Fire at Tesla battery-powered energy storage facility shuts down part of Highway 1 in California
Highway 1 in California closed as company worked with firefighters to stop the fire
A fire outbreak on Tuesday at PG&E Corp's Monterey county-based energy storage facility that uses batteries made by Tesla Inc has shut down part of Highway 1 in California.
The company said it was working with firefighters to stop the fire from spreading. The incident has caused no electrical outage for customers, it added.
The electric utilities company said on detecting the issue the safety systems automatically disconnected the battery storage facility from the electrical grid and that no onsite personnel was injured due to the fire.
California's Department of Transportation said a part of the highway was closed due to the battery fire and advised motorists to take an alternate route.
PG&E in April announced the commissioning of its 182.5-megawatt (MW) Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) known as the Elkhorn Battery located at its Moss Landing electric substation in Monterey County.
PG&E said the system represents one of the largest utility-owned, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in the world.
Batteries are charged when energy demand is low (or when solar production is high) and then provide additional capacity by sending that reserved power to the grid as demand grows.
'Thermal runaway'
In July 2021, a fire damaged two Tesla Inc battery units at a huge energy storage project in Australia. Investigators said the fire was caused by a coolant leak that went undetected during start-up tes ts.
Safety regulators later cleared the so-called Victoria Big Battery project, run by French renewables firm Neoen SA, to resume testing at the site near Melbourne.
However the safety regulator Energy Safe Victoria said it will now determine whether there have been any breaches of the state's electricity safety rules and "if so, whether enforcement action is warranted".
"We have taken the time to understand the cause of the incident and we have implemented actions to ensure it will not happen again," Neoen Australia Managing Director Louis de Sambucy said.