- There’s the ticking time bomb of natural gas going into out homes
- The ticking time bomb of AC electric going through our homes that Edison demonstrated could kill an elephant
- The ticking time bomb of wood framed stucco houses that could easily catch fire
- The ticking time bomb of volatile gasoline in your car catching fire
- the ticking time bomb of the Li-Ion battery in your back pocket
If you want to live in a technological society, you have to accept and manage these risks from our technology.
What exactly are we supposed to do with a large li-on battery burning in the garage? Give up and call insurance?
How often does that happen? I would say not very, even though gasoline is highly volatile. The onus is on designers and manufacturers to make Li-Ion fires so rare that consumers effectively ignore the risk.
A Lithium Ion battery pack will experience cascade failure in it's lifetime. A tank full of gasoline will not, neither will the circuit panel in your home.
Will that battery pack catch fire when it inevitably fails? Who knows, but that's exactly the problem.
There are significantly fewer home-scale or business-scale battery installations. The fact that there have already been so many issues with them is concerning, since they're much harder to put out than other fires.
Yes, there will be new safety procedures developed to account for these new risks. But they aren't in place yet and they won't be if Tesla fans ignore reality and pretend like nothing's wrong.
You are comparing an industrial site fire to residential fires. They are not comparable. Best wait for the incident investigation before declaring batteries dangerous and demanding they be banned.
I did not suggest that lithium batteries be banned (that was all you), I suggested that additional safety mechanisms would be needed to control the risk of spontaneous, uncontrollable combustion, which especially seems to be a risk with Tesla battery installations, seeing as how it has happened at every one of Tesla's Australian battery installations to date.
It would be good to know with what probability a powerwall will burn your house down, and what the probability is of anything else burning the house down.
If hysterical reactions like that were prevalent, we'd still be on foot. Every power technology has issues, and with consistent intelligent development, they are mitigated, or something better is developed. You think burning fossil fuels or containing hydrogen at 3000bar are better ideas?
It's not clear from the article what exactly went wrong, but it looks like they probably lost at least one shipping-container-sized battery pack.
Should you have a Powerwall in your house? Maybe, maybe not. I would feel safer with a design based on less volatile cells, like LFP. No reason to use technology that's unnecessarily dangerous when there are reasonable alternatives.
Just give proportional air time to incidents based on fires per vehicle.
This one BEV got half an hour of air time during the week? Why aren’t there a hundred hours of fuel burning vehicles catching fire?
This one BEV came off the road at high speed, hit a tree and all the occupants died? Why aren’t there an equal number of minutes for the non-BEV fatal single vehicle accidents?