Safety / Legal

Incident Date: 7/31/2021

Final Report Date: 1/25/2022

Reported Cause: Liquid coolant leakage led to electrical short, heat build-up, eventually initiating thermal runaway in adjacent battery modules in the incident unit. Not battery quality issue. Moss Landing Phase 1 & 2 Thermal Incidents (LG Energy Solutions & Fluence)

Incident Dates: Sept. 4, 2021 & Feb. 13, 2022

Final Report Date: 1/21/2022

Reported Cause: Sensor programming error triggered premature filling of water suppression system with leaky pipes, leaking water onto battery racks, causing electrical short, heat build-up, and ultimately thermal events. Not battery quality issue.

Damage: Total loss of two Megapack units (~1% of 212 units installed), one incident and one neighboring. No injury reported. Impact: Shelter-in-place advisory issued for approx. half a day starting ~1 PM local time. Communities as far out as 4.5 km impacted.

Damage: ~7% of all modules installed for Phase 1; no estimate or figure provided for Phase 2. No injury reported. Impact: No fire reported, no local emergency warning was issued, no road closure implemented, surrounding communities were not impacted.

Victoria Big Battery Fire (Above & Below) Scale of Incident vs. Installed System

Future Challenges:

System integration, commissioning, and operation remains a work-in-progress.

Though damages were contained to the facilities, community impacts were immediate and significant.

Highly visible events, regardless of scale relative to system size, cause significant community concerns.

The industry must continue to address these concerns head-on with standardization and clear, concrete answers.

This dynamic may be local currently, but will go global as installations multiply around the world.

Industry: Safety Source: Victoria Big Battery Fire (Top Image), Victoria Big Battery Fire (Bottom Image), BatteryBits (Article 1, Article 2)

Volta Foundation

Extracted from the PDF; charts and images may read imperfectly.