Re: energy in UK

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:
 

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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The big snag with Lithium batteries is their nasty tendency to catch
fire spectacularly.

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You can design the battery monitoring circuitry to prevent them doing it
spontaneously. Electric bikes and the like may not be big enough to
justify the expense, but electric cars and domestic solar panel back-up
batteries certainly are.

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

 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.

At the moment lithium batteries are collections of quite small cells - roughly D-cell size.
A tiny dendrite puncturing a separator may start an ignition wave that can propagate at centimeters per second, but only inside that D-cell - and that would take a badly designed separator.
This sounds more like journalistic alarmism than any kind of peer-reviewed study.

Utility-scale batteries are huge and forklifts move pretty slow.

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 batter got built anyway.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney