Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire District said at this point, most of the fire had gone out. A water-based mitigation system did not work as designed, Vistra's senior director of community affairs Brad Watson said at the conference. Earlier in the day, a Monterey Sheriff official had said there were no active fire suppression efforts going on, "as the best approach, according to fire staff, is to allow the building and batteries to burn."

Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

  • WraithGear@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    12 hours ago

    Weight lifting is slightly less efficient due to friction and heat generated by pully system, and the vast amount of weight and space needed may limit available storage possibility and scalability. But its simple, and safer.

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      4·
      10 hours ago

      We lack the materials and engineering necessary to make lifted weight storage systems enter the order of magnitude of energy storage needed to compete with batteries, let alone pumped hydro. It’s just really, really hard to compete with literal megatons of water pumped up a 500 meter slope.

      I believe that the plant in question was using something besides Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. This press release mentions LG JH4 which are deffo not LiFePO4. LiFePO4 batteries are far, far safer than other Lithium chemistries, and are now the norm for BESS (not cars tho, since they have lower energy density but better a better lifetime than NMC/NCA). This fire would not have happened with a BESS using LiFePO4 batteries.

      Now that batteries with aqueous sodium-ion chemistries are becoming available, we should begin transitioning pre-LiFePO4 sites to those wholesale. Aqueous sodium-ion batteries should be even safer than LiFePO4, and while they have kinda shit energy density, they’re still fine for grid storage.

      EDIT: correction, LiFePO4 batteries can run away, but they are incapable of autoignition.

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        10 hours ago

        LiFePO4 batteries are safer and harder to ignite, but they can still go into thermal runaway and can burn. If a fire started in a battery that big, it would still spread and it wouldn’t be practical to extinguish it.

        • Badabinski@kbin.earth
          2·
          10 hours ago

          You’re correct that they can enter thermal runaway, they just can’t autoignite. I really suspect that if this site has been using LiFePO4 cells instead of NMC, it wouldn’t have gone up like it did. 3000 MWh of NMC cells sounds absolutely bugnuts crazy to me.