There will sure be plenty of them which aren't actually certified and the failure rate of any consumer product is never zero.
How are the positives of a distributed storage grid offset by the negatives of the technologies?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bristol-hous...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-48190598
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/27/man-killed-e...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/06/birmingham-h...
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/house-de...
Unfortunately I can't find any links on local news now. It is available here with some photos of my neighborhood.
https://statter2017.wpengine.com/2015/07/03/take-a-look-at-h...
Gas is fairly clean energy, and many of the inefficiencies of electricity distribution don't apply.
It will be quite a long while before people in cold climates who need to heat their homes would switch to all electric or have anything close to local generation capable of heating their homes.
Well, you clearly can. Norway hasn't used gas. At home people have used mostly electric heaters and wood. They're now switching out oil burning furnaces and wood burning furnaces in many areas with heat pumps.
Sweden is burning trash for electricity and piping heat from those powerplants to nearby areas.
In most areas you'd need cheaper electricity, and heat pumps should be cheaper as well. But it's definitely possible.
In neither are renewables used in significantly large ways (maybe excepting the few percent of Swedish trash burning) that are applicable to the rest of the world.
There is very little correlation between the amount of energy contained in a device, and its likelihood of exploding. A container of helium does - after all - contain an enormous amount of potential energy (if fused), but that's not gonna happen all on its own.
Your worry about batteries exploding, is because of your experience seeing Li-ion batteries exploding (or at least burning very quickly) in videos. But this is something specific to the Li-ion battery chemistries. It has very little to do with the energy stored in the battery. It's the flammable liquid electrolyte catching fire that's the primary cause.
Solid state chemistries contain even more energy, and do not explode at all. You can cut them in two and nothing happens. Their problem is cycle life though, but that might be solved.
A home battery pack will be built in a much more safe manner than a cell phone battery, they have more space to go on and they're experience less physical stress than a cell phone or even a car. One of these spontaneously catching fire is likely to be a freak accident, possible but extremely rare. And it's likely to be a fire, not an explosion, as the cells will be more contained than in a cell phone. Check out the video of Tesla setting one of their grid storage battery packs on fire. It's not very spectacular.
Lithium batteries are much more energetic about their failures, "explode", and they can do so with only minor electrical or mechanical mistreatment.
A car in my garage is cold, outside of very odd situations it is not going to spontaneously ignite. Cars burn in accidents or when you are running them, not randomly in the middle of the night.
The "proper" safety for a large lithium battery pack is in a concrete sarcophagus or similar vessel capable of shielding and containing a catastrophic failure.
My co-worker's nanny's car, a new Subaru, burst into flames in her driveway while it was just sitting without the engine running. Non-crash fires occur so frequently that the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) produces a Noncrash Fire Losses Report, and insurance companies calculate premiums based on that data.
https://www.iihs.org/media/c93b98d8-6a7d-44a1-810e-4468ec539...
I'd have a power wall either in my garage or in a box outside the house if it would mean that we could go off-grid. Sadly that's not possible here (we've got more wind power than sun power and residential wind isn't feasible).
Not only that, but they are actually no more energetic than gasoline. This is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdaFk3w6rUY
Gasoline actually has a higher risk of becoming "explosive", though as you pointed out that is not the most common outcome.
Yet we even let everyone pour that stuff into their tanks, without any supervision whatsoever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Not that I'm recommending it, but you could fill a coffee can with gasoline and light it on fire and with only minimum care, be completely safe.
Do the same with an equivalent-energy amount of lithium batteries and you better have a good pair of running shoes.
Go watch some youtube videos of exploding laptops.
The latest big MacBook battery has 100 watt hours of energy fully charged.
A gallon of gasoline has 33,000 watt hours of energy.
So that macbook's battery has 2.3 teaspoons, about 1 centimeter cubed, or 11 mL equivalent energy of gasoline. I have spilled that much gas on my shoe and not given it a second thought. Another way to put it is a laptop battery has about as much energy in it as a shot of vodka.
I'll happily store many bottles of liquor in the cupboard without a thought of the fire risk.
An equivalent battery carelessly stored is scary.
I love cooking with gas but to be completely honest I'll be happy to see the back of it.
On the other hand Gas ovens are crazy nonsense. The electric oven was already the obviously superior choice last century and they've only continued to get better.
The failure mode of a modern lithium battery is much more benign that the quarter-stick of TNT you're making it out to be.
You're just fear-mongering, and that's an absurd level of hyperbole.
One these things become popular, just go on eBay or Amazon and buy a cheap one. There are loads and loads of electrical devices which are required to be certified which you can buy which are clearly not.