The safety regulator for Victoria, Australia, has no objections to commissioning of the Victorian Big Battery 300MW / 450MWh project resuming, after investigating a fire at the site and agreeing with steps taken to prevent it happening again.
A product recall has been announced for around 10,000 units of residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) by manufacturer LG Energy Solution Michigan in the US, due to potential fire risks.
Approval has been granted for a 150MWh battery storage retrofit at a Queensland solar farm under development by Elliott Green Power Australia (EGP), a solar investment fund group currently seeking to sell off its assets and exit the industry.
Testing and accreditation group DNV is going to build a Battery Safety Laboratory at Twente Safety Campus, a specialised complex in the east Netherlands dedicated to developing safety innovations and procedures.
Update 23 June 2021: LG Energy Solution has said that it was the supplier of battery storage rack equipment to Vistra Energy’s recently commissioned record-breaking project in Monterey County, California.
New technology which can help prevent flammable gas build-up in lithium-ion battery storage systems is being made available for “low-cost, non-exclusive licensing” by the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
Safely managing the use of lithium-ion batteries in energy storage systems (ESS) should be priority number one for the industry. In this exclusive Guest Blog, Johnson Controls’ industry relations fellow Alan Elder, with over four decades of experience in the field of gaseous fire suppression systems and Derek Sandahl, product manager for the company’s engineered fire suppression products, talk about the best ways to achieve prevention of fire incidents stemming from thermal runaway in lithium cells.
The challenges of explosion prevention – with flammable gases needing to be vented “very rapidly” – in the event of a battery fire have been highlighted at this week’s Energy Storage Summit USA.
The energy storage industry should be well prepared to deal with failure in lithium-ion battery systems so that thermal runaway in a single battery cell never becomes a fire or explosion.
