it's white smoke, not black dirty smoke.

Oh good, just nice lithium compounds, instead of nasty carbon ones...

Well, given that Lithium is a [1]mood stabilizer , I'm sure the fire crews and those downwind of the fire felt reeeeeeeaaallly good about events and were totally chill about the whole thing...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)

Think of it this way - every time a lithium battery goes to heaven, we elect a new pope!

Came for this, was not disappointed :)

… habemus damnum!

Typically, when smoke from fires turns from dark to white it means firefighters are getting water on the problem. White means steam, not combustion by-products ... This is a good thing, at least from a traditional perspective.

That was then. This is now. Someone should probably bring the North Monterey County Fire Department's newly appointed (last month) Chief Joel Mendoza up to speed on the modern world before he embarrasses his department further. Note I'm not blaming the Chief for this ... he's a firefighter by training and inclination, not a corporate spokesmouth.

Either that, or perhaps the Moss Landing PG&E plant should pay more in taxes again (only $142,000 last year, down from $860,000ish in the early 2000s), which would help fund the fire department to perhaps bring in a trained spokesperson ... North County is down from 30-odd personnel to just 22[0]. The whole district needs an overhaul financially, but the rich bastards it serves keep voting down property taxes, thus cutting fire protection services funding.

[0] Which also cuts the number of firefighters per truck going out on calls ... should be three or four, but these guys are doing what they can with just two.

I thought black smoke followed with white smoke was cause for rejoicing - the Cardinals have elected a new Pope!

Probably best the Vatican doesn't install any Tesla battery packs in the Sistine Chapel.

All those hills and mountains around Monterey Bay would've supported a much less flammable, much less expensive pumped storage facility. The unsubsidized, levelized cost of pumped storage dams is about $128 per megawatt-hour versus $414 per megawatt-hour for lithium-ion batteries.

The reason for the battery is that it can jump in in an instant, less than 20ms when needed if I remember right. No other electric energy storage can act that fast. It bridges the time until the turbines of puped storage facilities are up, which needs a few minutes.

"With all six units synchronised and spinning-in-air (water is dispelled by compressed air and the unit draws a small amount of power to spin the shaft at full speed), 0 MW to 1800 MW load can be achieved in approximately 16 seconds."

Wikipedia article on Dinorwig. The same source gives 75 seconds from start to sync without such preparation.

Yes, some CAN spin up that fast. Still a 16 seconds gap. The tesla battery packs filled [1]quite a few of such gaps during its operation, and proved it does stabilize the grid quite a few times.

However, those "Yahoo, the grid is stable!" success stories don't make headlines.

[1] https://www.energy-storage.news/undeniable-success-south-australias-129mwh-tesla-battery/

Grid stability would be far less of an issue if the grid wasn't required to accommodate unreliable, unpredictable wind turbines.

Na, a park of wind turbines doesn't change it's output THAT fast. Take the wind away and it does make quite a few more turns, more than you expect. Enough for other things to kick in. The battery pack is for other grid problems, like transformers blowing up, cable problems, short circuits and so on which cause very fast changes to the grid.

"Take the wind away and it does make quite a few more turns, more than you expect."

If unloaded, they will spin for a bit, sure. Momentum is momentum. But if you have a load on 'em, not so much.

Funny how it wasn't necessary until widespread adoption of wind.

Wind varies significantly over the course of minutes. The rotation of wind turbines increase and decreases randomly over time, and under load that change is rapidly transmitted to the grid.

Which is why here in Yurp we are putting most of the new wind turbines out at sea, sometimes way out at sea where winds are more reliable. Here in Scotland we have quite a few pumped storage installations now. Some built in from the start such as the Hole in the Mountain at the north end of Loch Awe, some retrofitted.

Whether a hydro station is pumped storage or not does not affect it’s spin up time.

And that is still just marketing number, there is still time for the rest of the processes to come online and synch up. So budget a minute and a half to cover the delays when the starting system fires, spin up time, and the rest of the stuff before it's on the grid and running stable.

Just like backup generators, the space between primary and secondary power is filled with batteries and capacitors.

Yes a battery in between is helpful, but lithium is the wrong chemistry for grid scale batteries. Size and weight are not much of a concern for this use case so pick one of the cheaper less explody batteries

You can use this approach in your electric car too, so long as you only drive downhill.

Seems to me that the whole electric car boondoggle is going downhill anyway ...

Electric cars totally should be acting as these batteries, while they are sitting plugged in.

"All those hills and mountains around Monterey Bay would've supported a much less flammable, much less expensive pumped storage facility."

Yeah, but no. There is not really enough watershed for that. Also, that's all earthquake fractured rock, it won't support large enough reservoirs to make any difference. Also, we're in a drought. There is barely enough water to drink, much less keep the Nation's salad production running.

What the area needs is a nuclear plant ... perhaps they could put it at the existing Moss Landing power plant site, and install a large desalinization plant at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. I'd recommend starting the installation about 40 years ago.

I'd suggest not mass populating much of California in the first place, starting n hundred years ago.

While I tend to agree with you, I'd say the same thing about the island of Great Britain ... do you lot even have enough square inches to feed yourselves anymore?

At least California feeds much of the rest of the nation ...

How much water is required? Could that be impacted by drought conditions?

Well it is California so the only water available for pumped storage would have to come from the ocean. Which would contaminate any ground fresh water in left the area. And then there might be a problem with faster corrosion of the pumped storage equipment.

'cause we heared that story a short while ago. No wait, it is a new story, but it looks sooooo similar.

Time to get better batteries for this scenario: I mean: longer life, not that easy to burn, more reliable, more charge cycles (endless preferred). If it takes up more space: Who cares? It is for stationary storage somewhere in the outback anyway, not for a car.

Tesla are a high spotlight company, who probably take this kind of event extremely seriously. Imagine when the country is running at 80% electric vehicles, the fire depts are going top go crazy....and the pyromaniacs are going to be in heaven when the finally get round to understanding how to force the situation...

When the country is 80% electric vehicles we will be using solid state batteries made from different materials that won't catch fire.

All the promising research you read about and people complain "how come this isn't making it into products" will have made it into products by then. We probably won't hit 80% of vehicles on the road until 2050, what with California being seen as "overly aggressive" for banning sale of new gas powered cars after 2035 (which won't remove the ones bought in 2034 or newer ones brought from other states from the road)

We will start seeing batteries without these issues later this decade, and by 2030 no one will be making utility scale batteries or car batteries using this fire prone technology.

NMC? NCA? LFP?

I've read some news saying Tesla's moving to LFP for their static packs, as they've done for some of the low end cars made in China, which would be a great choice. LFP has lower density but is made from more abundant materials and doesn't tend to be as ready to burst in to flames.

Unsure what's in these packs, seeing as they were probably produced some time ago.

LiFePo4 is fairly bulletproof, as neatly demonstrated by this video where someone shoots bullets into a LiFePo4 cell.

Video was from Sinopoly (a large Chinese battery manufacturer) - I've posted this a few years ago but it's too good not to repeat, and certainly on topic.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQs7L5LmEss

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQs7L5LmEss

They ARE more stable, but the application for static installs on a dedicated site isn't a good fit. Safer and adequate if it was a home install kit in a rich a-holes garage, but mostly getting used as an upgrade for car starting batteries where their weight and size are a plus in the trade-off for charge cycles and power density.

That impact insensitivity is great for something that rolls around, but they will still eat themselves and go china syndrome if they are mischarged or overloaded, and I can attest the fumes are rancid and nasty even when the cells don't flame out.

The world is going to take a few more years getting some of the engineering of these high density plants sorted out. By that point some new battery processes will also be scaling so, the lines of improved design safety and less explodey battery chemistry will cross about 2025 and this should start to work itself out.

From the other poster's notes, it sounds like the facility should be required to have it's own crew to deal with a pod failure, or pay to train and staff up the local fire department.

lfp (lifepo4) batteries aren't much cop as a car starter battery due to their very poor charging and discharging capabilities below freezing. Not sure how Tesla's dealing with that in their cars, but you can get self-heating packs - but that's obviously going to waste energy

For utility size batteries there is one obvious choice apart from lithium-ion - sodium sulfur (SS) batteries.

SS cells operate at high temperature (about 350C) so are not suitable for small systems (due to thermal losses) but for multiple MWh batteries they are the leading contender to lithium-ion batteries. Because SS batteries use the common elements sodium and sulfur they do not have the resource problems of lithium-ion batteries (lithium and cobalt), SS batteries have a solid electrolyte (beta-alumina) which is incombustible unlike the organic liquid electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries.

SS batteries are already in use in a number of utility scale (multiple MWh) locations.

Likely Sodium and Aluminum in the short term. An outfit in Australia has a prototype factory running for the latter, they seem to be on target for initial production of pouch batteries. Another company has some improvements around stuff blowing up with current tech that increases volume/kw by 25% or so but that would not be relevant if you are in a shipping container at a power plant.

Frankly aluminum if they can get it going is like a no brainer and highly recyclable.

Per CNBC, firefighters on the scene allowed the battery to burn out, as is standard practice for lithium-ion fires. Firefighters planned to remain on scene overnight to ensure the system didn't re-ignite.

Ok, so the let it burn itself out because the can't stop it from burning, how do they keep it from re-igniting?

Where's Paris?

Firefighters always remain on-site after a fire is nominally out. Sometimes something is missed, causing a flair-up. Better to have folks at the ready than having to roll out on another emergency call. This is true regardless of the nature of the fire.

Paris exists only in your imagination. Thankfully.

> Paris exists only in your imagination. Thankfully.

I was in Paris just a couple of days ago.

"I was in Paris just a couple of days ago."

You and several hundred thousand other gents.

Sounds unsanitary. At best.

"We'll always have Paris"

Who is "we", Kemosabe?

SOP is typically to spray water on the burning unit to cool things down, preventing the fire from spreading to adjacent cells, adjacent batteries, or other nearby materials. Once the affected battery is out, it's watched for signs of reignition (heating, smoking, outgassing, etc). If possible, submerging the entire battery is ideal.

The crew watching can't do much to actually prevent reignition, it's more about being there to respond quickly to move back to surround and drown mode. They can also monitor the air for the nasty byproducts that a Li-ion fire can produce and can respond as required.

Note regarding water: people who took a chemistry class or two hear the word "lithium" and assume adding water is a bad idea. Lithium ion batteries don't have any metallic lithium present (ok, *ideally* don't have any, but under some ageing modes or failure modes small quantities can be present, but it should be minimal). As a result, there's no kaboom from water reacting with lithium.

Source: not a firefighter, but I have a few Li-ion batteries totalling about 800kWh of capacity hanging around at work, so we've been learning a lot about battery safety lately.

What if in the future rolling blackouts prevent electric fire trucks from going to put out green tech fire?

We are led by fools that still believe in the tooth ferry

What if in the future rolling blackouts prevent electric fire trucks from going to put out green tech fire?

The future is now!

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/09/07/vancouvers-new-virtue-signalling-fire-engine-useless-but-at-least-it-wont-wake-the-neighbours-up/

Well, the new e-truck will cost $300,000 more than a comparable diesel model, pump 40 per cent less water and have such a short range (30 km) because of its enormous weight that it will have to have backup diesel power in case it runs out of juice on the way to a blaze.

Wonder if Canada's also ordering electric snowploughs?

Is one of the firemen called Montag?

They are testing electric plug-in tractors. I was allowed to borrow one for a few weeks. I really like the low end torque and the relative quiet. I really hate that I can't use it non-stop for 72+ hours a couple of times during harvest season. This last is a complete deal-breaker. When crops need to come in, I can't have my tractor sitting on the charger for hours on end.

> non-stop for 72+ hours

Harvesting at night too?

If yes: Quite some dedication!

If no: They only need to last for about 14 hours, don't they? Tough 14h nonstop is not an easy thing, requires quite a pack of battery. Or two tractors, which is very expensive...

Just because the tractor is busy doesn't mean that it has to have the same driver for the whole time.

Modern tractors are expensive. Keeping them busy when you need to makes good economic sense, and seeing tractors and harvesters work by floodlight is quite normal around harvest time.

Around here, typically I'll drive a semi taking harvest to storage for four hours, then drive a tractor for four hours, then 8 hours off. With four drivers rotating, it is fairly easy to keep up the pace for a week or so without getting tired enough to start making mistakes. My operation has more than four drivers available.

Normally, the harvest window for me and my guys (and gals) is no more than five days. Planting similar.

Modern LED lights make working at night just as easy as working during the day. In some places easier.

Yes, we harvest at night[0]. Especially if rain is on the way (rare though that might be around here, we had that very issue just this last weekend). It's not dedication, it's part of the job. The other side, planting, also happens 24/7 until it is done.

A spare battery pack would cost nearly the same as a spare tractor. And in reality, you would probably need four battery packs (+ charging infrastructure) per tractor to maintain a nearly non-stop harvest. Plus the transportable equipment to do the battery swap in the field. Them thangs is heavy, they is. All in all, quite spendy.

Electric power for farm equipment looks good on paper, until you look at real world TCO. Then it's shit.

One exception: In so-called "third world countries", where bleeding-heart yuppies install a free (to the locals) PV system, a free (to the locals) electric tractor that needs no expensive diesel to run can be a godsend. Hopefully that same god will send help when (not if) something breaks ... especially considering that none of the parts will have been manufactured locally, nor be available locally.

[0] Note that it's not just my land I'm working ... I rent my equipment/personnel out to other locals who can't/won't afford their own gear.