The energy storage industry didn’t wait for the outcome of Arizona Public Service’s year-long investigation into the battery fire that injured four firefighters in April 2019 to start improving the safety of grid batteries.
The McMicken fire set off a series of shadow investigations, as battery suppliers, developers and customers pieced together evidence to identify the risks posed by their own systems. New looks at potential failures prompted product redesigns, along with hardware and software updates to existing systems.
“Because of our own research into the causes of the APS event, we were aware of what the report was basically going to say,” said Danny Lu, senior vice president at storage integrator Powin Energy, in an email. “We had immediately started working on solutions to those problems about a year ago.”
By the time the APS battery report came out last month, leading energy storage providers, including Fluence, which supplied the McMicken energy storage system, had already adopted key safety improvements. They engineered systems to detect and remove dangerous gases so they cannot build up and explode. They also addressed the layout of battery cells so that if one heats up, the problem does not spread.
A high-profile failure like the McMicken fire might be expected to hold back construction of more grid batteries. Numerous startups hawk alternative storage technologies on the basis of being safer than lithium-ion.
But the U.S. energy storage market did not stop expanding as a result of safety concerns. Instead, the industry has experienced meteoric growth, with record procurements announced almost weekly this summer. An unprecedented number of utilities and power producers are investing in batteries as a pillar of a cleaner electric grid.
The recent changes to top-tier battery offerings have reduced the odds of a repeat of the destructive event at the APS facility, which came online in 2017. APS now applies stricter criteria to the batteries it buys, and other utilities may follow suit.
“Overall fire safety is without a doubt a key priority, and we are satisfied by the progress around standardization of safety features,” said Benoit Allehaut, managing director for clean energy infrastructure at Swiss asset manager Capital Dynamics, which is currently constructing 1.9 gigawatt-hours of storage.
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