Within the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fireplace at a key California energy storage facility, the state’s largest utility stated in a press release to TechCrunch.
In keeping with PG&E, the utility “turned conscious of a hearth in a single Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at round 1:30 AM in Moss Touchdown, which is situated about 25 miles south of Santa Cruz, in Monterey County. The positioning is residence to a facility that homes 256 Megapacks and is able to storing as much as 730 megawatt-hours of energy… when not aflame. Such amenities underpin the essential transition to renewables by storing clear vitality to be used when the solar isn’t shining.
On the time this story was printed, the ability was disconnected from the grid as firefighters labored to “cease the unfold of the fireplace and supply a protected space for emergency response personnel.” The fireplace shut down a section of Highway 1 and sparked a shelter-in-place advisory from the county’s sheriff’s workplace. The workplace warned close by residents of an “ongoing hazardous supplies incident” at round 9:00 AM, stating: “Please shut your home windows and switch off your air flow techniques.”
PG&E stated within the assertion that its security techniques “labored as designed when the difficulty was detected” and there have been no onside accidents. The utility added that the incident didn’t result in “electrical outages for patrons right now.”
When requested in regards to the scale of the fireplace, a spokesperson for the utility declined to share extra info.
Although not pinned on Tesla, lithium batteries at storage websites in Moss Touchdown have repeatedly caught fire lately. And final 12 months, a Tesla Megapack caught fire in Geelong, Australia throughout preliminary exams on the Victorian Big Battery storage website.
