact large-scale battery, it's energy-dense enough to serve as a big boom when broken in just the wrong way.

    That's how all our fuels work.

    Fuels/batteries are how we store energy so that it doesn't have to be used exactly as it is generated. Using all that power at once by accident in an uncontrolled way means a boom, thank to thermodynamics.

    Same thing if you compressed air tightly enough to serve as energy storage, or filled a large enough flywheel with enough energy, and then released it all at once.

    None of this is an argument against electric storage mechanisms, or even just this type. There's no foolproof way to densely store energy - just ways we're used to, and ways we're still learning about. Each form has advantages and consequences.

    Batteries just avoid most of the conversion cost of other methods with some of our newer, more maintainable energy generation systems. That never meant that they're better at everything.

    Ryan Fenton

    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      LiFePO4 batteries don't suffer from thermal runaway like other lithium-ion chemistries. What chemistry was in those battery cells in Arizona?

    • Yep.

      Energy density on LiON batts is at least 0.875 MJ/kg on the top end (i would imagine better than that now).

      Other energy densities:
      gunpowder: 3 MJ/kg
      dynamite: 7.5 MJ/kg
      gasoline: 10.4 MJ/kg

      So batteries are approaching a third of the energy density of gunpowder, always gonna be dangerous to some extent storing that much boom.

    • Use the excess electricity to raise a large amount of water up to some appropriate height then use it to drive a turbine on the way down. This is already done with some mountain reservoirs so why not try it on a small local scale? Its not as if water towers don't already exist. Perhaps its not as efficient as batteries, I don't know, but it certainly has zero chance of blowing up!

      • by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday June 30, 2019 @04:22AM (#58848872)

        Tower storage of water has been used in the past when nothing else was available. It's very limited in capacity compared to the costs of building and maintaining the tower structure. Modern pumped storage systems use reservoirs and convenient geography (a steep slope with a short distance between top and bottom reservoirs) and lots of water, millions of tonnes of it to store useful amounts of energy for grids. 1000MWh in will return about 750MWh back after losses for pumped storage, typically.

      • Whats wrong with water towers + turbines?

        They need to be too big.

        Imagine something massive, a 100m radius tower, 100m tall tank, with the base of the tank 50 meters off the ground. Vast. Truly vast, 500 times larger than the largest water tower I could find. That would store about 856 MWh, about the same size as the largest currently installed battery.

        Perhaps its not as efficient as batteries, I don't know, but it certainly has zero chance of blowing up!

        It has a non zero chnace of collapse. Any time you st

      • Use the excess electricity to raise a large amount of water up to some appropriate height then use it to drive a turbine on the way down. This is already done with some mountain reservoirs so why not try it on a small local scale?

        Because it is economical not viable unless you happen to live near a large mountain reservoir. his isn't to say pumped hydro is a bad idea where available, just that it's geographically restricted and has limited potential capacity compared with known demand for energy storage. We've already used a lot of the available capacity and there is no way to make new capacity unlike with batteries.

        Batteries also have the advantage that they can adjust to fluctuating capacity demands nearly instantaneously. Hydro

      • yeah, in this case it'd blow down.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Lithium battery fires are kind of nasty though. A safer but a little less efficient option is low temperature sodium sulphur. But lithium is cheap due to being mass produced.

      • Lithium battery fires are kind of nasty though. A safer but a little less efficient option is low temperature sodium sulphur. But lithium is cheap due to being mass produced.

        Sodium is cheaper than lithium. No one's particularly been trying to scale up sodium production, but it's easy to produce (just add electricity) and sodium ore is so cheap and plentiful that it's not even called ore. Sulphur is a byroduct of the oil industry and very cheap.

        I doubt sodium fires are any nicer than lithium ones.

        • Sodium fires are probably less toxic than lithium fires. That would be less nasty. Don't want to huff either one, though.

  • I have an idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    You know what has no thermal runaway and absolutely zero hazard from its energy density at all? Tritium and fusion. The US government should be dumping 50 billion per year minimum into fusion research, not a giant room full of bombs aka batteries.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      We just use those for power generation. Done.
      Tritium is highly dangerous to us water based organisms. And being chemically hydrogen they not only get taken up by humans but cannot be held in any pressure container: it will migrate through anything.

    • Even the most optimistic projections of the cost of fusion energy puts it at ten times current grid electricity costs - all that high tech gear costs money. It will never be a cost effective way to produce electricity.

      Simply building a high excess capacity of solar and wind will provide sufficient power cheaper even under the worst possible conditions.

  • by jimbrooking ( 1909170 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @09:06PM (#58848056)
    Have heard of no such problems in Tesla's massive installation in South Australia (https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-australia-cost-revenue/). Perhaps Tesla might offer some technical assistance in diagnosing and re-engineering the Arizona and Hawai'i issues.
    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Plenty of Tesla cars have had their batteries caught on fire and they require lots of attention through software and hardware. If you're putting it in a residential area, you have to assume someone eventually is going to drive a car into it and you also have to assume that nobody from the electrical company will take another look at it for 25+ years.

    • What's your sample size? One? Tesla certainly has plenty of experience with batteries catching fire and exploding.

      Anyway it's all pointless. Lithium used for grid storage is a temporal quirk. It won't win the market. I will wager vanadium redox flow batteries with their easy repair at end of life, and trivial capacity expansion will win.

      • Extremely different technologies (that are potentially complimentary).

        Lithium Ion is like an SSD. Very high bandwidth, expensive, and small. vs Flow batteries are like a spinning HDD. Very high capacity, cheap but large.

        E.g. flow battery in Japan has a 60MWh capacity but only 15MW of power. Compare that to Tesla's 'big battery' 129MWh capacity and 100MW power.

        Like SSDs vs platter drives at some point in order to get the 'speed' you need you have way more capacity than you want. It doesn't make sense for

  • Lithium-Ion is optimized for portability. Manufacturing scale off the shelf is the only real advantage it brings. And familiarity for all the non-engineers, plus I guess Elon Musk ramming it down our throats.

    Whoever figures out flow batteries or whatever is the right tool for the job and gets it to market is going to win in the long run, but nobody wants to give those folk the time of the day lately.

  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @09:17PM (#58848090)

    Whatever happened to those utility-scale vanadium redox batteries that we used to keep hearing about? These are not as compact as Li-ion, but in a stationary application that doesn't matter.

    • I keep reading here that for stationary storage density doesnt matter, as you just did, but I dont think its true.

      Land costs up-front money. If privately owned, then annual taxes as well. It would also be no shock to anyone that bigger installations require more maintenance, and dare I say it, more security.

      Still further, then there is the zoning and NIMBY issues, which only increase with footprint.

      The Federal government needs to start a big project, much like the Hoover Dam, except its pumped water s
      • by Doke ( 23992 )
        I agree that density matters. However, I would like to add some other reasons. The copper wiring to link together a more spread-out facility would be expensive. Inspecting, maintaining, and repairing a larger footprint requires more time and fuel driving around. The differences add up quickly.

        -

        We will probably never have another project like the Hoover Dam. It would never pass modern OSHA standards. 112 people died during it's construction (and maybe another 42 died of related complications). Tod

        • They can also tell OSHA to fuck off:

          Not Covered under the OSH Act:

          o) The self-employed;
          o) Immediate family members of farm employers; and
          o) Workplace hazards regulated by another federal agency (for example, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Department of Energy, or the Coast Guard).
      • Land costs up-front money.

        Land costs almost nothing in places where these batteries are being deployed.

      • In fact one could imagine such a system being built right next to the Hoover Dam, increasing its overall energy production capacity.

        Pumped storage is a way of making fluctuating energy sources more usable, so there would be totally no point in 'building one next to Hoover Dam'.

        In fact, we could use Hoover Dam itself as a pumped storage facility. Below the dam, there is a series of low dams on the same river. You could have wind and solar farms in the vicinity of Davis Dam, 70 miles downstream, pump water from Davis' lake up into Lake Mead, which has a lot of unused capacity right now. This stored energy would then subsequently be used a

    • Their problem comes with lack of investment. Right now there are only a few small companies supplying them and they are flat out completing demonstration projects and scaling them up. The technical demo in China (Hubei Zaoyang Storage Integration Demonstration) was completed and commissioned at 3MW at the start of the year and is currently being scaled up.

      Currently there are smaller installations providing a buffer for solar PV and wind all over the place. But the development of grid scale VRBs is still in

  • by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Saturday June 29, 2019 @09:38PM (#58848156)

    Why would you use something as flaky as a LI-Ion battery in this application? It makes sense in cars, but you have more-or-less unlimited space to put a stationary battery, so I am not sure why energy density is an issue. Some gigantic lead-acid cells or something even more rudimentary - but safe - technology would seem to make more sense.

    • Why would you use something as flaky as a LI-Ion battery in this application?

      Cost benefit at the current state of technology. I don't think Li-Ion will win ultimately in grid scale applications. I suspect VRFBs will end up the leading technology. However right now, in 2019, your choice is Li-Ion, and that's pretty much it. Lead-acid is a horrible relic which would consume an incredible amount of land all for a pitiful life expectancy. It doesn't make much sense to use lead-acid for anything that you don't want to replace within 5-10 years. i.e. put it in your home, in your UPS, but

  • Why lithium ion? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday June 30, 2019 @12:09AM (#58848524)

    Nearly all of the utility-scale batteries now on the grid or in development are massive versions of the same lithium ion technology that powers cellphones and laptops

    The primary advantage of Li-ion over other battery technologies [batteryuniversity.com] is energy density. They store the most energy for a given volume and a given weight. In nearly all other aspects, Li-ion are poor batteries. They're expensive. They don't last very many cycles. They're very sensitive to temperature. They're extremely temperamental - they can catch fire or explode [youtube.com] if you overcharge them or over-discharge them or puncture them. That's why they're now banned in the cargo holds of airliners. (Other batteries just turn into a powdered mush [youtube.com] if you destroy them.)

    For phones, laptops, and cars, the high energy density is of paramount importance. But for utility-scale power storage, energy density does not matter. Who cares if the batteries take up 4x as much space as Li-ion? The utility can just build a bigger building to house the batteries. Who cares if the batteries weigh 10x as much as Li-ion? You're not going to be moving them around; they're just going to sit in one place their entire life. So why are you using Li-ion for an application where they're ill-suited?

    • by amorsen ( 7485 )

      Li-ion wins for the same reason Silicon rules practically everywhere it can possibly be made to work: It has economies of scale. Right now grid-tied battery storage is a tiny portion of battery sales, and that does not justify investing the effort into dedicated battery chemistries. The large batteries will just have to cope with what is available.

      Perhaps if grid batteries become a huge success this will change, but it seems likely that for the next 10 years most batteries will be made for the transport sec

  • by io333 ( 574963 ) on Sunday June 30, 2019 @03:41AM (#58848816)

    When town's Supercapacitor goes wrong, town vanishes!!!

  • by jakedata ( 585566 ) on Sunday June 30, 2019 @05:27AM (#58848978)

    In 2013 someone shot up an electrical substation with a high powered rifle. I bet a well placed shot or two could make a most satisfying boom. At least they would be able to figure that out pretty quickly.

  • How about storing energy as the potential energy of a raised mass? The mass would be raised using sun sourced energy during the day and allowed to descend at night, releasing potential energy to run a generator.
  • Electricity in the US broken down [energycentral.com]. Battery storage right now accounts for about 80 milliseconds of our national electrical power usage. That's for 1 GWhr installed. We'd need to crank it up by multiple orders of magnitude to be at all useful, and that assume we have deployed over 20 TWh of wind and solar capacity (generation is about 25% of capacity, and that's on the high end of the average). Storage just isn't going to cut it - at all. Generation capacity is what is required, and it needs to be consi
  • Would the use of large format NiMH or Super Capacitors work as a safer alternative to unstable lithium? The patent on large format NiMH should be just about expired.
  • Instead use zinc bromide flow batteries.

  • The summary neglects to include why any quote from Dr. Donald Sadoway is interesting. He's worked for many years on Liquid Metal batteries. His graduate students spun out Ambri to commercialize the technology and have several nice demonstration projects. I'm unaware of any commercial installations, but their technology looks more promising than most new battery technologies.

    * Low cost materials
    * Several viable chemistries to tailor to specific applications and battery designs
    * Virtually unlimited number of

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