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Big batteries are critical to decarbonizing the electric grid. They can also explode.
Every source of renewable energy seems to face an opposition based on a real downside that’s blown out of proportion. Wind turbines kill birds. Solar panels fry them. Hydropower can release methane. Nuclear reactors can melt down. And now batteries are coming under the microscope for exploding.
Late last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state had formed a working group to “ensure the safety and security of energy storage systems,” in response to fires at battery systems in three New York counties. Her announcement concerns batteries used on the electric grid, which are larger but typically conform to high standards in construction and installation, but it came a few months after the publication of a New York Times report about deadly fires caused by much smaller lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes.
While energy researchers and fire officials are concerned about the risks of battery failures leading to explosions, they’re also nervous that fears of e-bikes packed into bike shops could rebound against energy storage. If a 5-pound e-bike battery can explode and burn down a house, who would want to put 300,000 pounds of batteries on their apartment building’s roof?
The problem is there’s basically no way to realistically decarbonize an electric grid without a lot more battery storage. Wind and solar power only generate electricity when it’s either windy or sunny, so powering the grid on cloudy, calm days — or, in the case of solar, just at night — requires a way to store that energy.
In other words, with energy storage rolling out fast across the country, a lot more attention is about to be paid to preventing and putting out battery fires.
It’s worth noting at the outset that there’s also always a risk of failure from energy storage. Oil and gas can ignite, dams can burst, and batteries can explode. The chemical or kinetic energy you hope to release in a controlled fashion can always be released in an uncontrolled fashion, and batteries are no different.
“Anytime you store energy it can be released in an uncontrolled manner,” Lakshmi Srinivasan, a senior technical leader at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), told me.
In fact, the very reason lithium-ion batteries are so appealing — i.e. their high levels of energy density — is also why their fires can be so devastating and hard to put out.
“They put in energy in a small footprint. That’s bad when energy is released in an uncontrolled way. It’s an inherent hazard we accept,” Brian O’Connor, technical services engineer at the National Fire Protection Association, told me. The battery cells are packed tightly together to efficiently use available space, which then presents the risk of issues in one cell spreading to the others.
When one battery cell goes in thermal runaway, which is uncontrolled energy release, it can then spread to the next battery cell and the next, O’Connor explained. “As this process continues, it can result in a battery fire or explosion. This can often be the ignition source for larger battery fires,” according to the NFPA, which may result in explosions and the release of toxic gases.
The subsequent fires can be hard to put out and difficult to manage for first responders without specific training and experience, explained O’Connor. “We’re trying to encourage and require thorough codes and standards in preplanning with fire departments. Let’s make sure first responders know where they’re going to. Let’s have a plan.”
Because battery storage systems typically have to go through a permitting process to be installed, there’s leverage for making them safer through improving and disseminating best practices, explained Stephanie Shaw, a principal technical leader at EPRI.
Longstanding doubts and fears around batteries in scooters, e-bikes, and hoverboards can sometimes make people apprehensive about energy storage, Shaw said. “We do see a tendency for folks less familiar to lump all that together. One of the things that I’m trying to get across is that larger-scale grid connected units have a lot of requirements.” This can mean spacing out the batteries both from each other and from walls, as well as installing sprinkler systems.
The issues around batteries are not new or unknown: According to a database of battery failures maintained by the EPRI, there have been 11 in the past year, including three in New York since late May, as well as a recent one in Taiwan.
There also doesn’t yet appear to be evidence that failures and fires are scaling with deployment of electrical storage at a constant rate, said Shaw.
That’s encouraging because large-scale battery storage is getting rolled out rapidly.
“With grid scale utility scale deployments, the vast majority are lithium-ion technologies. We’re increasing deployment very rapidly. We’re at beginning of a hockey stick curve,” Srinivasan said, referencing the way exponential growth looks on a chart.
California, in particular, has installed a staggering amount of grid scale storage, from around 500 megawatts in 2020 to 5 gigawatts this year. Texas has 3.5 gigawatts of installed battery storage on its grid, compared to 2 gigawatts last year. Any area that pursues decarbonization with a renewable heavy grid will likely have to follow suit. Earlier this year, Kathy Hochul announced a goal to install 6 megawatts of storage in New York by 2030.
While there is not yet any evidence of the kind of widespread, intense local backlash to battery storage that has greeted many utility scale wind and solar projects, there are a few cases of leery residents when faced with a proposal to install batteries near them. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, for example, a plan to install 15 lithium-ion batteries that weigh a combined 300,000 pounds on the roof of an apartment building has stirred up tenant opposition, according to the local publication Greenpointers.
Battery installations across Staten Island have also evoked grumbling from residents and local officials, with the borough president, Republican Vito Fossella, telling the Staten Island Advance, “If you put a deck on your house, it is scrutinized from every angle ... But we have residents who are quite literally waking up with these battery systems in their backyards.”
If the ambitious battery storage targets required for decarbonizing the grid are going to be met, expect the grumbling to increase.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.