It will be interesting to see what it does for fire fighting if we start adopting batteries on large scale in our homes. EVs already pose a significant challenge in European cities. Easy enough for electric cars which can be put into some sort of container to handle the fire, less easy with electric busses. I’m not sure we have a good strategy in place yet here in my city. So far the strategy seems to be “well, it was lucky it caught fire outside the main streets”.
I imagine it’ll be wild if a fire breaks out in a line of town houses with battery storages. If it’s as difficulty to put out as EV’s then you’re probably going to have a hard time containing it to just a few houses.
EVs do not all share the same battery chemistry. Many have LFP batteries, and these are common for home batteries too. You can go on YouTube and see people drilling into an LFP battery with only a little smoke to show for it.
Right exactly. Any discussion about this topic that doesn’t separate LFP (lithium iron phosphate) based batteries from the wider discussion about lithium ion is missing one of the biggest changes to battery tech in recent years. Not all lithium based batteries share the same fire risks - there are enormous differences now.
Increasingly EVs and especially backup batteries use the LFP tech - you can charge it to 100% without harming the battery unlike previous lithium ion batteries, and they don’t really catch fire.
This paper even acknowledges LFP is significantly safer, mentioning it once, but doesn’t dive into the significant improvements. Again, many EVs (including brands like Tesla etc) already use LFP packs in many cars, and the usage is only increasing. Tesla’s generation 3 powerwalls (home backup battery) are LFP too, its really taken off for home power storage for very obvious reasons - they don’t really catch fire, and you don’t need to worry about charging to 100% harming the battery over time.
> what it does for fire fighting if we start adopting batteries on large scale in our homes
Battery fires do not change much in the first stage. They can be cooled and extinguished (on the outside) with water, but initial reactions are violent for sure, see videos on YouTube.
The long term strategy for firefighters will likely consist of removing the battery (coordinated or forcefully) from the house and then dumping it in a thick layer of sand or water where it can react until it's done.
I wonder if the reduction in entire houses being reduced to a rubble filled crater by gas pipeline explosions will counterbalance these home battery fires as we electrify homes.
Not to mention burned down garages/houses because of ICE vehicles combusting.
Of course people parking their ICE vehicles under, in, or near where people live is completely normal and socially acceptable. Even though they do occasionally burn.
And when I say occasionally, I actually mean: vehicle fires are most common reason for fire trucks to be called. And the overwhelming vast majority of those fires are good old ICE vehicles catching fire. That's not news because the media would be in a permanent stat of OMG, another one burned down hour more or less 24/7 around the year. If you think that is exaggerating things a bit, The US actually has hundred of thousands of vehicle fires reported per year causing billions in damage. And a year is only 8760 hours. You might want to consider your fuel bomb on wheels a bit further from where your loved ones reside, just saying.
Batteries are mostly safe. There was (past tense) a problem with low quality cheap Chinese e-bikes using unsafe and uncertified components. That already is being addressed through stricter regulations and tariffs. For the same reason, the TSA is now completely fine with you bringing phones and other battery equipped electronics on planes.
Home storage systems are far less problematic and usually involves professional electricians and using quality components from very responsible manufacturers with stellar reputations. I'm sure there are some isolated cases of these things having issues. And I'm also sure that that's not going to be a huge number of incidents. And that that pales in comparison to the statistics on gas boilers/furnaces, ICE vehicles, etc.
The (mock) outrage here is very selective and targeted. There's a crowd of fossil fuel funded lobbyists out there promoting any article that serves their agenda. They drip feed news papers, magazines, etc. with a non stop flow of articles to promote their agenda of spreading FUD about EVs / renewables.
I'm sure this is otherwise a fine article. And maybe somebody even is peer reviewing it; the site wasn't very clear on that (other than the 0 citations statistic). But is it really that interesting / world shocking? Why does dry bit of otherwise completely uninteresting statistics literature end up featuring on the front page of HN and getting tens of thousands of views?
A fossil fuel fire can be extinguished by snuffing it. By a fire extinguisher if it's caught small enough, or by a fire department with sufficient quantities of water.
Lithium Ion battery fires are self sustaining. Like with thermite, they produce their own oxidizer - they can't be snuffed. You might be able to flood one and cool it to the point where it self extinguishes (creating a flood of heavy metal contaminated water), use special equipment to drown it, or just let it burn itself out (spewing toxic gasses and at least three times the heat of petroleum fires) but once they are going, they are far more of a disaster than other kinds of common fires.
And even if put out they can re-ignite later forcing salvage yards to keep them physically isolated; causing all kinds of follow on problems that don't exist with traditional vehicles or other battery tech.
As others noted, this study did NOT explore these follow on effects, which is unfortunate. Perhaps they really aren't as bad as they appear - it would be nice to see them studied as well.
I imagine it’ll be wild if a fire breaks out in a line of town houses with battery storages. If it’s as difficulty to put out as EV’s then you’re probably going to have a hard time containing it to just a few houses.