Vistra's battery storage facility goes up in flames, spurs evacuation orders
Vistra's battery storage facility goes up in flames, spurs evacuation orders
Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners, who also had fires in 2021 and 2022. There are plenty of battery storage facilities operating safely.
As someone living in Texas presently: you could have saved yourself a full sentence:
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners...
to
Texas company
or honestly:
Texas
Would be sufficient. Any Texan that doesn't own x texas-based-company is tired of that company's bullshit. It's one of the few things natives and transplants agree on.
This PSA brought to you by the makers of: y'all, you all, and all y'all.
I don't think they should be operating at all.
What are the alternatives?
A really strong elastic band.
Build a tower, use excess power to lift heavy weights. Drop them when you need electricity to spin generators
Video on weight storage. Pumped hydro is proven and efficient, but it's location specific.
Weight lifting is slightly less efficient due to friction and heat generated by pully system, and the vast amount of weight and space needed may limit available storage possibility and scalability. But its simple, and safer.
Lifting your mom with a pulley.
Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.
Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.
Electrolisis is relatively inefficient and wears down the electrodes. While not as bad on an industrial scale, those are still problems. And then you have to convert it back, that is even less efficient.
Good in theory, barely passable in practice. Growing sugar cane and making ethanol would be better, like brazil does it.
You're hard pushing hydrogen / oxygen pretty blindly. Do you happen to know what the best efficiency of it is? It's not great. And it gets worse when you have to harvest it (typically electrolysis which is brutally energy intensive.) Worse still when you need to compress it - and don't even start me on energy density. Oh and that compressed gas needs to be kept cold. More energy.
Hydrogen cells have been around for ages and are still functionally worthless until the storage and generation problems are solved.
I believe there is battery tech that is newer but being deployed into production that is iron based. It is heavier and less energy dense than lithium. But for power grid level deployment that should be fine and iron is a bit harder to catch on fire.
This is why you don't use battery chemistries that can thermally run away autoignite in grid storage. The plant was using LG JH4 batteries, which use an NMC chemistry. I don't think that LiFePO4 cells were as ubiquitous when this plant was first constructed, so the designers opted for something spicy instead.
This shit is why you use LiFePO4. It can't thermally run away autoignite, it lasts longer, and the reduced energy density doesn't really matter for grid storage. Plus, it doesn't use nickel or cobalt so the only conflict resource is lithium.
EDIT: LiFePO4 batteries can enter thermal runaway, but they can't autoignite.
Ever seen what happens when a coal mine catches fire? Link
I guess we should just go back to water mills right?
Enlighten us with better approach. Also there are battery types that are less flammable.
Edit: is -> us
Here's another article from AP: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/g-s1-43268/fire-battery-storage-plant-california-moss-landing
Clearly, storing steam in tanks for demand surges is the most efficient form of energy storage (as in Factorio)
I would prefer to use energy rather than store it, but yes, pressure vessels are preferable to chemical batteries.
Yeah, that's probably true. I was mainly being silly and making a factorio reference. On the other hand, with the intermittent/cyclical nature of renewable energy, I don't think it's unreasonable to look into ways to store it for times when demand outstrips supply. Maybe there's something I'm missing? I'm not an expert in energy grids or anything.
So uh. I guess those coal and natural gas power plants would fare better in a fire. Something seems wrong there but OP clearly wouldn't possibly post something on the Internet that was utterly detached from reality.
Energy storage is just that. Fire is frequently quite good at releasing said energy.
Lithium? poof.
Oil? yup.
Nat gas? mmhmm.
wood? yup.
Coal? dang.
Guess all we got left is water - I'm sure that doesn't have any specific regional requirements...
So tell us champ: what energy storage you got all figured out from that armchair?
Nuclear though, never had a problem with excess heat at one of those. /s
Was gonna list it but I figured our energy-tzar OP would just complain about radioactive minerals being like batteries with more steps.
None. Use demand shaping instead. I like electrolysis of water, but desalination might make more sense in some regions. I suppose you could even redirect excess electricity to certain computational work.
I imagine you, like many, just don't understand the insane engineering feat that is an electrical grid. Everything is realtime - Every time someone's AC kicks on the grid must adapt and provide more power immediately. Power storage is a godsend to this process and in terms of relative age ... is very new. With regard to power storage - there are very few ways to hold it that don't run some risk of fire or other calamitous failure mode. That includes water - but I was being coy when making my statement implying it wouldn't burn.
To your comment: you could use salt/sea/undrinkable water for energy storage but it comes with regional requirements (elevation change typically) in addition to the water. It's not one size fits all and definitely doesn't work in many regions.
Regarding your two options which you offered to create potable water (not to store energy:) Both are wildly inefficient and have one or more major drawbacks to them. Topically - one of these drawbacks is their massive energy requirement. So you provided a way to burn energy faster - not store it ;)