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Comment by BluSyn | Hacker News Reader

The root cause will be great of great interest; I hope we get to find out publicly. These battery systems are still new, but even so they have many layers of safety systems designed to prevent thermal runaway.

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Well, maybe. But this application isn't safety-critical. Power infrastructure is fenced off, remote, and generally operated without personnel. Certainly you don't want to deploy stuff that's going to spontaneously combust for reliability and economic reasons. But it's not a car.

I hear people talking about replacing peaker plants with batteries. Peaker plants are usually not at all remote, and could pose a threat to nearby buildings.

You don't have to replace the plant in the same location. Battery "peaker" plants can be remote, especially as there's limited need for on-site staff.

I’m not a grid expert so I could be wrong, but don’t they place the peaker plants in urban areas to avoid “congestion” on long distance transmission lines during peak demand?

Peaker plants are burning possibly explosive chemicals. If you can build a peaker plant safely in a certain location, you can put a battery there as well. It'll be safer than a gas or diesel fired peaker plant.

When this battery caught fire they told area residents to stay indoors, close all windows, and turn off their HVAC to avoid breathing the fumes. We don't get told to shelter in place when a diesel vehicle drives by and we cook with natural gas in our homes -- are you sure the safety is the same?

Actually my area had a transformer fire at a residential substation (not a peaker plant, but same infrastructure) about three years ago. And... the instructions were exactly the same! Apparently it smelled bad within a quarter mile, put a ton of soot in the air (apparently from the cooling oil burning), and was on the nightly news. And until this thread I hadn't bothered to remember it. I doubt many do.

Come on. Stuff breaks, things burn. We don't want it to burn. We should take reasonable action to make sure it's engineered not to burn. But if it happens to burn? Meh. Let's not lose our shit about it and start banning critically important technology, OK?

You've never seen a video of a large diesel fire? They put out deep black smoke that would definitely not be safe to breathe.

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