Bouldercombe battery back on line just 48 hours after fire destroyed Tesla Megapack

The Bouldercombe big battery near Rockhampton in Queensland has come back on line, just 48 hours after shutting down when a fire erupted in one of its Tesla Megapack battery modules.

The fire on Tuesday night took the battery facility offline after it erupted in the early evening, but the damage was contained to a single module, and the fire is now out, according to project owner Genex Power.

Data from PocketNem shows that the Bouldercombe battery – rated at 50MW and two hours of storage (100MWh) operated at low levels on Thursday evening, charging at rates of just over 5MW in the early evening, and discharging smaller amounts back into the grid.

The battery had been operating at or near full capacity in the days leading up to the fire as it worked through the final phases of its commissioning process, which owner Genex Power had expected to complete by late October.

CEO Craig Francis told RenewEconomy on Friday that auxiliary power had returned to the site, and a controlled charge was performed on Thursday night into the Tesla Megapack modules. There are, or were, a total of 40 Megapack modules on site before the fire.

Francis said the re-energisation showed that the facility had the confidence of the Australian Energy Market Operator, and the transmission company Powerlink, although full operations will not resume until a root cause analysis is complete.

A fire in a Tesla Megapack during the commissioning process of the Victoria Big Battery near Geelong in 2021 was ultimately blamed on a liquid coolant leak. In that incident, two Megapack modules were destroyed, but it did not significantly delay the project commissioning.

The cause of the Bouldercombe battery fire is not yet known, including whether a fault occurred within the battery module or on the other side of the inverter.

The quick return to service at both the Bouldercombe and the Victoria Big Battery projects contrasts with the catastrophic nature of events such as the explosion at the Callide coal plant two years ago. That facility remains off-line, and with a growing repair cost in the hundred of millions of dollar.

See also: Two new big batteries in South Australia sign connection deals, including first for Zen Energy