California SDG&E battery fire was ‘well managed,’ caused minimal impact

Meanwhile, a representative of the technology provider that supplied services to the affected system said the event had as good an outcome as could be expected. The local fire department and project owner were well prepared to handle it, with no lives put at risk, said John Zahurancik, Americas president at system integrator Fluence.

The fire happened earlier this month, beginning at around noon on 5 September, at a BESS facility owned by investor-owned utility (IOU) San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) in Escondido, California, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

It was limited to one containerised BESS unit out of 24 at the 30MW/120MWh site and burned out in around 13 hours at SDG&E’s Northeast Yard. Air quality remained safe, although some people in the local area were ordered to evacuate while the situation remained active.  

“The fire was, by all accounts, well managed by Escondido Fire and SDG&E and their personnel. The evacuation order was lifted relatively quickly after it was issued,” and in accordance with industry best practice, ESRG’s Nick Warner said, as the fire department let the affected unit burn out while monitoring it very closely, rather than trying to fight the flames.  

“Generally, people did not come out [of the incident] with a concern of a major environmental impact,” which Warner said was indicative that the industry is getting better at monitoring environmental impacts, but also that it is getting “better at leveraging findings from previous incidents”.

Yesterday (19 September), the City of Escondido published a report and findings from monitored air quality, first from the San Diego County Hazmat team and then SDG&E’s third-party contractor, Haley & Aldrich Inc. The Hazmat found that “only normal products combustion of a structure fire were detected,” and below exposure thresholds, while Haley & Aldrich Inc. found oxygen levels did not deviate from normal atmospheric levels.

The system deployed at Escondido uses AES Advancion 4 BESS units. AES’ energy storage operations were rolled into Fluence, AES Corporation’s joint venture (JV) with Siemens, which launched in early 2018, a few months after the project’s inauguration. Now one of the biggest BESS integrators worldwide, Fluence remains responsible for servicing the project for SDG&E.

In an interview last week at the RE+ clean energy trade show in Anaheim, about 80 miles from the project site, John Zahurancik said media and the public should “stay tuned” for further information about the system from SDG&E, as detailed investigations and analysis are now underway with the utility leading those efforts.

While declining to comment in detail, he did say that the Escondido Fire Department, SDG&E, and Fluence’s teams “all worked very well together”.

“You don’t want to have any events like this, and I think we’ve worked very hard to make sure that we don’t have any kinds of events with these [systems],” Zahurancik said.

“But then the next thing is, if you’re going to have an event, you want it to fail safely and be able to be managed with no lives at risk, with nobody injured. I think that all happened well.”

‘Responsibility to educate’

What’s important going forward, according to both ESRG’s Warner and Fluence’s Zahuaranick, is not only to include the best preventative fire safety features into the technology itself but also to educate stakeholders, including fire departments and local authorities having jurisdiction (AHJs), on what to do.

Escondido was a great example of that, said Warner. Fire departments need to be “properly trained in handling these things appropriately going forward, and also making appropriate decisions as to what the risk to the public actually is during one of these [fires],” he said.

“Despite the efforts of the industry to train folks across the country, we can’t train everyone, everywhere, immediately, and even when we can, there’s a lot of challenges that come just with the nature of the fire service, making sure that those trained people are the ones responding.”

Zahurancik said Fluence’s strategy to enhance fire safety includes sharing information about events that have occurred and learning lessons from them.

While that means incorporating new safety features into product design and potentially remediating existing facilities, it also means going out and educating stakeholders, he said.

“I think this is a good case where SDG&E was very well prepared. People knew what they were supposed to do. Things were taken care of relatively quickly. That’s generally what we need to shoot for, for the future,” Zahurancik said.

Earlier this year Fluence held an event in Phoenix, Arizona, gathering together first responders and representatives of utilities and hosting a day of discussion on best practices and safety for batteries. Zahurancik said the company intends to replicate this approach in other places where its projects are being deployed.

“Anybody in this industry doing anything with batteries has a responsibility to educate themselves and then educate the people around them.”

“We are constantly looking for ways to either eliminate any sources of potential problems, create safeguards, or shut the system down quickly; things that contain any kind of issue. Those are all steps that you can keep doing, and every time you take another step in the industry, we try to incorporate the learning of what’s going on,” Zahurancik said.