I've noticed something about news media, and it may just be confirmation bias, but journalists really like to associate Tesla with fires.
Electrical fires aren't rare, especially when there is a lot of energy involved. Heck, the pass-through or whatever in my office building from the solar panels caught fire and it was dealt with without a news article about it.
Its Australia and they're very much worried about forest fires right now.
No different than all the fire-reports from PG&E when wildfires were raging in California.
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The thing about these Li-Ion batteries, in general, is that electricity serves as a natural "spark" and the electrolyte serves as a natural "fuel".
No other storage mechanism stores both "spark sources" AND "fuel sources" together. As such, any Lithium-Ion battery installation is suspect. It doesn't matter if you're making Samsung batteries or utility scale batteries in Australia, a Lithium Ion battery can (and do regularly) spontaneously combust.
Sure, you can point to larger explosions like Beirut explosion: but that fertilizer only caught on fire when nearby fireworks caught on fire from them wielding a roof. That's how these normal fire accident stories go: you have a hilarious amount of incompetence involved.
Not so with Li-Ion.
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In the case of California's PG&E, we have 100-year old electrical lines that are operating well outside of their expected lifespan... to the point that we can see them physically drooping from the summer heat. Its a clear cut case of "lack of funding".
In contrast, this here is a brand new Lithium-Ion battery pack. It deserves the eyeballs. Heck, the other fire incidents deserve the eyeballs too (fires are dangerous), even if they're somewhat understandable.
I consider journalist sensationalist as well, but in this case:
1) Tesla is a stock market darling, so a lot of people have a lot of money riding on it. Some of those people may make different decisions with extra information they didn't have previously like the commonness of electrical fires. So we're not always talking about industry experts here. Could just be Joe Smoe software developer who plowed his equity grant into the stonk after vesting.
2) Tesla does market big battery packs to go in the home as well, which means this is a safety issue for people considering that. It's not like they are replacing existing battery packs and know the details. They are replacing either nothing or a diesel generator from Home Depot, so they may not be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages. Tesla doesn't have a good reason to be more forthcoming than is legally required either, leaving it to journalists.
So yeah, journalists just want eyeballs to sell ads to, but Tesla just wants to sell electric stuff. The latter has less reason to be truthful about the dangers.
What are the numbers? As a society, we wisely look at incidents and determine how isolated they are. A lot of the same people who get furious about people being afraid of the recent vaccines because of anecdotal reports jump onto these stories and immediately make statements like this. In both cases, the anecdotes should be treated like what they are, not lent credence without further information.
I could just as easily say that Pfizer has less incentive to be truthful about the dangers of their products. But here's the thing:
Neither Tesla or Pfizer wants to get sued or have their brand destroyed. That's a hell of an incentive to not sell dangerous products.
We all have batteries all over the place all the time and the idea that they could spontaneously catch fire just by their nature of being small containers filled with energy is thrilling and scary.
It's the same reason the Samsung phone battery fires became such a story.
I don't see anything misleading, the article says exactly this.
And I don't believe that testing was supposed to put things on fire, I presume fire is not supposed to happen at all. Definitely worth reporting.
The massive rush of journalists (seemingly none of whom bothered to do the most basic research like, I don't know, getting into a Tesla and looking at how it's Autopilot system works) who were jumping on the "Tesla self-driving system is killing people and needs to be regulated" bandwagon was shocking. A story in the LA Times was particularly ignorant and foolish.
Any owner of a Tesla could have been contacted via this primitive device that today's journalists are afraid to use called a telephone, and interviewed about whether it can function when there are no lines painted on the road, or if it's remotely convenient to get the vehicle to drive with nobody at the wheel.
I chalk it up to a way of thinking that permeates the brains of quantitatively illiterate people (the vast majority of the US population, and the overwhelming majority of journalists):
They think in terms of stories within a framework of a bigger story/narrative. They don't let data point them to reality. They instead think in terms of the privileged white male Elon Musk exploiting his workers and customers with malicious indifference in the pursuit of profit. Anecdotes from people, provided that they are designated as some form of victimized/marginalized group, are treated with the veracity of peer reviewed research. Anyone bringing up hard data that doesn't fit this narrative is attacked for a lack of empathy.
The attacks on Tesla are a perfect lens to view the corruption of journalistic institutions as they transformed themselves into Buzzfeed style confirmation-bias machines, harvesting clicks from emotionally charged lemmings reading the latest tribalistic takes from the former bloggers they employ.
The journalists don't come up with the titles, the editors do.
Do you take an issue with the actual, factual reporting in the article? Or even with the factual accuracy of the title?
All of your complaints on this thread come across as you desperately trying to defend Tesla for something that...actually happened. Yes, it happened "during testing." But it still happened.
This isn't much better than a random fire, in fact, it's arguably worse. An industrial lithium battery has absolutely no business catching on fire within 24 hours of being put into use. That's simply unacceptable: it means that the significant errors were made in either the manufacturing, assembly, or installation phases. That would be news even if this wasn't a Tesla installation, especially given that the fire was so large a toxic smoke alert had to be issued for the area.
There was no bias in the reporting. There was a fire, during testing. And that's what the articles actually reported. It's possible that the fire wasn't related to manufacturing/assembly issues on Tesla's end (i.e., that it was related to installation), but as the fire just happened that information won't be known for a few days.
The only bias here is your own. Tesla makes mistakes. Accept it, and move on.
> The cause of the fire at the Victorian Big Battery site in Geelong, Victoria is not yet known.
It may be too early to be attributing blame to Tesla. Even the safest systems can be compromised by technician scissorhands or first day forklifter. Something as simple as damage in shipping can cause these issues. Which is why they test them immediately after installation.
I don't think anyone would honestly think Tesla can't make mistakes or rush something they weren't prepared for. Especially considering their cars... But they are certainly accomplishing something amazing in Australia.
I don’t see how it would possibly be worse than it happening in use V’s. Testing. This is part of why there is testing. Any system a small percentage of components will be out of spec or defective. Or damaged in transit. There are on the order of 1+ million or more individual battery cells in this installation, which means also multiple times that in electrical connections, plus BMS electronics. Assuming it stays isolated to a single unit, and no other fires occur, I would say their system design is excellent.
Do you know how everyone who isn't Tesla tests equipment like this?
They test the units individually, before connecting them to the system/grid/etc, especially if there are safety risks involved, like a fire that can't be put out until it burns itself out.
Everyone defending Tesla on this simply doesn't understand what proper safety looks like at an industrial/utility scale.
Well, I see a lot of that stuff in the media, yes. This is new technology, so of course we're watching it closely. Have you never seen coverage of a pipeline rupture, or an oil train derailment? I certainly have... it's generally a pretty big deal.
Almost oil and gas spills and fires get effectively no attention, despite their being a very significant number of them. Typically only the largest disasters get any sort of coverage, unlike battery technology.
Melting down mountains and creating millions of tons of toxic waste all for the sake of batteries to save the environment was already questionable at best. Burning them into even more tons of toxic fumes is just adding insult to injury.
Off that topic, I suspect they aren't putting out the fires because the water and foams required would destroy the nearby battery electronics and set back the project timetables.
What nonsense. LiIon batteries have many cycles of reuse and they almost never get thrown away. As volume get larger literally every large players wants to recycle as that will actually be cheaper at large volume then traditional mining.
As of now, it actually looks more like there are to many recycling company fighting over to few batteries they can recycle. With large players trying to do it themselves in addition to all the startups.
And only less then like 0.0001% burn up in a fire so that really not all that relevant.
You suffer under the illusion that recycling means no toxic waste and no energy cost. Every few thousand cycles, they must be broken down and remade at the cost of thousands more tons of toxins. Those toxins and precursors must also be mined by melting down mountains.
That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail. It just continues to build with each battery cycle.
Nuclear energy storage is much better.
Nuclear waste is tiny by comparison. All the long term nuclear waste ever produced would fit in the footprint of the toxic waste of any one of those battery factories in a single year. But they even bigger difference is that we will reuse that waste when new nuclear deposits become scarce.
Likewise, if done correctly, gravity and hydro offer much higher output per unit of energy stored while having minimal waste.
Even in the absolute best case, batteries slow the destruction of the planet rather than solve the problem.
First of all, I don't suffer under a nirvana fallacy. Of course recycling uses energy.
Second, I'm a huge fan of nuclear power so you don't have to convince me of that.
Even if you have nuclear power, you still need EV and lots of batteries, so that is not a solution.
Hydro is limited in location and not a scalable solution. Gravity highly depends on what you are talking about, and most of the proposed solution are not capital efficient.
These however also solve partly a different problem then these batteries solve, in terms of respond speed, frequency regulation and efficiency.
Recycling is of course not perfectly efficient, but current generation batteries have 20 year lifetime and with reuse maybe even 30 years. Some of the next generation can push that even further, wont be recycled for 40 years. Maybe they are recycled more often, but maybe simply because the materials inside are more valuable then the battery of that technology level.
So yes, of course it uses some resources and something has to be mined, but that is true for almost anything.
In terms of grid storage, batteries are some of the better solution. Current Nickel based LiIon will be replaced by LFP and pure LiIon will never solve the complete grid battery challenge. Maybe with Sodium batteries. There are also Liquid Metal batteries, or things like Iron-Air batteries. These solutions are scalable in combination.
All that said, I would much prefer to have a bunch of thorium thermal breeders.
> That sludge must be locked away in vaults waiting for containment to fail.
Can you please show exactly what you mean here? Like what exactly this sludge is=
Electrical fires aren't rare, especially when there is a lot of energy involved. Heck, the pass-through or whatever in my office building from the solar panels caught fire and it was dealt with without a news article about it.