California's Battery Plant Fire Sparks Call for Investigation, New Regulations (yahoo.com) 56
Earlier this month a major fire erupted at a California battery plant. But several factors contributed to its rapid spread, the fire district's chief told the Los Angeles Times:
A fire suppression system that is part of every battery rack at the plant failed and led to a chain reaction of batteries catching on fire, he said at a news conference last week. Then, a broken camera system in the plant and superheated gases made it challenging for firefighters to intervene. Once the fire began spreading, firefighters were not able to use water, because doing so can trigger a violent chemical reaction in lithium-ion batteries, potentially causing more to ignite or explode.
The county's Board of Supervisors has now requested that the plant remain offline until an investigation is completed. A county supervisor told the newspaper "What we're doing with this technology is way ahead of government regulations and ahead of the industry's ability to control it."
And plans for a new battery storage site nearby are now being questioned, with an online petition to halt all new battery-storage facilities in the county drawing over 3,200 signatures. The fire earlier this month was the fourth at Moss Landing since 2019, and the third at buildings owned by Texas-based Vistra Energy... Already, the fire has prompted calls for additional safety regulations around battery storage, and more local control over where storage sites are located...
California Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 303 — the Battery Energy Safety & Accountability Act — which would require local engagement in the permitting process for battery or energy storage facilities, and establish a buffer to keep such sites a set distance away from sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and natural habitats... Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce advocate of clean energy, agrees an investigation is needed to determine the fire's cause and supports taking steps to make Moss Landing and similar facilities safer, his spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in a statement. Addis and two other state legislators sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday requesting an investigation.
"The Moss Landing facility has represented a pivotal piece of our state's energy future, however this disastrous fire has undermined the public's trust in utility scale lithium-ion battery energy storage systems," states the letter. "If we are to ensure California moves its climate and energy goals forward, we must demonstrate a steadfast commitment to safety..."
initial testing from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the levels of toxic gases released by the batteries, including hydrogen fluoride, did not pose a threat to public health during the fire. [The EPA says their monitoring "showed concentrations of particulate matter to be consistent with the air quality index throughout the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay regions, with no measurements exceeding the moderate air quality level... In addition to EPA's monitoring, Vistra Energy brought in a third-party environmental consultant with air monitoring expertise, right after the fire started"]
Still, many residents remain on edge about potential long-term impacts on the nearby communities of Watsonville, Castroville, Salinas and the ecologically sensitive Elkhorn Slough estuary.
The county's Board of Supervisors has now requested that the plant remain offline until an investigation is completed. A county supervisor told the newspaper "What we're doing with this technology is way ahead of government regulations and ahead of the industry's ability to control it."
And plans for a new battery storage site nearby are now being questioned, with an online petition to halt all new battery-storage facilities in the county drawing over 3,200 signatures. The fire earlier this month was the fourth at Moss Landing since 2019, and the third at buildings owned by Texas-based Vistra Energy... Already, the fire has prompted calls for additional safety regulations around battery storage, and more local control over where storage sites are located...
California Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay) has introduced Assembly Bill 303 — the Battery Energy Safety & Accountability Act — which would require local engagement in the permitting process for battery or energy storage facilities, and establish a buffer to keep such sites a set distance away from sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and natural habitats... Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce advocate of clean energy, agrees an investigation is needed to determine the fire's cause and supports taking steps to make Moss Landing and similar facilities safer, his spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in a statement. Addis and two other state legislators sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday requesting an investigation.
"The Moss Landing facility has represented a pivotal piece of our state's energy future, however this disastrous fire has undermined the public's trust in utility scale lithium-ion battery energy storage systems," states the letter. "If we are to ensure California moves its climate and energy goals forward, we must demonstrate a steadfast commitment to safety..."
initial testing from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the levels of toxic gases released by the batteries, including hydrogen fluoride, did not pose a threat to public health during the fire. [The EPA says their monitoring "showed concentrations of particulate matter to be consistent with the air quality index throughout the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay regions, with no measurements exceeding the moderate air quality level... In addition to EPA's monitoring, Vistra Energy brought in a third-party environmental consultant with air monitoring expertise, right after the fire started"]
Still, many residents remain on edge about potential long-term impacts on the nearby communities of Watsonville, Castroville, Salinas and the ecologically sensitive Elkhorn Slough estuary.
1 fire is unlucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1 fire is unlucky (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, shut up, coward. You think that the employees in California are less capable than you... oh, that's right, you're the employee who keeps getting put on probation.
What disturbs me is the fire suppression system *FAILING*. And since it sounds like it's happened before, that reads MANAGEMENT FAILURE to me - ROI over safety (no company's ever done that, you know... um, Don Blankenship? Who?).
Always more regulations (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Always more regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if the previous three fires weren't enough to convince them to do it right. This was the fourth since 2019.
This facility seems to suffer a serious fire almost every year, on average.
But they also seem to be the only fixed facility having this problem, so maybe a comparative examination of this plant and others to determine the differences.
Re:Always more regulations (Score:4, Informative)
because fewer haven't worked
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Were those regulations enforced?
I've seen many times where regulations were not enforced because the violation was a "paper crime", as in it was technically breaking some law but because nobody was hurt the punishment was a sternly worded letter to not let it happen again.
This lax enforcement on rules is fine until someone gets hurt. When that happens there's usually a call for more rules than the more important aspect of looking into if existing rules were followed. We can keep writing new rules but if t
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Difficult to say. a common tactic by politicians opposed to regulations is to find a way to foil enforcement.
For example, the GOP wanting to defund the FBI, the IRS and the EPA.
I'm sure there are many other examples at all levels.
"We can keep writing new rules but if there's no real punishment for violating the rules then there's no point in having them"
perhaps but having weakly or rarely enforced laws on the books can often be useful but usually for authorities as a pretext for arrest
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If you had bothered to read the article you would know that the new proposed regulations are to do with minimum distances these obviously dangerous facilities must be placed from such sensitive locations as schools. It is clear that they are leaving actual regulation of the engineering alone for now. Where that is a good idea... I have my doubts, but that is what it is.
The root problem is shitty self-regulation, just like the Boeing fiascos.
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The regulation proposal that set you off: "would require local engagement in the permitting process for battery or energy storage facilities, and establish a buffer to keep such sites a set distance away from sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and natural habitats."
you know what, was going to write a whole essay about why regulations are a good thing and how fire at a business is not good (aka bad), and a fire at a plant every year that deals with toxic compounds and can blow up if WATER is used is not
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There may have been a fire, but it caused very little damage to everyone else. Nor was there risk of it spreading (being surrounded by water on 3 and half sides). Why must it be stopped with regulation? Isn't it sufficient to fine them for actual damages, e.g. evacuation, fire response, toxic fumes etc.?
If they eventually go bankrupt due to all the mismanagement, then it's their problem.
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you know what, was going to write a whole essay about why regulations are a good thing and how fire at a business is not good (aka bad), and a fire at a plant every year that deals with toxic compounds and can blow up if WATER is used is not a good thing... and i definitely wouldn't want one built beside my kids school.... just like you wouldn't want an explosives plant being built besides a school... but i'll agree with you for the sake of argument... regulations are bad... and ask you what is the solution?
Not the original poster, but... regulations aren't intrinsically bad. But these specific regulations are, IMO, borderline idiotic. They basically would ban power storage in exactly the sorts of places where they are most needed, and don't actually address the real problem, which is that this plant keeps catching fire for some reason. Repeatedly. :-D
The right regulations would render the storage systems safe, e.g.
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How about the innocent people who were affected by the fire? The company losing money means nothing to them. I have some cheap real estate you might be interested in. It’s located next to the regulation free fireworks factory.
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Because the financial loss is less for the company than the harms and risks to employees and neighbors. Because the financial loss is less than the cost of cutting corners, or they wouldn't cut corners.
Because the cost of the response. Why should the costs of their risks be socialized on citizens when the profits are privatized to the company? Why should taxpayer money be wasted on responding to those fires when the law could have required and properly incentivized the company to prevent them in the first p
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Because the financial loss is less than the cost of cutting corners, or they wouldn't cut corners.
I'd add a 'perceived' in there.
Because the perceived financial loss is less than the perceived savings from cutting corners.
Because these types tend to be horrible at math,
"It was a calculated risk, but man am I bad at math" type deal.
Various places kept cutting corners even after it bit them several times.
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The issue with the Ford Pinto could have been solved by moving a single bolt, which would have increased the manufacturing cost (IIRC) $1.83/car. Executives decided that for a run of one million estimated cars it would be cheaper to pay off survivors of the fires. Instead they almost completely destroyed the company's reputation for over a decade.
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Why is it always "more regulations"?
Why is there always incentive to demand more regulation?
It takes two to tango.
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Re:Always more regulations (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a "battery plant", despite all the terrible headlines. There are no battery plants in California. This was a battery storage site.
"God knows what" - no, you may not be familiar with battery fires, but regulators very much are.
This has nothing to do with wildfires.
Batteries aren't made of a vile liquor drawn from the depths of hell; the materials therein are not at all exotic. IMHO, I'm still fan of the late Jack Rickard's description of them as "magic rocks" ;) The largest component is graphite (like pencil leads), usually natural (mined) and milled. Aka, a rock. The anodes, the next largest component, are usually mixed oxides of common metals - aka, a rock. That right there is most of the mass of a battery.
In addition to the rocks, you have copper foil and alumium foil as current collectors. The casing is usually steel. The electrolytes are organic carbonates (think "a somewhat milder form of paint thinner"). The separator membranes are plastic. There are lithium ions that move around the cell (2-3% of the mass), but lithium isn't particularly special (lithium chloride only has 1/6th the LD50 of sodium chloride, aka table salt, and is neuroprotective - we should probably be adding it to drinking water [nytimes.com]). There are various additives to the electrolytes, generally simple polar compounds of non-exotic elements. And there's the binder that binds the anode and cathode grains together (usually PVDF - think teflon, but half the fluorine per carbon).
The most "unusual" thing available is the fluorine in the PVDF and sometimes some additives, but these are all tiny portions of the cell mass. In the California fire, fluorine could not be detected outside the building that the batteries were in; whatever existed was consumed within the fire (the ultimate fate of fluorinated compounds like teflon in fires is water fluoride, aka what people add to water anyway; it's just a question of dilution). Again, tiny amounts.
All fires are polluting and things you don't want to breathe. In car fires, both of EVs and ICEs, it's neither the battery nor the fuel that produces most of the pollution, but rather, the hundreds of kilograms of burning plastics (including chlorinated and fluorinated compounds).
These batteries buffer wind and solar on the grid - in California, ~27% of the grid. You want to replace even a chunk of that with fossil fuels, in order to prevent a single fire that seems to have done little damage to anything? Get out of town, man. The world burns 90 MILLION TONNES of fossil fuels EVERY DAY. The world has burned ONE badly-managed li-ion energy storage site (plus a couple random packs), in the entire history of their use.
Have some damned perspective.
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Because obviously this plant is a danger to their workers, the firefighters, and likely the entire community. If companies comported themselves as they do in the phantasmagorical Libertaria there would never be a need for regulations. They would maintain their fire suppression system adequately. They would have paid competent designers to design the assembly line to prevent chain reactions. They would have maintained their equipment adequately to prevent a fire in the first place. And they certainly wou
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Your premise is flawed: this is the fourth fire in the facility and they still haven't managed to stop it catching on fire so apparently it's just not that big of a priority for them.
Good time to switch to sodium (Score:5, Interesting)
Sodium batteries are now a viable alternative to lithium. Cheaper, easier, and not prone to burning out of control.
They're much heavier than lithium but if your intent is to have a stationary battery facility to even out the energy produced by wind and solar, sodium is the superior choice.
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Sodium batteries are now a viable alternative to lithium. Cheaper, easier, and not prone to burning out of control.
Sodium can still burn when it comes in contact with air or water. That characteristic is true of all of the metals on the left side of the periodic table.
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Sodium batteries are now a viable alternative to lithium. Cheaper, easier, and not prone to burning out of control.
Sodium can still burn when it comes in contact with air or water. That characteristic is true of all of the metals on the left side of the periodic table.
You haven't lived until you take a big block of sodium and hit it with a firehose. Better than fireworks!
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"Sodium can still burn when it comes in contact with air or water"
that would only happen with elemental sodium.
afaik the batteries are using sodium-ion which should be safe
Re:Good time to switch to sodium (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently "sodium-ion battery" can mean a lot of things, including meaning a fire hazard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
An electro-chemical storage battery is by definition a system that has fuel and oxidizer in close proximity. If things go wrong then the typical tactics of firefighting don't apply. Water on a fire typically removes two of the "fire triangle" elements of air and heat. For a fire to start it needs heat, air, and fuel. Dump enough cooling water on a battery fire and it will go out but that means a lot more water than other kinds of fires because the water isn't removing the oxidizer like it would for wood and such in a burning building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'm no firefighting expert but apparently a battery fire is best put out with sand or or some kind of salt. Sand is very much chemically inert so the point is removing heat from the fire and providing a barrier to heat from the fire starting other things on fire. Salts have some chemistry involved, maybe it's producing gases that spreads the heat out faster? I don't know but apparently salts are commonly used to extinguish battery fires.
The problem with fires at a battery factory, or even an EV on fire, is it's difficult to carry enough salt or sand to make a difference. It can mean firefighters are bringing just more and more water, or they use some kind of foam like they'd use for a fire at a fossil fuel spill. The purpose of foam at a fossil fuel fire is to float on top of the fuel to starve the flame of air, most fossil fuels float on water so water is not all that effective in putting out the flames. Foam on a battery fire isn't starving the battery of oxidizing air because the oxidizer is part of the battery, but what it does do is allow the water in the foam to "stick" to the battery to boil off and be more effective in removing heat.
Battery fires haven't been too much of a concern until we've started stacking them so high and deep. I recall hearing that a typical lead-acid car battery contains about as much energy as a stick of dynamite. That's no joke but also something any competent firefighting team can deal with. Now just imagine batteries stacked far and wide, such as would be found in a battery factory or grid storage facility, with an energy density that's ten times that of a common lead-acid car battery. That's a kind of fire that likely would cause a governor to activate the National Guard due to the requirements for manpower and heavy equipment.
Re:Good time to switch to sodium (Score:5, Informative)
Elemental sodium can. Not sodium-ion.
Just like lithium can as well exposed to air, but lithium-ion is completely different.
And we know sodium ion are perfectly safe in water, because there's a lot of sodium ions in water. Your body has a lot of sodium ions floating around in water - it forms the basic function of cellular potential with ion pumps that move sodium ions into and out of the cell. And when you add salt to water, it dissolves into sodium ions in that water.
Never confuse the various states an element can have - the chemical behavior changes significantly. Lithium and sodium elements have that pesky extra electron in the outer shell they want to get rid of, and they're going to do anything to lose that electron. But once they lose that electron and form an ion, they're in a very happy state where they're sitting with full electron shells.
So no, a lithium ion battery cannot catch fire just by exposing its contents to air and water. Similarly, a sodium ion battery will not catch fire.
What actually causes the fire is the energy stored in the battery. If you take two identical batteries, one charged, one discharged and puncture them, the charged one will puff up and smoke and catch fire like all the videos show. But the discharged one will sit there doing absolutely nothing as there's no energy to start the reaction.
That's why when such batteries are shipped, they have to be between 20-40% charge at most - too low a level to cause problems even if the battery is damaged.
The behavior of ionic compounds can be different than their elemental ones. After all,l sodium is a very reactive metal. Chlorine is a poisonous gas. Yet the two form a harmless (chemically speaking - health wise is a different matter) substance - table salt.
Sodium ion batteries are a promising technology because they use rather benign electrodes and electrolytes - nothing requiring conflict minerals or restricted materials, just common everyday materials in a water-based electrolyte. They will always be heavier because sodium has atomic number 11 while lithium has atomic number 3.
Lack of information.... (Score:2)
Well, I'm not entirely sure about the current state of Sodium Batteries, but I don't really need to be. At the moment, industrial scale batteries are a highly competitive market, and if someone could make more money by switching from Lithium to Sodium, they would have done it. That suggests to me that Sodium isn't yet quite ready for prime time.
I'm waiting for Calcium Ion batteries myself - twice the volumetric energy storage due to the +2 ionization state.
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switch to LiFePo for stationary storage already
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There is no excuse whatsoever for fires spreading uncontrollably in lifepo4 installations. This is nothing less than criminally negligent engineering.
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LiFePo has been available for a decade and is the least likely to suffer thermal runaway and doesn't contain any ingredients that explode on contact with water nor any problematic ones such as cobalt
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The problem isn't the battery chemistry, it's shitty engineering of safety systems, including control systems. Why the fuck do they even put water sprinklers in these things for crying out loud? This is just grade school engineering in big boy territory. Good thing those pros have insurance, huh? Because they will be paying out...
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The problem isn't the battery chemistry, it's shitty engineering of safety systems, including control systems. Why the fuck do they even put water sprinklers in these things for crying out loud? This is just grade school engineering in big boy territory. Good thing those pros have insurance, huh? Because they will be paying out...
Why wouldn't they put water sprinklers in them? Flooding a single compartment with water will remove the heat, preventing the fire from spreading to the next battery. It's pretty much the only way you can stop a battery fire in situ. Things like sand won't work, because you can't remove the battery that's on fire and shove it down into the sand. Only some sort of liquid flood system can provide the rapid, extreme cooling needed to stop a battery fire like this.
You do have to make sure your cells are sea
I predict that... (Score:3)
...the defenders of fossil fuels will fight hard for extremely strict safety regulations to make sure that ALL batteries are outlawed
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Right! Then of course they need to outlaw home computers and 3D printers. Never know what harm they could do.
fire suppression system failed (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they should have made sure it works and prevented this? It isn't rocket science.
"Regular maintenance and testing are critical for ensuring the effectiveness and reliability of server room fire suppression systems. This includes routine inspections of the physical components, such as nozzles and piping, to ensure they are free of obstructions and damage. Additionally, the fire detection systems linked to the suppression system must be tested regularly to guarantee their responsiveness and accuracy. It's also essential to check the levels and condition of the fire suppression agents, ensuring they are at optimal concentrations and have not degraded over time. "
https://www.controlfiresystems... [controlfiresystems.com]
Pfffff (Score:2)
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My crystal ball says class action suits incoming.
Self-regulation, "invisible hand", etc... (Score:3)
...they're all pretty fictional in the modern world. The "invisible hand" didn't even keep dirt and sawdust out of store-bought bread.
Everybody seems to understand that you can't trust illegal drugs to be safe, to contain what is advertised, even though that market is totally governed by the "invisible hand". All it lacks is regulation.
If you're against regulation, you're in favour of every product being as reliable as street drugs.
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If you're against regulation, you're in favour of every product being as reliable as street drugs.
If drugs were legal few people would need street drugs.
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If drugs were legal few people would need street drugs.
That's a lesson lost on people that didn't learn from history.
There wouldn't be "bathtub gin" if there wasn't prohibitions on the legal sale of alcohol. Before Prohibition most alcohol consumption was pretty tame beer and wine. Once Prohibition was in place it became problematic to smuggle bulky beer and wine so "bootleggers" would sneak in grain alcohol and other distilled spirits, such as in a flask hidden in their boot leg to "spice up" some lemonade or tea. Does everyone understand now where the term
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Moar Regulations (Score:2)
How about they put in a regulation that says that your fire suppression system shouldn't fail?
Because probably the designers and owners wanted to lose their money and reputation so they put in a fire system that didn't work on purpose.
Better regulate that one - a local inspector totally would have caught it.
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A properly trained local inspector might have caught it. This whole technology is so new I doubt anyone is quite sure what they are looking for. This will get ironed out in time.
Does the investigation belong to the CSB or the utility.
Re: Moar Regulations (Score:2)
a California battery plant. (Score:2)
Not just any battery plant. A lithium battery plant. Local news was claiming it is the largest in the world.