How safe would it be to put large quantities of a potentially unstable alkali metal in close proximity to lots of humans?
In California, the Puente gas plant made headlines last year because they found it was cheaper to create battery storage than an equivalently-sized gas peaker plant. A large part was permitting and land rights. People don't want an emissions-spewing gas plant in their backyard, but an array of batteries in what looks like every other industrial warehouse is much more palatable. (Time-to-go-live was another factor: battery arrays are modular and can be distributed across multiple sites to further minimize risk, a gas plant is a massive multi-year centralized organizational challenge with all the associated costs and all-or-nothing risks)
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/sce-picks-major...
Underprovision? Pour some more concrete, truck a couple more batteries in.
Overprovision? Load em up again and resell them to someone who wants them. Can't quite do that with a gas plant.
Sure there will be some overhead lost, but it just make soooo much sense to go with battiers from a risk perspective.
They also look (but I'm a layman) easily maintainable, more like server racks than high tension electricity stations. I wonder if the batteries would be hot swappable.
But, if something starts to go wrong it should have monitoring systems and an engineer can swap out the faulty module, and if it does go wrong I hope they have good containment.
But, not much you can do against a proper lithium battery / electrical fire I suspect.