Startling new evidence has emerged showing a dramatic increase in fires caused by exploding electric vehicle batteries in the U.K. There was a sharp rise last year, particularly in London where fires jumped from 32 in 2020 to 102 in 2021 and already 98 recorded in the first half of this year. The information comes from a recent Freedom of Information request made by the health and safety consultancy CE Safety, who contacted all 50 fire and rescue services. Statistics were unavailable from 11 services, including Scotland, leading CE Safety to suggest these results “only tell half the story around this trend”.
Electric vehicle (EV) sales have risen of late and the fire trend, notably in London, is undoubtedly growing. In Merseyside, there were 16 fires in 2021, and so far there have been 13 for the first half of this year. The number of scooters catching fire is much higher than other vehicles across Britain, but in London electric cars are the prime fire culprit, followed by bikes, vans, buses and motorbikes.
EV battery explosions are a much more serious fire incident than conflagrations in internal combustion vehicles. Explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. They are very difficult to extinguish, and present considerable safety issues for fire workers who tackle the blaze. Since they are chemical fires, it is not possible to extinguish them by cutting off the oxygen supply. The fire often takes hours to control, and can reignite hours or days after it was thought to be out.
The risks involved with large lithium-ion batteries have been known for some time, although the desire to promote ‘green’ transport means discussion is often muted. Paul Christensen, Professor of Pure and Applied Electrochemistry at Newcastle University, notes that a lithium-ion battery stores a huge amount of energy in a very small space. “Since 2008, the adoption of such batteries has outstripped our appreciation of their risks,” he notes. Batteries can catch fire if perforated, but, “more worryingly”, contamination of just one cell during manufacture can lead to a spontaneous fire. “Even the most experienced and careful manufacturers have defective electric cells passing through their very careful quality control systems,” he adds.
Many of the fires occur during recharging, something that often occurs in or near domestic premises, although spontaneous combustion can also occur if the battery pack is knocked or damaged at any point. In June this year, the failure of an e-scooter battery caused a fire in a 12th floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush. At the time, the London Fire Brigade said it had seen a “huge spike” in e-bike and scooter incidents. It has issued a number of warnings, pointing out how ferocious the fires can be. A similar incident involving an e-scooter battery explosion occurred in April causing substantial damage to a flat in Portsmouth.
In May, six buses were engulfed in flames at a terminal at Potters Bar following a battery recharging explosion. A local resident described the scene in the following terms: “I just heard an unbelievable noise that sounded like a jet and when I looked out my window one of the buses exploded in a ball of flames”. CE Safety notes that in London, 19 bus fires have had to be extinguished.
Last February, the roll-on-roll-off car transporter Felicity Ace was engulfed in flames after an EV fire. The ship burnt for 13 days before finally sinking off the Azores with the loss of 4,000 high-value vehicles on board. The rapid spread of the fire, which proved impossible to control, sent shock waves through nautical circles. The German insurer Allianz warned that the rising demand for EVs was an emerging risk for shipping fires on cargo ships as they are not designed to carry lithium batteries safely.
Neither, it might be noted, are passenger car ferries.
Has the risk involved in the huge increase in the numbers of massive lithium-ion power packs been downplayed? Certainly, fire hazard publicity is unlikely to help EV sales, as Governments around the world try to ban internal combustion engines within extremely short periods of time. But another question that few seem to be asking is whether battery cars are actually a practical replacement to existing transport?
EVs are expensive and likely to become more so as the world scrambles to buy limited supplies of minerals. A recent alternative energy report for the Finnish Government by Professor Simon Michaux found that “in theory” there was enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if it was used exclusively for EVs. More cobalt, however, would need to be discovered. But it gets much worse, since batteries have a working life of only eight to 10 years and will need to be regularly replaced. As with many Net Zero projects, the EV experiment belongs in Alice in Wonderland territory. Michaux is slightly more measured in his commentary: “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be rethought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive.”
In the meantime, a typical EV battery weights one thousand pounds. According to a recent essay published by the U.S. think-tank Heartland Institute, it contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper and 400 pounds of aluminium, steel and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. It is noted that to manufacture each battery you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, it is said, you dig up 500,000 pounds – about 225 tonnes – of the Earth’s crust for just one battery.
EV sales have been soaring in the U.K. of late. But the ‘green’ credentials of EVs are a far cry from their popular portrayal, and safety concerns in the future about their batteries are only likely to increase.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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It’s hard, isn’t it, not to feel a bit of schadenfreude when one thinks of a virtue-signalling Tesla owner’s car exploding!I’m in Vietnam, where I’m happy to report that the combustion engine still rules the road, fuel is cheap, and engines hum, roar, splutter, pop etc, it’s great.
I hope the so-called developing world continues for many years to make use of abundant, cheap oil for its transportation needs, all the while laughing at the western world’s abandonment of a refined technology that worked in favour of an stupid, wasteful and impractical one that doesn’t.
Hear hear CG. Oil made an inhospitable planet hospitable.
Hope Vietnam is treating you well. Sounds like you’re enjoying it
Could be. Apart from oil itself, there are parts of the world that make heavy use of plant oil, and ethanol (mainly from sugar cane) as a fuel for combustion engines – e.g. in Brazil it’s a lot more than E10 petrol. Not only that, if the use of oil as a fuel falls, maybe the oil price will also decline, and there is a fair bit of it not that far away from them, in Venezuela.
And are they still overloading their mopeds to an amazingly excessive degree and riding along the pavements if the roads are blocked?!!
Brilliant “Vive La internal combustion engine!!!”
Like vaccine damage this won’t be reported in MSM, goes against the EVs are wonderful narrative.
The LFB article https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/news/2022-news/june/shepherd-s-bush-high-rise-fire-caused-by-e-bike-prompts-safety-warning-from-firefighters/ suggests that many e-bikes etc are often charged using inappropriate charging kit. However, the Potters Bar bus fire looks more problematic, if one assumes that correct equipment was in use at the depot.
These days, almost all of us use Lithium ion batteries in a small way, whether it be phones, laptops, or camera batteries. Any stories about smartphones exploding? When it comes to risks associated with EV batteries, it could be that damage caused by flooding, or other road surface damage, is part of the risk, if it leads to difficulties with charging; don’t know, but in EV’s there is not much ground clearance below the traction batteries.
There could be maintenance errors in the coolant kit as well. I’ve been running a petrol-electric hybrid for a few years. It doesn’t use Lithium, but NiMH for it’s traction battery, but it does need coolant, which is done by fan controlled airflow. One needs to be careful to avoid blocking the air intake for that. I think the full-on EV ones use liquid coolant, so that no doubt has it’s own failure modes.
There must be loads of shipping of EVs that are imported for sale when new, as well as moves by train via the channel tunnel (such as Toyota hybrids in both directions that way, some being made in Derby, others in other countries).
Stories of exploding iPhone and also, Samsung Android-phones use to make rounds in the first half of the 2010s.
Yes, the quality of batteries in phones is much improved now and the period around the iPhone 6 where a metal chassis weakness could lead to the phone bending and cracking the battery is now much less likely.
Isn’t there a relationship between size of vehicle and battery fires? The larger the vehicle the more likely it will go up in flames?
It depends on the manufacturer. There have been several whistleblowers at Tesla, for example, revealing the very poor assembly process. See Martin Tripp (obviously ignore what MSM and/or Elon may or may not say about him).
But surely EVs are Safe and Effective?
Only anti-batterists would claim otherwise!
I’ve heard that the Vauxhall Astra-Zenica is prone to blockages in the hydraulic system
Haha!
Had to read that twice very good.
Poor old Potters Bar: many people only know the place exists because of the notorious train crash of 2002, its frequent mention on travel bulletins “the M25 is slow between Watford and Potters Bar”, and now this. I saw the smoke of the bus incident.
I’m definitely NOT flying on any of those electric planes. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter!
Tesla has led the charge in self-combusting vehicles. By far. And so called “autopilot” which he told people was already level 5 autonomy (when it wasn’t even level 1). And with whompy wheels. And doors that won’t open when the electrics fail. Bad in a fire, that is.
But Elon Musk has repeatedly been let off the hook, and even for years before he was “the world’s richest man”.
He thought he could teach Toyota by skipping PPAP (Pre-production Parts Approval Process).
WTF are “fire workers”?
The politicaly correct (for now) replacement for firemen.
What’s wrong with firefighter? I think if I was a fireman or firewoman I would much prefer that as a gender neutral term.
That would need to be become firefighters and firerfightresses. However, at this point, the average woke brain is going to suffer from serious polysyllabic burnout. Hence: Keep it simple, Sam! We are nowhere near being as smart as we’d like to appear!
Electric cars – exploding batteries – limited travel
Yellow Freedom Boards – next event
Thursday 10th November 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction B3408 London Rd &
John Nike Way, Binfield
Bracknell RG42 4FZ
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
A friend of mine challenged me the other day that hydrogen is more energy dense than a hydro carbon. after a short debate where he looked something up on his phone I dropped. However it turns out he had been directed to look at specific energy (MJ/Kg) not actual energy density (MJ/Litre). Because hydrogen is the lightest element there is of course its specific energy is very high, around 170MJ/kg, Petrol/diesel are around 30-40MJ/kg. A Lithium battery? About 0.5MJ/kg. Actually appallingly bad by this metric.
And H is not a source of energy. It can be used as a storage mechanism from another place, ideally by splitting water via electric power generated by something else – ideally, not by burning gas, oil or coal! The only real time source is the Sun. The fact that H is less dense than carbon per unit volume is the reason why petrol carries less energy than diesel oil – there is a lot more hydrogen in petrol than diesel oil. In rough numbers petrol has about 10% less energy per unit volume. The organic structure of the fuel is one of the reasons why petrol engines spew out a certain amount of steam when running.
The pollution from such fires should be considered. The burned out shp must have put a great deal of very unpleasant compounds into the sea.
Never mind the safety aspects let’s look at the basics here:
A) Power vehicles from a primary energy source (petrol or diesel fossil fuels) which are freely available, reliable and allow refill in seconds.
B) Power vehicles from a secondary (hence massively less efficient and intrinsically more expensive) power source (electricity) which requires a primary energy source for its creation (either fossil fuels or much more expensive and less practical nuclear for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine) and at least tens of minutes for battery recharge.
The B) option was rejected in the early twentieth century because of its obvious – how can I put this politely – outright idiocy.
I have a battery powered electric trike for road use. Bought new in March 2021.
I am now on mt 4th set of batteries, can only get chinese imports, the last lot overheated an thankfully I turned the charger off but it was many hours until the battery culd be lifted out. I no longer put it on charge overnight a I read to think what might have happened if it had caught fire when I was asleep.
The only reason why I bought an electric one was because the petrol trikes are beyond my price range.
Buy a second hand quad bike for less than £1500. Much more reliable, far more range, no stupid batteries.
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/bike-search?postcode=Sw1a%201aa&price-to=1500&body-type=Quad%2FATV&include-delivery-option=on&advertising-location=at_bikes&page=1
The green blob gets larger by the minute. Everything from turbines and smart meters to electric cars and no beef. Pretty soon if this blob isn’t deactivated, we will all be eating a plate of bluebottles for tea as our last drop of electricity burns a hole in our pockets
Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practise to deceive.
Exploding batteries? – difficult to extinguish?. There you have it.A solution to the energy crisis. We can harness the heat to warm people’s homes via a grid, whilst they tootle off to work in their normally aspirated combustion engine cars. It’s a win- win.