After fires were started at a reported 23 battery energy storage installations in South Korea during 2018, the government and a national standards committee have discovered the causes but have so far declined to engage with the international press on the matter.
Energy-Storage.news has been tracking progress since rumours and then more solid reports began flying around over the past few months that during 2018, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems, deployed rapidly over the past few years, have been catching fire.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and the national Standards Committee were reported by local news outlets to have held a press briefing a week ago, revealing that in nearly every case the issue appears to have been poor management of batteries, rather than anything inherently unsafe in the batteries themselves. At one stage at the beginning of the year, a source passed on to Energy-Storage.news a note issued by manufacturer LG Chem to customers which requested customers to stop operating their systems until “a decision is made to restart the operation”, with other manufacturers similarly affected.
The ministry has issued a release in Korean, while Energy-Storage.news has requested further information from both the ministry and standards committee but is yet to receive a reply several days later. Similarly, when requested for comment back in May, the US office of battery maker LG Chem refused to handle the matter, deferring back to corporate HQ in Korea but claiming to be unable to contact or obtain comment from there. Direct requests to that HQ have yet to be acknowledged. Both Samsung SDI and LG Chem, among the country’s biggest players have taken a big financial hit based on one-off costs of dealing with the safety issue.
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