5 ms·

Tesla Megapack Caught Fire at Victorian Big Battery Site in Australia

35 points by watchdogtimer 5y ago

hajile 5y ago
Melting down mountains and creating millions of tons of toxic waste all for the sake of batteries to save the environment was already questionable at best. Burning them into even more tons of toxic fumes is just adding insult to injury. Off that topic, I suspect they aren't putting out the fires because the water and foams required would destroy the nearby battery electronics and set back the project timetables.
- nickik 5y ago
  What nonsense. LiIon batteries have many cycles of reuse and they almost never get thrown away. As volume get larger literally every large players wants to recycle as that will actually be cheaper at large volume then traditional mining. As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups. And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.
  - hajile 5y ago
    You suffer under the illusion that recycling means no toxic waste and no energy cost. Every few thousand cycles, they must be broken down and remade at the cost of thousands more tons of toxins. Those toxins and precursors must also be mined by melting down mountains. That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. It just continues to build with each battery cycle. Nuclear energy storage is much better. Nuclear waste is tiny by comparison. All the long term nuclear waste ever produced would fit in the footprint of the toxic waste of any one of those battery factories in a single year. But they even bigger difference is that we will reuse that waste when new nuclear deposits become scarce. Likewise, if done correctly, gravity and hydro offer much higher output per unit of energy stored while having minimal waste. Even in the absolute best case, batteries slow the destruction of the planet rather than solve the problem.
    - nickik 5y ago
      First of all, I don't suffer under a nirvana fallacy. Of course recycling uses energy. Second, I'm a huge fan of nuclear power so you don't have to convince me of that. Even if you have nuclear power, you still need EV and lots of batteries, so that is not a solution. Hydro is limited in location and not a scalable solution. Gravity highly depends on what you are talking about, and most of the proposed solution are not capital efficient. These however also solve partly a different problem then these batteries solve, in terms of respond speed, frequency regulation and efficiency. Recycling is of course not perfectly efficient, but current generation batteries have 20 year lifetime and with reuse maybe even 30 years. Some of the next generation can push that even further, wont be recycled for 40 years. Maybe they are recycled more often, but maybe simply because the materials inside are more valuable then the battery of that technology level. So yes, of course it uses some resources and something has to be mined, but that is true for almost anything. In terms of grid storage, batteries are some of the better solution. Current Nickel based LiIon will be replaced by LFP and pure LiIon will never solve the complete grid battery challenge. Maybe with Sodium batteries. There are also Liquid Metal batteries, or things like Iron-Air batteries. These solutions are scalable in combination. All that said, I would much prefer to have a bunch of thorium thermal breeders. > That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. Can you please show exactly what you mean here? Like what exactly this sludge is=
villgax 5y ago
Are we tracking every other pump/refinery/ICE vehicle burning up as well?
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  It’s not a vehicle.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  Well, I see a lot of that stuff in the media, yes. This is new technology, so of course we're watching it closely. Have you never seen coverage of a pipeline rupture, or an oil train derailment? I certainly have... it's generally a pretty big deal.
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    Almost oil and gas spills and fires get effectively no attention, despite their being a very significant number of them. Typically only the largest disasters get any sort of coverage, unlike battery technology.
  - villgax 5y ago
    Yeah, coz those are huge. This is just one unit not the entire facility as the title implies.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Any fire that prompts a toxic smoke warning in an urban area in a developed country is going to get a fair bit of coverage, yes.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I've noticed something about news media, and it may just be confirmation bias, but journalists really like to associate Tesla with fires. Electrical fires aren't rare, especially when there is a lot of energy involved. Heck, the pass-through or whatever in my office building from the solar panels caught fire and it was dealt with without a news article about it.
- lnanek2 5y ago
  I consider journalist sensationalist as well, but in this case: 1) Tesla is a stock market darling, so a lot of people have a lot of money riding on it. Some of those people may make different decisions with extra information they didn't have previously like the commonness of electrical fires. So we're not always talking about industry experts here. Could just be Joe Smoe software developer who plowed his equity grant into the stonk after vesting. 2) Tesla does market big battery packs to go in the home as well, which means this is a safety issue for people considering that. It's not like they are replacing existing battery packs and know the details. They are replacing either nothing or a diesel generator from Home Depot, so they may not be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages. Tesla doesn't have a good reason to be more forthcoming than is legally required either, leaving it to journalists. So yeah, journalists just want eyeballs to sell ads to, but Tesla just wants to sell electric stuff. The latter has less reason to be truthful about the dangers.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    But is there a safety issue here? What are the numbers? As a society, we wisely look at incidents and determine how isolated they are. A lot of the same people who get furious about people being afraid of the recent vaccines because of anecdotal reports jump onto these stories and immediately make statements like this. In both cases, the anecdotes should be treated like what they are, not lent credence without further information. I could just as easily say that Pfizer has less incentive to be truthful about the dangers of their products. But here's the thing: Neither Tesla or Pfizer wants to get sued or have their brand destroyed. That's a hell of an incentive to not sell dangerous products.
  - 5y ago
bamboozled 5y ago
So, is the whole thing destroyed, part of it? Pretty bad journalism there.
goodcanadian 5y ago
Perhaps, a better source (or at least, one with more information): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-mo...
trixie_ 5y ago
“ The fire happened during testing.” - you think that’d be in the title, or the main bullet points, not hidden in the article. How is any journalism taken seriously anymore? There is always an angle.
- s9w 5y ago
  They aren't. They're professional liers and the enemy of the people.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  The journalists don't come up with the titles, the editors do. Do you take an issue with the actual, factual reporting in the article? Or even with the factual accuracy of the title? All of your complaints on this thread come across as you desperately trying to defend Tesla for something that...actually happened. Yes, it happened "during testing." But it still happened.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    Huge difference between a random fire and a fire during testing. As proven by most of the comments in this thread, people think it was a random fire. That’s how editors and journalists control public opinion.
    - gamblor956 5y ago
      This isn't much better than a random fire, in fact, it's arguably worse. An industrial lithium battery has absolutely no business catching on fire within 24 hours of being put into use. That's simply unacceptable: it means that the significant errors were made in either the manufacturing, assembly, or installation phases. That would be news even if this wasn't a Tesla installation, especially given that the fire was so large a toxic smoke alert had to be issued for the area. There was no bias in the reporting. There was a fire, during testing. And that's what the articles actually reported. It's possible that the fire wasn't related to manufacturing/assembly issues on Tesla's end (i.e., that it was related to installation), but as the fire just happened that information won't be known for a few days. The only bias here is your own. Tesla makes mistakes. Accept it, and move on.

35 points by watchdogtimer 5y ago

Melting down mountains and creating millions of tons of toxic waste all for the sake of batteries to save the environment was already questionable at best. Burning them into even more tons of toxic fumes is just adding insult to injury. Off that topic, I suspect they aren't putting out the fires because the water and foams required would destroy the nearby battery electronics and set back the project timetables.

nickik 5y ago
What nonsense. LiIon batteries have many cycles of reuse and they almost never get thrown away. As volume get larger literally every large players wants to recycle as that will actually be cheaper at large volume then traditional mining. As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups. And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.
- hajile 5y ago
  You suffer under the illusion that recycling means no toxic waste and no energy cost. Every few thousand cycles, they must be broken down and remade at the cost of thousands more tons of toxins. Those toxins and precursors must also be mined by melting down mountains. That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. It just continues to build with each battery cycle. Nuclear energy storage is much better. Nuclear waste is tiny by comparison. All the long term nuclear waste ever produced would fit in the footprint of the toxic waste of any one of those battery factories in a single year. But they even bigger difference is that we will reuse that waste when new nuclear deposits become scarce. Likewise, if done correctly, gravity and hydro offer much higher output per unit of energy stored while having minimal waste. Even in the absolute best case, batteries slow the destruction of the planet rather than solve the problem.
  - nickik 5y ago
    First of all, I don't suffer under a nirvana fallacy. Of course recycling uses energy. Second, I'm a huge fan of nuclear power so you don't have to convince me of that. Even if you have nuclear power, you still need EV and lots of batteries, so that is not a solution. Hydro is limited in location and not a scalable solution. Gravity highly depends on what you are talking about, and most of the proposed solution are not capital efficient. These however also solve partly a different problem then these batteries solve, in terms of respond speed, frequency regulation and efficiency. Recycling is of course not perfectly efficient, but current generation batteries have 20 year lifetime and with reuse maybe even 30 years. Some of the next generation can push that even further, wont be recycled for 40 years. Maybe they are recycled more often, but maybe simply because the materials inside are more valuable then the battery of that technology level. So yes, of course it uses some resources and something has to be mined, but that is true for almost anything. In terms of grid storage, batteries are some of the better solution. Current Nickel based LiIon will be replaced by LFP and pure LiIon will never solve the complete grid battery challenge. Maybe with Sodium batteries. There are also Liquid Metal batteries, or things like Iron-Air batteries. These solutions are scalable in combination. All that said, I would much prefer to have a bunch of thorium thermal breeders. > That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. Can you please show exactly what you mean here? Like what exactly this sludge is=

villgax 5y ago

Are we tracking every other pump/refinery/ICE vehicle burning up as well?

camjohnson26 5y ago
It’s not a vehicle.
olyjohn 5y ago
Well, I see a lot of that stuff in the media, yes. This is new technology, so of course we're watching it closely. Have you never seen coverage of a pipeline rupture, or an oil train derailment? I certainly have... it's generally a pretty big deal.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  Almost oil and gas spills and fires get effectively no attention, despite their being a very significant number of them. Typically only the largest disasters get any sort of coverage, unlike battery technology.
- villgax 5y ago
  Yeah, coz those are huge. This is just one unit not the entire facility as the title implies.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 5y ago
Any fire that prompts a toxic smoke warning in an urban area in a developed country is going to get a fair bit of coverage, yes.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I've noticed something about news media, and it may just be confirmation bias, but journalists really like to associate Tesla with fires. Electrical fires aren't rare, especially when there is a lot of energy involved. Heck, the pass-through or whatever in my office building from the solar panels caught fire and it was dealt with without a news article about it.

lnanek2 5y ago
I consider journalist sensationalist as well, but in this case: 1) Tesla is a stock market darling, so a lot of people have a lot of money riding on it. Some of those people may make different decisions with extra information they didn't have previously like the commonness of electrical fires. So we're not always talking about industry experts here. Could just be Joe Smoe software developer who plowed his equity grant into the stonk after vesting. 2) Tesla does market big battery packs to go in the home as well, which means this is a safety issue for people considering that. It's not like they are replacing existing battery packs and know the details. They are replacing either nothing or a diesel generator from Home Depot, so they may not be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages. Tesla doesn't have a good reason to be more forthcoming than is legally required either, leaving it to journalists. So yeah, journalists just want eyeballs to sell ads to, but Tesla just wants to sell electric stuff. The latter has less reason to be truthful about the dangers.
- JPKab 5y ago
  But is there a safety issue here? What are the numbers? As a society, we wisely look at incidents and determine how isolated they are. A lot of the same people who get furious about people being afraid of the recent vaccines because of anecdotal reports jump onto these stories and immediately make statements like this. In both cases, the anecdotes should be treated like what they are, not lent credence without further information. I could just as easily say that Pfizer has less incentive to be truthful about the dangers of their products. But here's the thing: Neither Tesla or Pfizer wants to get sued or have their brand destroyed. That's a hell of an incentive to not sell dangerous products.
- 5y ago

bamboozled 5y ago

So, is the whole thing destroyed, part of it? Pretty bad journalism there.

goodcanadian 5y ago

Perhaps, a better source (or at least, one with more information): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-moorabool-geelong/100337488 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/tesla-battery-fire-mo...

trixie_ 5y ago

“ The fire happened during testing.” - you think that’d be in the title, or the main bullet points, not hidden in the article. How is any journalism taken seriously anymore? There is always an angle.

s9w 5y ago
They aren't. They're professional liers and the enemy of the people.
gamblor956 5y ago
The journalists don't come up with the titles, the editors do. Do you take an issue with the actual, factual reporting in the article? Or even with the factual accuracy of the title? All of your complaints on this thread come across as you desperately trying to defend Tesla for something that...actually happened. Yes, it happened "during testing." But it still happened.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  Huge difference between a random fire and a fire during testing. As proven by most of the comments in this thread, people think it was a random fire. That’s how editors and journalists control public opinion.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    This isn't much better than a random fire, in fact, it's arguably worse. An industrial lithium battery has absolutely no business catching on fire within 24 hours of being put into use. That's simply unacceptable: it means that the significant errors were made in either the manufacturing, assembly, or installation phases. That would be news even if this wasn't a Tesla installation, especially given that the fire was so large a toxic smoke alert had to be issued for the area. There was no bias in the reporting. There was a fire, during testing. And that's what the articles actually reported. It's possible that the fire wasn't related to manufacturing/assembly issues on Tesla's end (i.e., that it was related to installation), but as the fire just happened that information won't be known for a few days. The only bias here is your own. Tesla makes mistakes. Accept it, and move on.