Fear of big battery fires - is it justified?

When EnergyAustralia held the sod-turning event for its four-hour Wooreen big battery in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in February, a team from the Country Fire Authority was in attendance.

“Fire safety is one of the key considerations for communities when a renewable energy facility is proposed,” Victoria’s CFA said in a media release on the subject in December.

In the case of lithium-ion batteries, the most likely emergency situation is “thermal runaway” – an uncontrollable build-up of heat and pressure that can result an intense and potentially explosive self-sustaining fire.

But in big batteries, this sort of incident is rare. And yet, community opposition to big batteries is developing a sort of thermal runaway of its own – self-sustaining and increasingly difficult to extinguish.

Wärtsilä - the Finnish technology company supplying the battery energy storage system (BESS) for the Wooreen project - is keen to highlight the importance of battery safety.

"We're not here to just dump our technology and leave. We have a long-term service agreement with many of our projects. So we're in this project together, alongside the operator."

Mishaal SyedNaveed, senior fire protection engineer at Wärtsilä

In the event of a fire though Wärtsilä recommend a 'let it burn' approach - not directly using water to suppress a battery fire, but instead using water to cool adjacent enclosures.

But what about claims that battery fires spew "toxic chemicals and smoke"?

“Yes, batteries have electrolytes [that fuel the fire], but primarily inside [big battery] enclosures are plastics – and what is actually burning… is the plastics. “But compared to your house; you have polyurethane everywhere, which is glorified plastics. Everything from your sofa or your tables, almost everything has plastic-derived material in it."

Mishaal SyedNaveed, senior fire protection engineer at Wärtsilä

Get the free daily newsletter