Fire Away

Have you ever thought about why you can’t check a lithium-ion battery on an airplane? It is because such batteries have a nasty habit of bursting into flames. If it happens inside the cabin, the crew is trained to put the fire out. But if it happens in the hold, it can bring down the airplane.

Spontaneous battery combustion is just one of many reasons why the ballyhooed “energy transition” will never take place. The Manhattan Contrarian, who, inconveniently for the Left, is able to multiply and divide, explains why batteries are so central to “green” energy. An enormous amount of battery storage would be needed for wind and solar energy to be remotely feasible as principal energy sources:

My report concluded that the amount of storage needed was so large, and the costs so completely unaffordable, that energy storage was totally infeasible as a way to make wind and solar work as the main power sources for an electricity grid. Calculations set forth in that Report concluded that the amount of energy storage needed to enable a predominantly wind/solar grid to get through a year without hitting a blackout was in the range of 500 to 1000 hours of average electricity usage.

So, are our “green” states close to building that capacity?

[T]he states of New York and California have chosen to forge ahead with plans for predominantly wind/solar grids backed up by batteries. Multiple years into the project, neither state is anywhere near to building 1% of the energy storage that would be needed to make their fantasy systems work. But even in these very early stages, they have both blundered into an additional and unanticipated problem: catastrophic fires.

We will get to fires in a moment, but if you follow the link:

Over in California, their average electricity demand is around 30,000 MW, meaning that the range of 500 to 1000 hours of battery storage they would need to back up their dream of a wind/solar system would require 15,000 GWh to 30,000 GWh of batteries. Here from the State of California is an Energy Storage System survey from October 2024. The amount of energy storage built so far is stated as 13,391 MW. Of course, they use the wrong units. These people are completely innumerate. However, we know that they are talking about 4-hour lithium-ion batteries, so multiply by 4 and divide by 1000 to get 53.564 GWh of storage built so far. That would be between about 0.18% and 0.36% of the amount of energy storage they would need to back up a predominantly wind/solar system.

The “green” bureaucrats literally have no idea what they are doing. But back to fires:

Lithium-ion batteries have an unfortunate downside that they occasionally catch fire spontaneously. This can be a notable problem for your cell phone or computer, and a bigger problem for your electric bicycle or car. But the batteries for those things, even the electric car, are tiny compared to the huge batteries needed to back up the electrical grid. Grid-scale batteries must store thousands of megawatt-hours of electricity, compared to maybe 100 kWh for an EV. It seems that the frequency of these spontaneous fires increases with the size of the battery. Can this problem be solved? I have no idea. But it certainly has not been solved yet.

The Contrarian goes on to list a number of spontaneous battery fires in New York and California. But the most concerning one occurred at Moss Landing in California:

And now we have the biggest fire of all, this time again at the Moss Landing facility. According to Energy Storage News in August 2023, after a 2023 expansion to 3 GWh capacity, the Moss Landing facility became the world’s largest energy storage facility. The fire broke out yesterday, January 16, and appears to be still burning to some extent at the time of this writing. I can’t find an estimate of how much of the facility is getting destroyed, but it is not a small part. Here is a picture of the fire from NPR:

NBC News reports today that there was a mandatory evacuation of an area of 7600 acres surrounding the facility. 7600 acres is about 12 square miles. Approximately 1200 to 1500 residents living in that area were evacuated, according to NBC.

NBC quotes Monterey County District 2 Supervisor Glenn Church calling this “a worst case scenario of a disaster” that nobody predicted. Church continues:

“This is really a lot more than just a fire, it’s really a wake up call for this industry, and if we’re going to be moving ahead with sustainable energy we need to have safe battery systems in place,” Church said.

Church is further quoted as stating that this is the fourth fire at this facility going back to 2019. Besides the current one and the one in 2022 reported in the LA Times story linked above, there were additional fires at Moss Landing in 2019 and 2021.

There have been several instances where container ships have been transporting a large number of electric vehicles across the ocean, and a car battery has spontaneously caught on fire. These are not damaged batteries; the cars are brand new, fresh off the production line. And once the fire starts, it spreads rapidly from vehicle to vehicle.

The Greenies have no idea what they are doing. Their Green Dream is collapsing ignominiously, and meanwhile, the Chinese are opening new coal-fired power plants at the rate of at least one per week. If we continue down the futile energy path we are now on, we will lose out to the Communist Chinese. And, frankly, if we are that dumb, we deserve to lose.

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