Re: energy in UK

On 19/04/2025 2:39 am, Martin Brown wrote:

On 18/04/2025 14:32, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 18/04/2025 6:55 pm, Martin Brown wrote:

On 18/04/2025 08:24, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 18/04/2025 1:56 am, john larkin wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:44:15 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
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On 16/04/2025 15:59, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 16/04/2025 8:39 pm, Martin Brown wrote:

On 16/04/2025 00:17, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:04:37 +0100, Martin Brown >>
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

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I'm less convinced of that than you are. I think you can pretty well
stop thermal runaway but only if the sensors are done properly.

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That's presumably testable.
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A tiny dendrite puncturing a separator can start an ignition wave that
propagates in all directions at centimeters per second and ends in a
fireball fast. All a sensor might to is to tell people to RUN.

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It depends a lot on the chemistry. The previous generation of NiCoMn Lithium cells were extremely volatile if they get damaged although have higher energy density. The latest generation of Iron based ones in the BYD blade implementation seem to be a lot more forgiving. This isn't a bad demo of the differences (bear in mind they are a battery vendor):
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https://www.ufinebattery.com/blog/byd-blade-battery-comprehensive-guide/
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In particular part 6 with the consequences of failure for each type.
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Moves are afoot to double the energy density in the next generation if they can overcome the tricky problem of metallic dendrite growth under certain charging conditions.
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At the moment lithium batteries are collections of quite small cells - roughly D-cell size.

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Only in toys and a few older cars. You are hopelessly out of date.

Perhaps.
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Prismatic or latest blade cells are now in vogue for new build.

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But you haven't bothered to post a link to any kind of example.

 What do you think the link above points to? Duplicated below:
 https://www.ufinebattery.com/blog/byd-blade-battery-comprehensive-guide/?nowprocket=1
 First part describes older D cells methods and then prismatic cells typically 148mm x 79mm x 97mm looking like a brick and the much newer BYD blade which is much thinner and longer 960mm x 90mm x 13.5mm.
 See Part I : What is a blade battery.
 Pictures all seem to have broken since I last visited the site.
 I did have a link to the actual containerised modules but the entire BYD Energy site is presently inaccessible from the UK. Singapore works but doesn't have the full spec details only glossy sales brochures.

It's remarkably unspecific. Pictures of "electrodes" but no images of the internal structure.

South Australia has had a grid scale battery for years and now has several of them. They haven't caught on fire yet. A grid scale battery in another state did catch on fire during construction, but mechanical damage seems to have been the root cause, and the fire was pretty localised - confined to one refrigerator sized block of cells. the battery got built anyway.

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You obviously missed the Victorian Big Battery fire using Tesla modules where during installation they burnt out two full containers worth (infant mortality on precharge due to a coolant leak).

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That was the incident I was referring to. The local newspapers didn't write it up in any detail. The "coolant leak" could have have followed from the "mechanical damage" that showed up in the newspaper report.
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Safety systems that fail dangerous are not good. I suspect rough handling poor installation practices were to blame as root cause.

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That was the way it was written up in my newspaper.
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https://victorianbigbattery.com.au/2022/01/31/independent-report-released
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The URl offers a link to the report - which is more comprehensive than

 Thanks for that link. It is always useful to have the original accident investigation report as there is a lot of misreporting even in the technical press - just about everyone has an axe to grind on this topic.
 

the one in Energy storage News to which you provided a link.
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https://www.energy-storage.news/investigation-confirms-cause-of-fire-at-teslas-victorian-big-battery-in-australia/

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Moss Landing did nothing for the safety reputation of these systems.

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https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/moss-landing-the-worlds-biggest-grid-battery-just-caught-fire-again
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It did add to the list of rules of rules about not clustering batteries too close together.

 Or too many in one place (especially without firebreaks). We are talking 4GWhr packed into the smallest area they think they can get away with.

Which is mad. In any rational system, grid scale batteries would be dispersed and clustered at the sub-station level.

The South Australian Hornsdale Reserve 100 MW/129 MWh grid-scale battery was the first anywhere in the world  when it was completed in November 2017. It isn't surprising that scaling them up has created problems, but they are big enough and expensive that each disaster has been analysed in detail and nobody is going to make that particular mistake again.
There will be others, but not all that many. They aren't Windscales or Chernobyls.

 And what odds would you give a startup with no track record at all of building a grid connected 4GWhr BESS with a 1GW substation. That puts it in the same class for output power as the Hartlepool nuclear plant.

Depends on the startup. If they only hired new graduates they'd be in trouble, but that's not how sensible people work.
The Hornsdale Reserve was the first ever and it is still working fine. Tesla put together a bunch of car batteries on a tight time scale.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney