The fire at one of the several #GridScaleStorage #battery #VirtualPowerPlant s is still burning in #MossLanding #California . And everyone is still evacuated. It's been about a day now.
Here's some info on the fire: https://www.montereycountynow.com/blogs/news_blog/how-to-stay-safe-in-a-fire-emergency-it-all-comes-down-to-preparation/article_b9c37c5a-d52b-11ef-8863-4387b46d1b97.html
There are some decent photos here: https://www.montereycountynow.com/blogs/news_blog/how-to-stay-safe-in-a-fire-emergency-it-all-comes-down-to-preparation/article_b9c37c5a-d52b-11ef-8863-4387b46d1b97.html
It's looking like the facility is going to be offline for a long time. This will probably end up as a case study in my classes in the future.
I wonder how much better or worse this fire is versus living down wind from a coal power plant. Spoiler alert: the fallout from coal plants is pretty horrific.
@douglasvb Not again!!
@ai6yr this is like the... Third time?
There are several different battery facilities from different companies there and at least one is experimental.
@douglasvb Ok wtf is happening to CA
@LisaKalayji just another day in paradise
@douglasvb biggest lithium battery storage in the world
@douglasvb it's probably way worse in the short term. Batteries are pretty toxic.
@douglasvb long term coal plants burning for decades
@douglasvb I just hit the Like button for the fact that it may become a case study. Vistra wants to re-activate a plant in Morro Bay like Moss Landing, but that looks less likely now.
I'm disappointed that battery tech is unreliable since there's almost no generation on the central coast any more. I remember when there would be oil spills in Moss Landing harbor and the fishermen would get mad, but at least it wasn't acid rain from coal.
(edit: typo)
@cshishido we were in Morro Bay recently and read about the attempts to put a bunch of batteries there. It seems like it might be better to put offshore wind or wave energy there instead. It's bad enough how the town is split in half by the old power plant.
They'll get the kinks worked out on how to be safe eventually. But it seems this company has an especially bad track record.
@douglasvb Combining old Morro Bay and Diablo Canyon, there's a good base for transmission lines too.
OK I'm still not clear what's happened here
"The fire at the Vistra lithium ion battery storage facility began... "
"the lithium ion battery plant owned..."
So does this place manufacture Li-ion batteries, store batteries manufactured elsewhere, or store electrical power in finished batteries
Not sure what difference there really is between the three, but haven't seen what the facility *is* clearly called out
cc @ai6yr
@FinchHaven @ai6yr I've only ever seen it referred to in the past as a battery energy storage site and not a manufacturing plant.
@FinchHaven @douglasvb Energy storage facility.
huh...
So they actual store electricity in Li-ion batteries
Wow...
Kinda thought that might be the case but I wasn't at all sure
Thnx!
cc @douglasvb
@douglasvb @ai6yr one of the things I really wish would embed in the public consciousness is that not all grid-scale storage has to be electrochemical; batteries are not the only option. Gravity energy storage is my personal favorite, but compressed air and hydro are great options too. The simpler, the better: fewer things that can go wrong, fewer disastrous failure modes.
@darkuncle @douglasvb @ai6yr agreed. also those things are in widespread use already, and perhaps we just need, like, more of them. new things excite people more, but we really need to get past that and learn to appreciate the things we have. as a society.
@ireneista @douglasvb @ai6yr yet another area where people dramatically underestimate the importance of simplicity as an overriding design principle.
@darkuncle @ireneista @ai6yr just think about how many hundreds of thousands or more houses have battery packs on them.
@douglasvb @darkuncle @ireneista These Lithium battery fires are one reason my house has no batteries (only solar). Also since Tesla is the major provider of house batteries
@ai6yr @douglasvb @darkuncle @ireneista If I had a house battery, I think I might want it in a separate shed. Or even underground! Why not underground?
@msbellows @ai6yr @douglasvb @darkuncle well, not underground because battery maintenance is the biggest hassle with these things, according to friends of ours who've bought properties that came with oldschool solar setups
but definitely somewhere away from the main home. it's a shame putting a halon system in a shed would be more dangerous than the fire ><
@msbellows @ai6yr @douglasvb @darkuncle suffocation risk. sheds are too easy to access and people who don't know what it is are likely to go in there. also, the systems are designed to completely replace all the air in very large spaces, very quickly, and it would be a surprise to find one small enough to JUST do the shed, and also sheds are not designed to be airtight so the danger might extend beyond it
@msbellows @ai6yr @douglasvb @darkuncle one of those engineering tradeoffs, heh
@ireneista @msbellows @ai6yr @douglasvb rule 3: *everything* is a tradeoff.
@ireneista @darkuncle @msbellows @ai6yr I think those are old lead acid batteries that would vent hydrogen.
@douglasvb lithium iron phosphate - you can find them really cheap (electrician I know can get them in 5 kWh modules for about $800 each). heavier, but also can be fully charged/discharged without damage (unlike lithium ion)
@darkuncle I'm planning to get that chemistry for a future camper.
@douglasvb @ireneista @darkuncle @msbellows I used to work in a computer/robot lab with a halon system
I once shut down the entire campus computer lab by groping around for the light switch and INSTEAD hitting the "emergency power off" for the killer robot arm.
@darkuncle @ireneista @ai6yr @msbellows I worked in a building years ago that had a halide system for the whole place including our cubicles. They said we had something like 30 seconds to get out before the gas would release and we'd all be dead.
@douglasvb @darkuncle @ai6yr @msbellows we would like to believe that was an OSHA violation. sorry you had to deal with that, wow.
@ireneista @darkuncle @ai6yr @msbellows it was definitely an interesting place to work! The next building over had the laser labs that had only blinded one person that I'm aware of due to infrared laser light leakage.
@ai6yr @douglasvb @ireneista but after 60+ hours of no power this week, I'm looking closely at some LFP house batteries (80% less expensive than powerwall, and more stable than lithium ion - and for stationary applications, the extra weight doesn't matter)
@ai6yr @douglasvb @darkuncle @ireneista
The Moss Landing project uses Tesla's "older" lithium ion Megapacks, which aren't the LiFePo4 used in most residential buildings these days. LiFePo4 is much safer, and monitoring a single set of house batteries is probably quite a bit simpler than the 256 mega-containers at Moss Landing.
China seems to be the most viable source of house batteries at the moment, which isn't great. Ironically, some Megapack production is being moved to China. Main thing is to find a reputable local seller who will take accountability, and that whatever system you get can be cut off from the manufacturer and controlled locally if needed.
@me_valentijn @ai6yr @douglasvb @ireneista I definitely don’t want anything that has an Internet dependency. Self-hosting, or optional extras - that’s fine; just no dependency on network connectivity.
@darkuncle @me_valentijn @ai6yr @douglasvb yeah we didn't say anything last night but it was kind of mind-bending seeing the "if needed" at the end there as if it isn't a hard requirement to run without the cloud at all times.
@darkuncle @me_valentijn @ai6yr @douglasvb like, we get it, we're an information privacy person so we're highly aware of all the reasons to just never fucking use the cloud for anything whatsoever, whereas most people would have trouble even assessing whether that's happening...
@darkuncle @me_valentijn @ai6yr @douglasvb just... public understanding of technology and safety is nowhere near where it needs to be, and there are basically no protections against predatory practices, and it sucks
@ireneista @me_valentijn @ai6yr @douglasvb I value convenience as much as the next person, but given house batteries are primarily (for me) a hedge against an outage, and that’s precisely when I’m also most likely not to have connectivity …
@ireneista @darkuncle @ai6yr @douglasvb
Locally feeding in hourly electricity cost data on a daily basis might be a bit much for most home battery owners, if they want to sell electricity at optimal times when disaster isn't currently threatening.
Obviously internet is not required for basic and routine battery use, especially systems functioning as a backup when the grid goes down.
@me_valentijn @darkuncle @ai6yr @douglasvb that explains how people have been convinced to accept this, thank you. we still regard it as... like, there's a lot of cloud-centric features that people have been convinced are serving some important purpose, in a very wide variety of problem domains, and in general we question how much benefit such things actually have
@ireneista @me_valentijn @darkuncle @ai6yr I believe that in my area of California there's a program I could sign up for with PG&E where they would manage a house battery via the Internet to charge and discharge it based on system needs. And as you said, some batteries can tap into power pricing to decide for themselves when to sell or to charge.
If I owned a house, I probably would build my own system and possibly would even have it mostly disconnected from the grid.
@douglasvb I would very much like to generate enough from the sun that I pull little or nothing from the grid, and have enough solar capacity to fully recharge the batteries every day
@darkuncle that's the dream!
@darkuncle@infosec.exchange @douglasvb@mastodon.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Hydro can have disastrous failure modes. Gravity also isn't hat dense of a storage medium, afaik. I would probably go for more fire resistant batteries instead, but you do have a point :)
@deepbluev7 @douglasvb @ai6yr when you're talking grid scale, especially in the western US, empty space and high places are easy to come by. :)
other battery chemistries: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/grid-scale-batteries-theyre-not-just-lithium/
Some great pieces in WIRED about gravity batteries in various places around the world: https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/forget-elons-batteries-fix-grid-rock-filled-train-hill/
@deepbluev7 @douglasvb @ai6yr (notably, the earliest of those stories is almost a decade old at this point; startups have been working on improving the tech and making it more consistent, while eliminating failure modes, for quite a while now)
@douglasvb Too bad birds and animals can't read.