What’s the Deal with Battery Storage Regulation?

Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!

The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.

So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.

When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.

A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.

Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?

It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.

That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.

Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.

Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?

I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.

We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?

We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.

Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?

It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.

There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.

OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?

I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.

It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.

It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?

I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.

So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.

My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?

Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.