In 2012, a fire broke out in the battery storage building at Hawaii’s Kahuku wind farm. First responders arrived and assessed the situation, determining whether they should enter the building to fight the fire. Supervisors warned them that it would be too risky because of the wind farm’s battery components, the structure’s condition, and other factors, so they went into salvage mode to prevent the fire’s spread. It took seven hours to burn out, and continued to smolder even longer. The building, along with the expensive batteries it contained, was a complete writeoff.
This wasn’t just a disaster for Kahukuâ€"and a near miss for the firefighters involved, who might have risked their lives to fight the fire. It was also a symptom of a serious problem in the larger green energy community. Battery fires are dangerous and present unique firefighting risks, and as green energy facilities spread, that means that more and more fire departments will be encountering them, putting personnel in danger. The industry needs to think about how it wants to address the problem before it becomes a stumbling block that slows growth.
The US government and environmental organizations alike are encouraging citizens to purchase green power produced with wind, waves, and sunâ€"and with good reason, given the environmental costs of more traditional means like coal-fired power plants. Within some industries and nations around the world, people are setting green power goals as incentives to help them focus on achieving independence from polluting methods of power production. But there’s a catchâ€"isn’t there alwaysâ€"and it lies in energy storage. Until the green power industry can refine and stabilize storage options, it’s going to lag behind.
Green facilities need storage for two reasons. The first is that they need to mitigate the sometimes unreliable performance of green energy to ensure a steady supply to customers; when a wind farm isn’t getting much wind, or a solar facility is experiencing unreliable weather, they still need to get power to distribution centers. This is critical for investors and distributors, who don’t want to buy power that might prove unreliable. In addition, energy plants don’t want to waste generated energy, and thus need the capacity to store it and disperse it for sale later.
A number of firms, like Xtreme, the company that built the batteries used in Kahuku, are getting into the business of supplying batteries for the growing industry. They need to think about issues like high capacity and the ability to handle energy in the megawatts (storage capacity will need to reach or even exceed the gigawatt level within the next 20 years), as well as basic battery safety, building products that won’t degrade or fail at critical moments. Until battery tech is perfected, energy companies will be reluctant to buy, and fire departments will have reason to worry. They’ll need to invest in special training, chemical tankers for fire management, and moreâ€"all to fight battery fires in their regions and keep their personnel safe.
Green energy represents a key investment in the globe’s future but, as this and other issues reveal, it can come with hidden problems the energy suppliers need to tackle head-on. Accidents are a risk in any industry, and firefighters always take their lives into their hands on the job, but improving safety recordsâ€"Kahuku had multiple battery fires before the devastating 2012 incidentâ€"should be a priority if we are to achieve our green energy goals.
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