Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire District said at this point, most of the fire had gone out. A water-based mitigation system did not work as designed, Vistra's senior director of community affairs Brad Watson said at the conference. Earlier in the day, a Monterey Sheriff official had said there were no active fire suppression efforts going on, "as the best approach, according to fire staff, is to allow the building and batteries to burn."

Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

  • Badabinski@kbin.earth
    21·
    2 days ago

    This is why you don’t use battery chemistries that can thermally run away autoignite in grid storage. The plant was using LG JH4 batteries, which use an NMC chemistry. I don’t think that LiFePO4 cells were as ubiquitous when this plant was first constructed, so the designers opted for something spicy instead.

    This shit is why you use LiFePO4. It can’t thermally run away autoignite, it lasts longer, and the reduced energy density doesn’t really matter for grid storage. Plus, it doesn’t use nickel or cobalt so the only conflict resource is lithium.

    EDIT: LiFePO4 batteries can enter thermal runaway, but they can’t autoignite.

        • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          Read that and was like… fuck me why am I debating the guy when I coulda just asked that. Cheers.

          • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            There’s no IRL data for the specific model I’ve described,

            This is feelings based. Thanks for clarifying.

          • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            14 hours ago

            The document linked doesn’t go into detail for good reason. It’s a bunch of half cooked ideas distilled to make a good read… but misses a lot of key points. Most notably: it hand waves through storage.

            The electrical grid is a lot like a pressure system in a sense: we have a lot of equipment that is designed to work at a very specific pressure. Outside of those ranges things break. The article mentions feeding back into the grid which is fine and well… but fails to mention how that needs to be managed so as to not blow the whole thing up. Also that solar system you have isn’t going to be feeding shit back into the grid without a buffer… which is storage… for the same reason that you likely will struggle to have a solar home without batteries. The sun is variable and your “stuff” needs a very specific range of power. Too much? zap. Too little? brownout. Either way: rip electronics.

            The very things you are suggesting as solutions to power storage literally require it to work.