Are you maybe thinking of the CyberTruck that blew up in front of a Trump hotel earlier this month? If so, that fire was deliberate: the driver/owner committed suicide, and used fireworks and explosives.
I think I saw something on TV news about a Tesla that suddenly caught fire and then sometime later saw the BBC article and conflated the two. Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone.
We’re about twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, north of the incident. Since the wind turned around, we’re starting to smell an icky smokey chemical smell in the air. And that’s with a mountain range in between us and Moss Landing. It must really suck for those living nearer.
I think poster squeegee lives just a few miles away from Moss Landing. I hope he’s doing okay.
Some disasters, like the Kanto earthquake of 1923 that hit just as all of Tokyo was preparing fires for the midday meal and thereby caused the city to burn down, can’t realistically be avoided.
But now that it’s looking like the Pallisades Fire, just like the Camp Fire, was caused by Pacific Gas and Electric “maintaining” its equipment on the cheap, this fire at another company’s site is part of a trend. A trend that disproves all of Bill Maher’s bullshit about how California’s “over-regulation” is killing the state.
Not PG&E. They don’t operate in that part of California. (Palisades.). Perhaps it was Southern California Edison.
I am pretty sure that it is SCE. They have been turning power off to homes all over the place. I know people in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley who have been without power for days at a time.
Moss Landing is over 300 miles from Los Angeles. It’s like a different state.
< never mind >
Because them burning is a known problem.
I suspect they should take some lessons from how the military stores munitions (with more of an eye on stopping fire more than explosions, naturally). The military has a lot of hard earned experience on preventing stored volatiles from, well, volatilizing. Bad things happen when they violate those procedures.
In other words while totally preventing lithium battery fires is impossible, it should be possible to design storage areas like this to contain the damage. Of course that would likely cost at least some extra money, which means it’ll have to be forced by regulation.
Firefighters worked to contain the fire so it would burn out as quickly as possible, and now there are few active flames and as of Friday morning, very little release of combustion byproducts, according to Mendoza.
Mendoza noted that there had been no injuries to civilians, plant personnel, or first responders.
I saw it happen a few months ago. The driver was on the freeway, noticed smoke coming from the hood, pulled off and into a driveway to get out and have a look, and then FOOF, the whole thing was burning.
I just now unlocked a memory where my friends car caught on fire in the mid 80s. We were driving on the highway and smoke started coming in from the dash. We pulled over behind a highway patrol cop who happened to be there. He was about to write a ticket to a lucky guy who got cut loose and he was able to put it out with an extinguisher.
Here’s something from October:
I don’t know how well this will come through, but this is a photo of the power plant from about 10 miles down the coast. It’s pretty visible
There are many more instances of Tesla vehicles (and other BEV cars) spontaneously catching fire, and while internal combustion engine vehicles also catch fire (often due to oil leaks spraying flammable liquid on a hot exhaust manifold, or electrical issues) they are much easier to suppress with water and foam whereas a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery is self-feeding and will basically have to burn itself out.
While it is theoretically possible to space out the individual banks to prevent cascading ignition, it takes a much larger footprint that may not be available depending on location. And this isn’t the first lithium-ion facility fire in recent memory; from just last fall there was a fire down in Escondido that resulted in evacuations, road and school closures:
Morro Bay (also on the Pacific Coast but south of Big Sur, just northwest past San Luis Obispo) is a proposed site for the Morro Bay Energy Storage Facility on the grounds where the Morro Bay Power Plant (coal-fired) used to operate, and is facing broad public opposition for just this reason, as it is plumb in the middle of the town with businesses to the south, a school and water treatment plant to the north, and homes all around. A lithium-ion battery fire spreading toxic smoke would require mass evacuations with even fewer avenues for evacuation than Moss Landing and really no place for evacuees to stay (SLO is a small college town that is already packed to the gills, Paso Robles is basically a wine tourism stop, and Santa Maria is over an hour away and has its own housing crunch), not to mention the impact on the tourism industry which is the primary driver of the local economy.
I don’t know what the right solution is for storing and managing grid-based sustainable energy from variable inputs like wind and solar, but there needs to be some real development on the safety and reliability of energy storage, notwithstanding the pressure that lithium extraction is putting on ecologically stressed areas. Sodium-ion was supposed to be an acceptable substitute for safer and cheaper stationary grid energy storage but has of yet failed to take hold, and other options like various gravity-based schemes have many limitations and unacceptable costs.
Stranger
My state is getting ready for…
I don’t know what to do about lithium batteries in cars, etc., but warehoused materials subject to overheating are stored in CO2, and still others are stored in inert gas nitrogen to break up the fire triangle. Highly hazardous confined spaces, so energy procedures need to be in place.
That is a manufacturing facility. While there are flammable constituents there (hopefully properly segregated and controlled), there aren’t large masses of batteries being constantly charged and discharged.
That doesn’t prevent lithium-ion battery fires. These batteries have their own oxidizer and therefore stopping them is not a matter of smothering them but literally removing enough heat to drop the mass below auto-ignition temperature, and because these materials burn so hot that is a nearly impossible task.
From Thompson Safety:
Extinguishing The Fire
Now that we’ve determined the type of fire, we’re ready to grab an extinguisher and rush into harms way, right? Not exactly. As fire fighters have discovered in recent years, lithium-ion battery fires are prone to reigniting. That’s because the lithium salts in the battery are self-oxidizing, which means that they can’t be “starved out” like a traditional fire. So how do you put it out?
Because the lithium has an ignition point of 500°C, the battery has to be cooled to a sub-ignition temperature. That’s why it took the fire fighters in Texas 30,000 gallons of water and 4 hours to extinguish the blaze.
Stranger
Lithium will have a big advantage in the EV market. For fixed storage by electrical utilities, there are a number of alternative technologies, but they lack the known track record of lithium ion. This is important when financing billion dollar projects, especially when the batteries themselves make up only 20 or 30 percent of total cost. 2021 article by the invaluable David Roberts:
That’s not quite the case. Sodium-ion battery electric vehicles are currently in production in China:
