An alert Massachusetts watchdog group has blown the whistle on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for issuing potentially catastrophic guidance for building grid scale battery facilities. They are specifying a standard which is only meant for small batteries making some rules deadly wrong at grid scale. Turns out this fallacy is widespread nationally making their warning that much more important.
The background is that Massachusetts is rushing an enormous grid battery buildout driven by their 2024 Energy Act. Something like 3,500 MW of battery projects are to be built around the State in the next two years or so. A 40 foot long, tractor trailer sized battery is typically just 1 MW so think 3,500 giant batteries but it could be many more.
The Energy Act required the DEP to issue safety guidance for this buildout which they did in August. Laurie Belsito, Policy Director at the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, just blew the whistle in a Boston Herald article titled “Belsito: Battery guidance lacks juice to deal with Mass. projects.”
See https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/10/03/battery-guidance-lacks-juice-to-deal-with-mass-projects/amp/.
The DEP guidance focuses on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 855 — “Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems.” As Belsito points out this standard is only for small batteries not the giant batteries and battery complexes about to flood Massachusetts.
Here how Belsito puts it:
“By way of scale the NFPA Standard 855 is limited to batteries with an energy storage capacity of 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or less. Such a battery might be used for emergency blackout protection in an office building. However, each of the state’s Energy Act batteries is likely to have a capacity of 4,000 kWh (equal to 4 MWh) or more.
Giant batteries 80 times bigger than Standard 855 allows are not adequately covered by that standard. Unfortunately, as of yet there are no national standards for batteries of this scale.
In some aspects, applying 855 would be catastrophically wrong. For example, 855 says that when there are multiple batteries, they should be three feet apart so if one burns it will not ignite its neighbors. That tiny spacing would provide no protection in the case of the giant batteries being mandated in Massachusetts.
The greatest risk with these huge batteries is that a single battery burning has the potential to set the entire complex on fire. The Department of Energy Resources (DOER) has issued a Request for Proposals for Energy Act batteries that in effect, specifies that projects have at least 40 batteries and could have up to 1,000. The possibility of catastrophe is undeniable.”
Unfortunately NFPA 855 sounds like the right standard for grid scale facilities so it is cited frequently, not just in Massachusetts, which is a potentially deadly national error.
For example EPA recently put out “Battery Energy Storage Systems: Main Considerations for Safe Installation and Incident Response” for grid scale batteries. It too features NFPA 855.
The American Clean Power Association has a fact sheet: “NFPA 855: Improving Energy Storage System Safety” which never mentions the 50 kWh limitation. Even worse it features a grid scale battery background photo.
NFPA is partly responsible for this widespread, potentially catastrophic error. In Standard 855 the crucial 50 kWh limitation is not featured; in fact it is hard to find. In the latest 855 I could only find it stated once, as Section 9.5.1.1 where Section 9 is for electrochemical batteries including lithium ion grid batteries. This small battery limitation should be flagged up front in red.
The deeper question is why has NFPA not issued a standard for the giant grid scale batteries? There is a grid scale battery building boom going on. While recent legislation is rapidly phasing out lucrative subsidies for wind and solar it left untouched the similar subsidies for giant batteries.
Clear rules for safe design of grid battery facilities are desperately needed if deadly catastrophe is to be avoided. Belsito has made this urgent need clear for Massachusetts. The other States and the Federal Government need to hear it as well.
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If they put in realistic standards, that would dramatically increase the cost of grid scale batteries.
Nothing can be allowed to disturb the myth that solar/wind plus batteries is the cheapest option for grid scale power.
PS: I have my doubts about 3 feet of separation for 50kWh batteries. Not without some kind of active fire/heat suppression.
“Not without some kind of active fire/heat suppression.”
Exactly, and the suppression system must first be proven to be effective to protect the adjacent unit(s) and the structure in which they are installed.
While the letter of the rule is inconsistent with the size of Grid Scale MW sized batteries, the intent applies. They simply need to increase the distance between modules to one more consistent with the size of their potential Flambé zone (50′ spacing perhaps). Or construct 3 sided | | firewall modules for each and every Individual battery pod with a 10′ minimum spacing
A battery car alight can ignite a building 10 feet away.
But can it ignite kiln level fire brick?
Looking at Moss Landing facility, it looks like the battery modules were spaced about 10ft apart. Yet they still went up.
Right, the suppression system MUST be over engineered- like airplanes. Good isn’t good enough.
With numerous redundant redundancies
You cannot suppress a battery in thermal runaway. They produce their own oxygen while burning, they burn under water too. They just have to be left to burn out. Takes days sometimes just for a car.
Isolating the fie is only the beginning. One of the biggest dangers in East Palestine was toxic fumes. Does 855 cover abatement of toxic fumes while the fire is burning? The entire building needs to be sealed to prevent toxic fumes from being exhausted into public. How do you do that? Firefighters in hazmat suits may be able to protect themselves, citizen neighbors won’t. If you isolate the building from the outside what happens to the equipment inside then exposed to the toxic fumes? How do you go about decontaminating the infrastructure while keeping it working? The entire facility may need to be taken off line for decontamination – what replaces the lost output from the facility.
Handling this for infrastructure the size of a boxcar is one thing, doing it for infrastructure 100 times larger is a far different thing.
A battery is an energy container. When it starts to fail the energy starts to be released which further damages the container, increasing the rate of energy release. Once started, there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for plugging the leak. The contained energy doesn’t just go away. The 4mwh per battery has to go somewhere. That really is an awful lot of energy for a small area.
True for many lithium secondary chemistries, especially lithium cobalt (aka LiIon). Not true for all batteries..
I was a member of a number of NFPA standards committees over the years and I’m sure NFPA 855 is far more comprehensive. I don’t have access to download the full document but what I did find indicates active fire suppression systems giving full coverage would be required. This would typically be a high flow water sprinkler system at a minimum. Obviously, such systems would not be likely feasible for 1000 MWh grid scale systems. My suspicion is that the only practical fire safety requirement would be separation sufficient to allow individual units to burn themselves out without endangering any other equipment.
So they’re going to need a bigger state.
Agreed.
Yes 3 feet seems skimpy. But I have seen huge 100 40 foot long grid battery facilities with 3 foot spacing. Absurd!
3 foot or 6 foot doesn’t really matter once those eternal fires start to burn.
There need to be fire resistant walls between each row of batteries.
( isolating single ones would be inpractible)
The best thing would be some kind of cages above every single unit that can be let down to isolate them from oxygen in case of fire.
The lack of external oxygen makes no difference to a battery fire.
The cage won’t put the fire out but might prevent it from spreading.
Mark was responding to the idea of isolating batteries from oxygen. Waste of time.
Wind and solar by 2015 had clearly demonstrated that it was not fit for purpose without battery storage. Battery storage by 2025 has clearly demonstrated that is not fit for purpose. Only nuclear has the exothermic reaction temperature sufficient to cost effectively store heat for steam raising.
.”The best” solution is to end the wind/solar/battery failed experiment and begin site selection and permitting and building an assembly line factory to manufacture 100’s of NuScale Power 77 MW reactors for semi-trailer delivery to the job site for plug and play.
Bingo! The kind of giant factories that Musk likes to build. He should do it and I think he’s capable.
Musk, or perhaps more likely someone on his staff under his name, posts on Quora occasionally. I’ve provided suggestions that he arrange the financing to arrange exactly that and then serve as CEO.
Lone Skum?
end the failed ‘social experiment’….
Eternal fires! I like that. 🙂 Great idea about the cages!
All you need are radiant barriers between the batteries, plus enough space for the barriers to be effective.
As for the top, since the fires can’t be put out, you need to allow the heat generated to escape.
And redundant scrubbers to remove the toxic lithium smoke?
Shouldn’t we have, I don’t know, triple layered containment domes with inspection every two weeks and let’s not forget the environmental impact studies and licensing from 42 agencies.
oh wait, we’re not talking about nuclear power here, just slap it together. To hell with the neighbors. They’re expendable just like those eagles and whales that the windmills wipe out.
Yes, this is my opinion too, double radiant shielding, e.g. 2 metal sheets/foils and chimney to funnel gases above.
Design please, I’m struggling with envisioning the materials of construction. Cables, chains’, an over head crane system to route a dozen or so cages; parked nearby to above the batteries on steel rails over each row and lowering onto the burning batteries? My hunch is the only viable design is a sky hook, but no such thing exists and never will. Helicopters? Forget it.
When it comes to battery fires I am not aware of any effective fire suppression systems.
Note the huge payments to Banks and Owners compared to other cost items.
Also, see note at bottom
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
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Utility-scale, battery system pricing usually is not made public, but for this system it was.
Neoen, in western Australia, has just turned on its 219 MW/ 877 MWh Tesla Megapack battery, the largest in western Australia.
Ultimately, it will be a 560 MW/2,240 MWh battery system, $1,100,000,000/2,240,000 kWh = $491/kWh, delivered as AC, late 2024 pricing. Smaller capacity systems will cost much more than $500/kWh
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Annual Cost of Megapack Battery Systems; 2023 pricing
Assume a system rated 45.3 MW/181.9 MWh, and an all-in turnkey cost of $104.5 million, per Example 2
Amortize bank loan for 50% of $104.5 million at 6.5%/y for 15 years, $5.484 million/y
Pay Owner return of 50% of $104.5 million at 10%/y for 15 years, $6.765 million/y (10% due to high inflation)
Lifetime (Bank + Owner) payments 15 x (5.484 + 6.765) = $183.7 million
Assume battery daily usage for 15 years at 10%, and loss factor = 1/(0.9 *0.9)
Battery lifetime output = 15 y x 365 d/y x 181.9 MWh x 0.1, usage x 1000 kWh/MWh = 99,590,250 kWh to HV grid; 122,950,926 kWh from HV grid; 233,606,676 kWh loss
(Bank + Owner) payments, $183.7 million / 99,590,250 kWh = 184.5 c/kWh
Less 50% subsidies (tax credits, 5-y depreciation, loan interest deduction) is 92.3c/kWh
Subsidies shift costs from project Owners to ratepayers, taxpayers, government debt.
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Excluded costs/kWh: 1) O&M; 2) system aging, 1.5%/y, 3) 20% HV grid-to-HV grid loss, 4) grid extension/reinforcement to connect battery systems, 5) downtime of parts of the system, 6) decommissioning in year 15, i.e., disassembly, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites. Excluded costs would add at least 15 c/kWh
COMMENTS ON CALCULATION
Almost all existing battery systems operate at less than 10%, per EIA annual reports i.e., new systems would operate at about 92.4 + 15 = 107.4 c/kWh. They are used to stabilize the grid, i.e., frequency control and counteracting up/down W/S outputs. If 40% throughput, 23.1 + 15 = 38.1 c/kWh.
A 4-h battery system costs 38.1 c/kWh of throughput, if operated at a duty factor of 40%.
That is on top of the cost/kWh of the electricity taken from the HV grid to feed the batteries
Up to 40% could occur by absorbing midday solar peaks and discharging during late-afternoon/early-evening, which occur every day in California and other sunny states. The more solar systems, the greater the peaks.
See URL for Megapacks required for a one-day wind lull in New England
40% throughput is close to Tesla’s recommendation of 60% maximum throughput, i.e., not charge above 80% and not discharge below 20%, to perform 24/7/365 service for 15 y, with normal aging.
Owners of battery systems with fires, likely charged above 80% and discharged below 20% to maximize profits.
Tesla’s recommendation was not heeded by the Owners of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia. They excessively charged/discharged the system. After a few years, they added Megapacks to offset rapid aging of the original system, and added more Megapacks to increase the rating of the expanded system.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-largest-battery-system-in-australia
Regarding any project, the bank and Owner have to be paid, no matter what. I amortized the bank loan and Owner’s investment
Divide total payments over 15 years by the throughput during 15 years, you get c/kWh, as shown.
There is about a 20% round-trip loss, from HV grid to 1) step-down transformer, 2) front-end power electronics, 3) into battery, 4) out of battery, 5) back-end power electronics, 6) step-up transformer, to HV grid, i.e., you draw about 50 units from the HV grid to deliver about 40 units to the HV grid, because of A-to-Z system losses. That gets worse with aging.
A lot of people do not like these c/kWh numbers, because they have been repeatedly told by self-serving folks, battery Nirvana is just around the corner.
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NOTE: EV battery packs cost about 135/kWh, before it is installed in the car. Such packs are good for 6 to 8 years, used about 2 h/d, at an average speed of 30 mph. Utility battery systems are used 24/7/365 for 15 years
ThisTesla battery systems has had two major fires
THE HORNSDALE POWER RESERVE, LARGEST BATTERY SYSTEM IN AUSTRALIA
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-largest-battery-system-in-australia
By Willem Post
HIGH COST/kWh OF W/S SYSTEMS FOISTED ONTO A BRAINWASHED PUBLIC
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/high-cost-kwh-of-w-s-systems-foisted-onto-a-brainwashed-public-1
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People are brainwashed to love wind and solar. They do not know by how much they screw themselves by voting for the woke folks who push them onto everyone. Their ignorance is exploited by the woke folks
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If owned/controlled by European governments and companies, would be a serious disadvantage for the US regarding environmental impact, national security, economic competitiveness, and sovereignty
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Western countries cajoling Third World countries into Wind/Solar, and loaning them high-interest money to do so, will forever re-establish a colonial-style bondage on those recently free countries.
What is generally not known, the more weather-dependent W/S systems, the less efficient the traditional generators, as they inefficiently (more CO2/kWh) counteract the increasingly larger ups and downs of W/S output. See URL
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/fuel-and-co2-reductions-due-to-wind-energy-less-than-claimed
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W/S systems add great cost to the overall delivery of electricity to users; the more W/S systems, the higher the cost/kWh, as proven by the UK and Germany, with the highest electricity rates in Europe, and near-zero, real-growth GDP.
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At about 30% W/S, the entire system hits an increasingly thicker concrete wall, operationally and cost wise.
The UK and Germany are hitting the wall, more and more hours each day.
The cost of electricity delivered to users increased with each additional W/S/B system
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Nuclear, gas, coal and reservoir hydro plants are the only rational way forward.
Ignore CO2, because greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere is essential for: 1) increased green flora to increase fauna all over the world, and 2) increased crop yields to better feed 8 billion people.
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Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to increase command/control by governments, and enable the moneyed elites to get richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people.
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Subsidies shift costs from project Owners to ratepayers, taxpayers, government debt:
1) Federal and state tax credits, up to 50% (Community tax credit 10%; Federal tax credit of 30%; State tax credit; other incentives up to 10%);
2) 5-y Accelerated Depreciation to write off of the entire project;
3) Loan interest deduction
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Utilities forced to pay:
At least 15 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from fixedoffshore wind systems
At least 18 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from floating offshore wind
At least 12 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from largersolar systems
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Excluded costs, at a future 30% W/S annual penetration on the grid, based on UK and German experience:
– Onshore grid expansion/reinforcement to connect far-flung W/S systems, about 2 c/kWh
– A fleet of traditional power plants to quickly counteract W/S variable output, on a less than minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365, which means more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh, more cost of about 2 c/kWh
– A fleet of traditional power plants to provide electricity during 1) low-wind periods, 2) high-wind periods, when rotors are locked in place, and 3) low solar periods during mornings, evenings, at night, snow/ice on panels, which means more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh, more cost of about 2 c/kWh
– Pay W/S system Owners for electricity they could have produced, if not curtailed, about 1 c/kWh
– Importing electricity at high prices, when W/S output is low, 1 c/kWh
– Exporting electricity at low prices, when W/S output is high, 1 c/kWh
– Disassembly on land and at sea, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites, about 2 c/kWh
Total ADDER 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 11 c/kWh
Some of these values exponentially increase as more W/S systems are added to the grid
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Offshore wind full cost of electricity FCOE = 30 c/kWh + 11 c/kWh = 41 c/kWh, no subsidies
Offshore wind full cost of electricity FCOE = 15 c/kWh + 11 c/kWh = 26 c/kWh, 50% subsidies
The 11 c/kWh is for various measures required by wind and solar; power plant-to-landfill cost basis.
This compares with 7 c/kWh + 2 c/kWh = 9 c/kWh from existing gas, coal, nuclear, large reservoir hydro plants.
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The economic/financial insanity and environmental damage is off the charts.
No wonder Europe’s near-zero, real-growth GDP is in de-growth mode.
That economy has been tied into knots by inane people.
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In summary,10x too expensive forever, if the batteries were free battery storage would still be 5x too expensive because of associated cost. There isn’t a qualified utility electrical engineer anywhere who hasn’t laid that all out for management. But because of low information voters insisting that free sunshine and breezes is the way to go the farce, fraud? continues.
“Grid scale” batteries don’t need to deal with the vibration and regular changes in temperature that car batteries have to put up with.
Daytime temperatures in deserts can soar to 50°C and night time to below zero in some places.
My cars battery is in the trunk. No different.
The only “vibration” would be an accident, or a big pothole.
EVs are tested in labs under vibrating conditions, to ensure designs are sufficient.
Car batteries have heating and cooling systems to maintain about 70F while driving, which happens to be the best efficiency point. Tesla uses heat pumps.
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If an EV sits in the cold at an airport for a few days, and has an empty battery, it has to be towed to a warm garage to unfreeze the battery and warm it up, prior to charging the battery. That can take a day and hundreds of dollars.
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No problem, if you are the only one, big problem, if there are hundreds more.
Nit 1: Earthquakes happen all over the world. Most are vibration level only.
Nit 2: Automobiles all have a low level background vibration. Tires are not perfect. Road surfaces are not perfect.
Nit 3: If the battery has frozen, anyone attempting to thaw and recharge it is taking a serious risk. The act of freezing alters the internal dimensions.
Yes they are designed to handle the vibration, however that requirement adds to the cost. Heating and cooling systems also add to the cost.
In both cases, added complexity will increase operating costs and reduce the economic lifespan of the batteries.
I presume the costs are in USD?
Yes
Thanks Willem. Have converted them to AUD for my records. Reside in Western Australia, so regularly check the WA SWIS grid battery operation.
Read the URL at the top of comment
“Clear rules for safe design of grid battery facilities are desperately needed if deadly catastrophe is to be avoided.”
Rule No. 1. Storage of chemical energy, from which grid-scale electrical output is then produced, must be in the form of solid, liquid, or gas hydrocarbons. Standard practices for protection against fire and explosion during idle periods, and during electricity output, have been proven over many decades and must be applied.
Rule No. 2. Don’t even think about grid-scale storage equipment where the electrical charge is directly accumulated by chemical means, enabling an internal short circuit or runaway thermal condition to occur in the event of even a minor fault. The magic smoke escapes much too easily for assurance of truly safe charging and discharging.
That’s it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Insanity brooks no limit.
Insanity is right. We have energy sources that are obviously unsuitable and wasteful. We will compensate for that with batteries that cannot possibly do the job either without vast redundancy.
Never mind that they are dangerous and have short life.
Here in Wokeachusetts, one should be built right next to the state legislature.
The present MA RFP allows projects up to 1,000 MW with 4 to 10 hour storage. Let’s say 1,000 tractor trailer sized batteries. Put that beside the legislature. Don’t forget the evacuation plan.
Not just forget the evacuation plan, but how about chaining the doors shut.
Big resistance to the construction of a large battery system in Wendell, MA.
https://nabunited.org/
What’s ironic is that the town is loaded with old hippies- many who dropped out of the many colleges nearby (in the CT River Valley) ended up there- land was dirt cheap- there was a famous hippie commune there decades ago- and the town has always been in favor of green energy- until green energy started showing up in that town. 🙂
They also hate all forestry. The state planned on a thinning of an oak stand in a state forest. The oak were the best trees. They were planning on harvesting only low value species and diseased trees. The locals went bonkers- saying the state was going to rape the land. When the loggers moved their machines to the site- the locals chained themselves to the machines. Eventually the job got done and nicely done too. Of course the locals all live in wood homes.
When you are talking GigaWatt Hour batteries, pumped storage seems a likely candidate. It requires lots of water and a suitable site for two impoundments at substantially different elevations. The principle drawbacks are high initial cost and unimpressive turnaround efficiency — about 70 percent. But it can handle lots of cycling, isn’t subject to thermal runaway, and can last for many decades with minimal maintenance.
Seems like if you have that right set of circumstances, normal hydro-electric would be a better bet.
Environmentalists would love it if you pumped the major rivers dry for storage.
Or you could pump sea water into a major valley in a mountainous region. They would like that too.
How about placing the impoundment ponds in a vertical alignment with a straight drop between them? Costly digging and construction but far less evaporation considering the secondary pond is not exposed to the elements.
Like the many thousands of beaver ponds that were on every stream in America before the Europeans showed up and almost wiped out that species.
Not quite like beaver ponds more like stacked reservoirs in a repurposed, tailed out open pit mine
Don’t forget the occasional free recharge from rain on the upper reservoir.
There’s one here in Wokeachusetts but the enviros have been fighting against it for decades.
Pumped water storage looks like a total disaster in Australia, a location not known for lots of mountains or water. The initial cost of Snowy 2 was around A$2bn, now A$12bn and still climbing, and nowhere near completion. Its max output is quoted as 2GW, less than 10% of the grid it is supposed to backup, but even this figure is in doubt, due to unequal top and bottom reservoir sizes. There have been calls to shut the useless project down before its cost doubles again.
The Tesla “Big Battery” array fire in Victoria, Australia last year proved that use of these mega capacity L-ion devices is an ongoing live experiment.
I’d hate to be living anywhere near one of these installations.
https://www.energy-storage.news/investigation-confirms-cause-of-fire-at-teslas-victorian-big-battery-in-australia/
Blast walls and active cooling?
Yes they need to be able to immediately deliver great amounts of cooling water to the nearby batteries. They need their own water tank or tower.
I am not sure about that…Tesla batteries that get wet have caught fire in the past.
Fascinating!
First paragraph re-formatted with commas by ChatGPT.
“An alert Massachusetts watchdog group has blown the whistle on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for issuing potentially catastrophic guidance for building grid-scale battery facilities. They are specifying a standard which is only meant for small batteries, making some rules deadly wrong at grid scale. Turns out this fallacy is widespread nationally, making their warning that much more important.”
Agreed, but I was criticized for using too many commas so cut way back.
They were hoping no one would notice.
Oops.
“We are not guinea pigs for anybody; we are not going to experiment, we are not going to take risk.”
-Mike McGinty; Mayor of Island Park, New York; commenting on the passage of a moratorium this July on grid scale batteries after a proposal to install them there.
He should have said “unnecessary risk”, since everything involves risk.
What risk is incurred by not allowing the facility? I think the mayor said it right.
Conversely they are putting grid battery clusters all over heavily populated Brooklyn and Queens with no objection from the NYC Government. The utility says it is cheaper than building new transmission to meet increasing need due to EVs. Safety obviously irrelevant.
Haste makes waste but in this era of Rahm Emanuel moments of stimulus funding opportunities from disasters, you have to also look at their other spending priorities.
As one young socialist told me, “I don’t want to be relatively safe, I want to be safe.”
NFPA standards are created and updated by volunteer committees, from people usually with some sort of fire prevention background. The standards are debated and formed by a consensus of the committee. As to why there are no standards for anything larger, my guess would be that the 855 committee has not been able to come to any consensus about them.
And I think that on it’s own should make people stop and think.
That is my guess too. Especially the spacing and fire safety generally. Too hot to handle.
These people want to build a system that will make the recent LA disaster look like a Girl Scout campfire.
The rules will be written shortly after the first facility blows a town to the hereafter. That is the American way. (though we also like to make regulations about things that will never happen – we’re kind of schizophrenic like that sometimes.)
What are these large batteries designed to power when the grid system has a power fail?
Many facilities have diesel or nat. gas electric generating systems for suppling emergency power. For example, all high-rise buildings have emergency power for lighting hallways and stairways. Chemistry labs have emergency power for fume hood exhaust fans. Hospitals have emergency power generation as do air port control towers. Even power plants have emergency power backup. Communication companies have backup power.
Super markets have emergency for lighting and the cash registers but not for refrigeration systems.
We probably do not need these expensive and dangerous L-ion batteries.
I live in a state where backup generator emissions are strictly controlled and limited by our state DEQ. Company environmental team has to send in monthly reports of run time, fuel use and reasons for running the generator.
These are Moss Landing scale facilities, right? I would think that disaster is hard for Mass to pretend did not happen.
Moss Landing is never discussed here in Wokeachusetts. Only the wonders of green energy! 🙂
In fact Belsito & Co have produced short videos for three communities protesting batteries that feature the Moss Landing giant flames. The article I write about here includes a good picture of it with the headline.
At Moss Landing just 350 MW went up. MA projects could be bigger. A 700 MW project has been proposed in Everett next to a hotel and Casino.
NAFPA has procedures to notify the Technical Committee and the Executive Council on an emergency basis. The chair (listed at the beginning of the document) and the staff liaison should be notified at once. As a former member of PPE standards committees (Structural and Proximity Fire Fighting PPE, and Chemical and Biological PPE), I feel certain that the Tech Committee chairs would want to address the issue.
Another important question would be what committee oversees fire response for large battery fires? NFPA, IEEE and NIST should all be contacted regarding both issues. The International Association of Fire Chiefs would also be another interested group.
For the sake of accuracy would everyone note that MW is a measure of power, not energy. I could make the assumption that they really mean MWh, i.e 1000 units (kWh), which is frankly not very much. Might keep a hamlet going for a couple of hours.
My Tundra truck with a full tank stores the equivalent of about one MWh.
If I’m reading this right, Mass is looking to build 3500 MW(h) of capacity, or 3500 Tundra Equivalent Units (TEU). Moss Landing Vistra was 300 MW(h) – 300 TEU. Basically, a medium size parking lot of stored energy. Not much stored energy, but it caused a disaster the scale of which is still playing out.
Seems like a lot of disaster potential for the energy stored
Unfortunately the law as usual is in MW. The two year procurement is 3,500 MW of 4 to 10 hour batteries so no way to know the MWh, just a big range.
I’d be shocked (no pun intended) if Wokeachusetts updates its battery regs.
You would be able to see the explosion from here.
with https://e-catworld.com/2025/09/23/thunderstorm-generator-mass-production-announcement/ it becomes obvious that coal or oil-fired boilers may easily trump solar farms and wind mills, especially given the tremendous CO2 cost of these “renewable” technologies.
There’s definitely a lack of engineering and planning for all the wind and solar projects because if they did it proper they would never be built. Or, there is, they know it, but then there would be no project and no money.
mie, you are precisely correct, it really is that simple. It’s fraud, not a scheme, hoax or farce. Fraud, don’t doubt it.
Good summary of Moss Landing battery fire linked below. I think discussion about NFPA855 capacity limitation is not nearly as important as construction consideration, battery type, spacing and best fire suppression/containment measures.
https://www.batterytechonline.com/stationary-batteries/moss-landing-battery-fire-fallout-repercussions
This is “green energy”. Just as wind farms are given an environmental pass for bird and whale migration impacts, we need to ignore safety. Let’s designate the back yards of all the politicians voting for these extravagantly costly and short lived batteries as the primary locations of choice.
Massachusetts already has some of the lower 48’s highest retail consumer electricity prices. This will just add more to that burden.
Wind, solar and storage don’t work, stop building them. CO2 can’t cause catastrophic global warming, stop saying it can. Build things that work, coal, gas and nuclear work. It is that simple.