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Comment by Mengkudulangsat | Hacker News Reader

Well, that's a damning rebuke to grid-scale battery storage. Is it wise to have this time bomb (e.g. Tesla powerwall) inside every house?

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In 2014 the Hazelwood Coal Mine in Victoria caught fire and burned for 45 days, creating toxic fallout that is still affecting people today - I don't think it's entirely fair to make comments like that when our previous energy generation technology has been orders of magnitude worse than batteries. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-24/hazelwood-coal-mine-f...)

The Centralia coal mine fire has been burning since 1962, they had to condemn and evacuate an entire town due to the fire burning underneath it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

We have ticking time bombs all over the place in our households and life that we’ve grown accustomed to.

- There’s the ticking time bomb of natural gas going into out homes

- The ticking time bomb of AC electric going through our homes that Edison demonstrated could kill an elephant

- The ticking time bomb of wood framed stucco houses that could easily catch fire

- The ticking time bomb of volatile gasoline in your car catching fire

- the ticking time bomb of the Li-Ion battery in your back pocket

If you want to live in a technological society, you have to accept and manage these risks from our technology.

Well, I get the point many things we own in the household are already fire hazards. But at least those are either small enough that we can wait for them to burn out on their own (phone batteries) or we can reasonably put out with a fire extinguisher or hose.

What exactly are we supposed to do with a large li-on battery burning in the garage? Give up and call insurance?

What do you do if your car catches on fire in your garage? You call your insurance.

How often does that happen? I would say not very, even though gasoline is highly volatile. The onus is on designers and manufacturers to make Li-Ion fires so rare that consumers effectively ignore the risk.

For conventional cars you might still have a chance to put out the fire using fire extinguishers as the highly combustive materials, mainly fuels, are actually contained and they will not be a problem until vital structures compromised and such deterioration can be avoided by routine services. But there is not much you can do for Li-Ion batteries. Lithium spikes grow each time you charge the battery and eventually those spikes will penetrate membrane between electrodes, beyond which point the explosion will be inevitable: the process needs no air and will not stop until energy stored in the cell fully discharged. For small batteries we can prevent situation from deteriorating by putting them in water. But there is not much can be done for the size in a Tesla. I've seen video footages of two accidently involving those, one was a couple of years ago in the car park of a Shanghai apartment. Started with just a little bit smoke, but in just around 10 seconds, the Tesla was beyond redemption. Luckily there was no casualties. The other one was a tragedy. A guy brought a e-bike in to a lift and just when the lift door was about to close the battery started to burn. Unfortunately they missed the vital second that could stopped the lift door from closing. It turned several people severely burnt, including a baby.

Fire departments trained and equipped for such fires is the most likely answer though it's possible we'll end up with outbuildings that house the batteries much like garages and stables were detached from homes until automobile were considered safe enough to be parked in a home attached structure.

Natural gas leaks in a house have been known to destroy the house and all the surrounding houses when they blow up.

None of these things are ticking time bombs, they are things with (other than your electricity inside your house) fairly fantastic failure modes.

A Lithium Ion battery pack will experience cascade failure in it's lifetime. A tank full of gasoline will not, neither will the circuit panel in your home.

Will that battery pack catch fire when it inevitably fails? Who knows, but that's exactly the problem.

Yet somehow nearly every house is filled with a dozen or more lithium ion batteries.

Ah yeah, and what happens when you increase that number 100x? Adding a powerwall to your house will increase the battery count in your home by 1,000 or more.

Less than a year since the last house with a gas explosion nearish me.

https://www.greenamerica.org/natural-gas-pipeline-and-infras... (Natural Gas Pipeline and Infrastructure Explosions Nationwide)

What's your point? That out of the tens of millions of homes, residential, and commercial buildings that receive natural gas just in the U.S. alone, there were only 11 explosions over the course of 2 years?

There are significantly fewer home-scale or business-scale battery installations. The fact that there have already been so many issues with them is concerning, since they're much harder to put out than other fires.

Yes, there will be new safety procedures developed to account for these new risks. But they aren't in place yet and they won't be if Tesla fans ignore reality and pretend like nothing's wrong.

“So many issues” compared to what?

You are comparing an industrial site fire to residential fires. They are not comparable. Best wait for the incident investigation before declaring batteries dangerous and demanding they be banned.

Best wait for the incident investigation before declaring batteries dangerous and demanding they be banned.

I did not suggest that lithium batteries be banned (that was all you), I suggested that additional safety mechanisms would be needed to control the risk of spontaneous, uncontrollable combustion, which especially seems to be a risk with Tesla battery installations, seeing as how it has happened at every one of Tesla's Australian battery installations to date.

This is a very large facility, and the expected number of fires is proportional to the number of batteries.

It would be good to know with what probability a powerwall will burn your house down, and what the probability is of anything else burning the house down.

Nonsense, it is not like gasoline powered automobiles never catch fire, it is just that we are used to it, and practices, car designs, and building codes are specifically designed to account for the hazard, e.g., attached garage floors must be below the adjacent floor level, have a certain slope away from the house, and have firewall and fire-rated door.

If hysterical reactions like that were prevalent, we'd still be on foot. Every power technology has issues, and with consistent intelligent development, they are mitigated, or something better is developed. You think burning fossil fuels or containing hydrogen at 3000bar are better ideas?

No it's not. A single rare fire is not a rebuke, nor are they time bombs. You're completely over exaggerating. Fires in electrical grid equipment happen all the time.

It's not a rebuke of grid-scale batteries, it's a rebuke of Tesla's implementation of it, or perhaps the design of the site if it wasn't planned out by Tesla engineers. One would expect that the batteries should be better isolated from each other to some degree so you don't get a chain reaction, and there to be automatic fire suppression (plain water, probably) on site and ready to go.

It's not clear from the article what exactly went wrong, but it looks like they probably lost at least one shipping-container-sized battery pack.

Should you have a Powerwall in your house? Maybe, maybe not. I would feel safer with a design based on less volatile cells, like LFP. No reason to use technology that's unnecessarily dangerous when there are reasonable alternatives.

The worst part about it is that that instability is on public display every time we get another battery fire. It shakes American confidence in EVs when it's the country that most desperately needs to adapt non-fossil fuel cars at a higher rate. I wish we knew more about the implementation process...

So accompany every battery fire report with reports of all the fossil fuel fires in the same period.

The EV fires look worse from a public perception perspective. I am sure there are plenty more fossil fuel car fires, but seeing a full EV car engulfed in flames multiple times is not a great look. I'm just saying they need to do better if we want people to go more green

Perfectionism is the worst enemy. You pretend to be an ally but then treat any failure as a total disaster.

Okay then. Tell me what you think can be done to increase the adoption of EVs in the United States?

Give fuel fires the same coverage as EV fires. Every gas station catching on fire or exploding. Every car spontaneously catching fire. Every home burned down because a fuel burning vehicle caught fire in the garage.

Just give proportional air time to incidents based on fires per vehicle.

This one BEV got half an hour of air time during the week? Why aren’t there a hundred hours of fuel burning vehicles catching fire?

This one BEV came off the road at high speed, hit a tree and all the occupants died? Why aren’t there an equal number of minutes for the non-BEV fatal single vehicle accidents?

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