this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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A massive battery fire in California could cast a dark shadow on clean energy expansion (www.fastcompany.com)
submitted 5 days ago by RememberTheApollo_ to c/technology
69 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.

A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.

Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.

Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

But you always have a combination of several renewable sources which can power these countries.

this is not uncontested, plenty of people disagree

Yeah, i know. Time will tell.

we have been saying this for decades and I guarantee you we will still be saying in in another decade. Also, renewables aren't fast to connect to the grid either. The more we spin up the bigger the backlog will be connecting new installations to the grid.

Sorry but that is just not true. The growth of solar has almost been logarithmic and the installed capacity was almost non-existent two decades ago. That just doesn't compare to the snails pace of nuclear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Also, it's not about people, but money. Every euro spent on some tech bro nuclear startup could be used to install real capacity instead.

longer power lines means more efficiency losses, and the more you plan to roll out renewables to 100% the more inefficiencies there will be. as previously stated, connecting large brand new renewable installations to the grid is expensive and also takes a long time.

Yeah, theoretically true, but what distances are we talking about? To get electricity from the suburbs in the city center should be trivial. It gets more difficult if we have to cross countries, but high voltage DC solves that issue pretty well. We could power europe from solar installed in the Sahara ^^