After Moss Landing Power Plant reignites, officials brace for more flare-ups
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
(The rules are that you can't paddle within 60 feet of an otter, and if one comes closer than that you need to stay still until they leave. The otters will quite happily pop up from nowhere right next to your boat.)
I'm deeply worried about the impact of the fires on the wildlife there.
My favorite restaurant in Moss Landing is currently closed: https://www.hauteenchilada.com/
"It is with profound sadness that we announce the immediate closure of The Haute Enchilada Café & Gallery. The fire incidents and thermal runaway caused by an explosion at the nearby Moss Landing battery storage facility on January 16 and February 18 of this year have introduced safety and environmental concerns that are insurmountable for us as the fires continue to burn."
Hopefully the business makes it through this crisis.
As long as Phil's Fish Market is still there.
And no I'm not trolling, this sort of whitewashing out the ugly parts have contributed a lot of damage and waste from things like "recyclable plastic" which weren't actually recyclable, but everyone felt good it in a green bin next to grease soaked pizza boxes that weren't recyclable either.
I see stuff like this often and it always leaves me wondering. Does equipment for coal power generation fall from the sky?
Raw materials need to be extracted for coal power plants too, right?
Hydrogen fluoride? That's incredibly toxic stuff. Surprised it's allowed to build something this hazardous, in California of all places.
Why would they choose a fluorine battery chemistry for a power plant when there are many alternatives?
Edit to add: > The electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery is flammable and generally contains lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6) or other Li-salts containing fluorine.
Other than burning lithium ion battery plants, the other major source is burning coal.
I feel like it's at least mildly weird to actually _colocate_ these. Like, it makes sense that they would be _close_, but probably not right beside each other.
If demand is low, charge batteries. If demand is high, drain batteries. If demand is higher than batteries can sustain, run gas. If there's a subsidy for putting battery electric power on the grid, when batteries are low and demand is also low, run gas to charge batteries locally and then supply that to the grid later to get the subsidy.
Only the last part requires colocation, but it's probably easier to get one power plant parcel zoned and one power plant hooked up to the grid, and having both energy storage and a gas peaker together might bring it up the connection prioritization list because it addresses multiple problems for grid operation.
The grid is built to have a peaker plant there, and it’s operated by a company that bids for generation at this location and has experience in it.
I think it more than makes sense.
Given the length of the interconnect queue these days, I'm assuming a lot of industrial/large power draw systems will start to just colocate with enough pv+wind+storage to have a local grid with a very small if any connection to the exterior grid.
Obviously it's a cost, but it's one less action item on the set up process and one less possible area for delay, there will be cases where the cost pencils out.
I assume that the battery plant hadn't restarted operation after the first fire yet since I can't imagine that repairs had completed.
We need a different battery chemistry.
Your typical lithium 18650 - vape cell, old laptop cell, whatever you know it as (18mm diameter, 65mm length, cylindrical), has a high end capacity of around 3500mAh - so 3.5Ah (amp-hours - so will take an hour to drain at 3.5 amps, 3.5 hours to drain at 1 amp, handwave goes here). At 3.7V nominal, that's around 13 Wh (watt-hours, a measure of energy capacity).
As a first order handwave, when a cell runs away and burns off all the materials in it (electrolyte, plastic separators, etc), you'll get about twice the energy out of the cell as the electrical capacity - so, ballpark, 25Wh for a fully charged 18650 running away. Except, it doesn't run away in an hour. It runs away in about 30 seconds, so doing the math on that, you end up with about 3000 watts for those 30 seconds. That, meanwhile, can heat nearby cells up enough to cause them to enter thermal runaway, and the whole pack will just go, until cooled sufficiently.
"Dumping a lot of water on the pack" will, generally, cool it down enough to stop this. Assuming you can get the water where it needs to be, and in something like a shipping container battery, that's far from given.
At this point, you've got a damaged battery, in unknown condition, with none of the existing current paths able to be relied on, and probably new current paths that may or may not exist yet (water, metal, corrosion, and those paths are often high resistance and slow to form, which creates a lot of heat). It's not really safe to disassemble it or work on it until things have been discharged, because if the pack has energy left in it, it's prone to do exactly what this article talks about - reignite, later, inconveniently.
As far as disassembling it, would you go work in a few megawatt-hours of energy, in unknown configuration, with the state of the safety systems unknown, in a charred environment of unknown toxins (what you get out of a runaway is far from predictable, beyond "generally unfriendly to humans")?
It sounds silly, but if the pack is confined and the fire isn't going to spread to other packs nearby (which is why they tend to be quite spread out), the safest thing to do really is to let it burn to completion. At that point, if it's actually burned out, there's no energy left in the cells to do anything terribly nasty, and you've burned off most of the electrolyte and such.
Anyway, the right answer is lithium iron phosphate for grid scale energy storage, but even those can catch fire if water gets in the wrong places, and they will, with enough prodding, burn.
I'm sure it existing in combination with other elements changes its bioavailability (as opposed its practically non-existent elemental form), but for better or worse?
Lithium Carbonate is very soluble, so once it reach a mucous membrane it will dissolve, split in two Li+ and one CO3= and nobody will remember they were together.
So in both cases you get intermediately Li+ so I expect no differences in the bioavailability. (IANAMD. Don't try this at home)
But there is an important difference:
Lithium Oxide one is too alkaline and so I guess that inhaling it is like inhaling quicklime power and you may get a huge irritation. If there are firefighter, rain or other sources of water you will get Lithium Hidroxide that is like hydrated lime that is not as bad.
Lithium Carbonate is only slightly alkaline (like anti acid pills) so I guess that inhaling it is like inhaling limestone power that is not a good idea but is no terrible.
But the basic answer is that lithium is fairly ubiquitous in the environment and it has biological effects only at fairly substantial doses. I think the usual therapeutic dose is above one gram of lithium carbonate per day.
The most likely product here is lithium hydroxide, which is caustic. The smoke also contains more dangerous substances such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide from burning plastic. So, I'd wager you'd be dead or seriously injured long before you feel any cognitive effects.
Lithium also doesn't bioaccumulate, so any small amount that gets in your body will be cleared fairly quickly - probably within a day or two.
In essence, I'd stay clear of the smoke, but not because of the mood-related effects.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's a reasonable question.
No to the high-karma stupid, especially because their stupidity is growing more glaringly obvious by the day, and that makes them angry instead of leading them to reevalute their ignorance.
"Same as it ever was." --Talking Heads
Burning produces nontrivial amounts of hydrogen fluoride and clouds of hydrofluoric acid. In the short term, these are horrifically toxic (reactive). They'll bond with just about anything, including etching glass. The impact on living tissue is nightmarish and unlike some other strong acids, protracted because it absorbs rapidly through skin and starts substituting things in your biochemistry.
There are also a variety of other excitingly unstable fluorinated compounds floating around.
I have a suspicion that at some point we're going to stop talking about "Hey it's a fire that won't go out, we have to use too much water, our tanker trucks aren't equipped for this" and start talking about "Hey it's a fire that boils off what is very nearly a chemical weapon. Evacuate a mile downwind and let it burn". And then we're going to ban the more fire-prone chemistries in stationary and vehicular applications. What event is going to trigger that? I think the most likely thing is a mass casualty event in a deep tunnel traffic jam where the pileup ends up igniting.
Obligatory reading: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-tou...
And on this specific threat: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z