The town of Viviez in Aveyron in France has just seen a lithium battery storage and recycling installation erupt in flames, igniting more fears about the dangers of these batteries. Lithium batteries are of course absolutely fundamental to plans to decarbonise the economy. The Mail has the story:
A warehouse storing 900 tons of lithium batteries waiting to be recycled went up in flames this afternoon, amid growing fears over their dangers.
The fire in France occurred at a storehouse in the town in Viviez in Aveyron, and residents were told to stay indoors by authorities.
While the cause of the fire has yet to be confirmed, it took 70 firefighters to get the flames under control.
Lithium batteries, found in e-scooters, are the fastest growing fire risk in London, with the London Fire Brigade called to an e-bike or scooter fire once every two days on average last year.
The fire in France has once again raised questions around the use and safety concerning the batteries.
Not surprisingly, the conflagration has sparked concerns in Britain, and especially Buckinghamshire:
Jean-Louis Denoit, the Mayor of Viviez, called the fire “shocking” and told French news outlet BFMTV: “There is indeed reason to ask questions about the function of electric vehicles and lithium batteries.”
The fire comes amid proposals in the U.K. to build one of Europe’s largest battery storage sites in Buckinghamshire [which have] been met with fierce criticism.
More than 200 residents have lodged objections to Statera Energy’s plans to construct the 500 megawatt facility on fields at Rookery Farm.
The developers have planned to “strip the topsoil” and build 888 full-sized shipping containers to accommodate the batteries, which will be surrounded by a 2.5m high steel mesh fence.
One only has to consider how much chaos a single e-bike lithium battery can cause:
A blaze at the Royal Courts of Justice was caused by an e-bike battery failure earlier this month.
The fire destroyed part of a ground floor storage room and caused chaos outside as it disrupted traffic in the Strand, London.
The LFB said at the time: “Whilst E-Bikes and E-Scooters offer a great way round the city, if the batteries become damaged or begin to fail they can start incredibly ferocious fires.
“Lithium battery fires can spread quickly out of control, and within minutes have started a large fire.”
It appears that lithium batteries have a long way to go before they can function as a serious and safe path to the future.
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Of course at some point somebody is going to get killed as a result of a failure of this crude technology. Never mind, let’s all sing together:
‘Lessons will be learned.’
Given they stabbed alot of healthy ppl to death they’ll cheerfully burn alot of ppl to death. In fact I believe Grenfell tower had eco cladding that killed rather alot of ppl, so the state has a happy precedent.
I am absolutely convinced that our government couldn’t care less. Targets to meet and all that.
Yes but if in the future even-one-life-is-saved™️ from climate change…
Perhaps we should worry less about the houthi and more about these batteries.
The article in the Mail actually starts with this:
Yep. That’ll do it (not). Keep the smoke (and Coronavirus) out by staying in and closing your doors and windows.
As wokeman has correctly pointed out, echoes of Grenfell all over the place.
The danger isn’t just from fire which can be contained, but the highly toxic gases emitted, even if there is no actual fire. This means toxic gases can be produced before flames appear so fire alarms will not sound and absence of visible flame will not alert anyone to the danger.
Further some of the toxic emissions look like water vapour, so if the fire is being quenched danger of inhalation will not be recognised.
Cue government solution – mandatory installation of battery fume detectors, to be seen on every staircase near you. Apply online at http://www.boondoggle354c.gov.uk for your £5K grant. They have a list of approved suppliers. Sorted!
Stop press: the first approved supplier in the list is AAAFUMEDETECTIONSYSTEMS LTD and a quick search at companieshouse.gov.uk reveals the Chairman and Company Secretary to be a certain Mrs Sunak. A good honest woman providing useful services to keep us safe.
Good digging ….. well done you
And, apparently, water that has been poured on the fire is contaminated and toxic, and should be contained within a barrier. My guess is it is just going down our drains, so will eventually end up in our drinking water.
No shortage of lithium batteries now, in various sizes – unless you have no mobile phone, no modern camera etc. From time to time, there are fire outbreaks which might be caused by inappropriate disposal with domestic rubbish instead of proper “dead” battery collection bins.
It could be that there are some cheap and nasty products that are more likely to catch fire, or if there are attempts to charge them without proper kit as well. What is not reported in the article here is the actual cause of the warehouse fire – although a stock of Li-ion batteries made it worse.
The fire was in a re-cycling facility and so there may well have been batteries from crashed EVs which may have been damaged. My understanding is that many EV’s have an air-conditioning unit linked to the battery to ensure the battery does not get too hot or cold. If they are that sensitive to heat and cold then it is hardly surprising that if you are storing a load of potentially damaged high capacity lithium-ion batteries then the risk of over-heating and fire is quite high.
”Lithium-ion batteries are also prone to thermal runaway. If the temperature exceeds a certain threshold, the cells begin to vent hot gasses, which increases the temperature even further, and ultimately leads to ignition and fire.”
The likelihood of such an event with a large high capacity EV battery would seem to be much higher than for a small computer battery.
In my opinion the idea of using lithium-ion batteries for cars and transport is a bad idea, in the future we will look back and consider the idea of using lithium-ion batteries to power cars as dinosaur technology, the Betamax of transport. I am not a prophet and cannot say what the future will hold but my money is on some new technology that will consign lithium-ion batteries for cars to the history books.
The usual argument advanced by the pro-EV crowd is “fires are much more common in internal combustion engined vehicles than in EVs“. A recent interview with a retired firefighter suggests otherwise. He said…
“I have attended hundreds of car fires. Every one of them was deliberately torched by car thieves to destroy evidence. It’s not as easy to set a petrol or diesel car alight as one might think. Drop a match in the neck of a petrol filler and as often as not there will be a whoosh of flame which spits the match back out and extinguish itself. If it stays alight it usually merrily burns until the fuel runs out. Diesel is a different matter. It just won’t burn unless under extreme heat. A match won’t do it.
The preferred method to burn a car by the people who know, the joyriding car thieves, is to set light to the interior where most of the cars fabrics and plastics are, leaving the doors open to let air circulate. Quick and very destructive. Most of the car fires I attended still had their fuel tanks intact with the fuel still in them whilst the rest was just a charred lump. I have never known a tank to ‘explode’ because petrol doesn’t explode as such, unless it’s in a confined place and the rapid expansion of ignited fumes can cause what appears to be an explosion.“
Agree, only car fires I have been called to are dumped cars that kids have thrashed until they died or stolen cars
It is an interesting subject for a thesis. What exactly is the point of a lithium battery? It means that you are able to carry around a device that might normally be in your home, a mobile phone instead of a landline.or a laptop instead of a desktop. Portablilty and of course portability was always never meant to benefit us. Who needs ubiquitous advertising when people carry it around in their pocket. Electric cars seem insane to me and the creators knew very well that no infrastructure could ever be built for recharging on a mass scale so that they could replace petrol cars. They throw them at you, the quarterly corporate agendas and the long term globalist agendas ans hope you don’t fight back. We are in the thick of the storm. On a positive note people are starting to fight back and it is super-rational because they can intuit what this battery agenda really means. A Ted Kaczynski scholar perspicaciously said that one of the evils of this technology is that it makes you reluctant to criticise it. It is a great achievement to overcome this.
And the article is incomplete because it talks about how easily such fires can start and spread. Have you ever tried to put out a litihum fire – as a last ditch survival attempt it is advised to open your phone, puncture the battery and pour water on it. This will produce a strong source of ignition for about five minutes that it is difficult to put out. Obviouosly only do it when the value of a source of ignition outweighs any benefit of keeping your phone going. You can’t just have some scallywag driving an electric scooter or some car owner blithely unaware of these consequences. Like the world is your toilet and you can happily just sit back and accumulate a reserve of power in the form of a battery. Such people are a disaster waiting to happen.
I love the smell of emissions reduction in the morning
It’s not just the smoke from burning batteries that is dangerous, the water used the try to extinguish them is highly contaminated and enters soils and watercourses. Battery storage facilities should have some form of fire suppressant system to prevent batteries going into thermal runaway and burning out off control and prevent environmental contamination