Hi welcome to Ev Blog Breaking News Straight off the teletype. Uh, we've got a battery fire. A Tesla Battery Fire. Check it out.

This comes from just tweeted from Seven News. Look at this. Ah, doesn't look good. Um, called the Victoria Big Battery.

It's in Morable, uh, in Victoria and it's supposed to be like the well. one of the largest uh, Tesla battery uh, storage facilities in the world I believe. Um, and twice as big as our previous biggest one here in Australia which was the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Might have a look at that in a minute, but um, yeah, it's on fire.

Toxic smoke is a big thing and they've issued toxic smoke. uh, warnings because you don't want to breathe this stuff in. And oh, look, it's spread to this one over here as well. Well, it's got like charring and there's something that's all bent out of shape.

There is that? like there's the heat doing that or whatever? But yeah, obviously it started in one of the cells in here and it's just engulfed these packs because they come as these are units here. Now This is a 450 megawatt hour facility which is absolutely enormous. 300 watts, watts, 300 megawatts. Uh, peak power capability 450 megawatt hours? Now it's not actually finished yet.

I believe. like they're just in the process of testing it at the moment. and well, an aerial photo of it. This comes from the Abc, although I guess the Abc choppers in the air there and as you can see like it's in big farmland.

I guess the farmer like whoever owned uh this land probably sold it to them or rented it to them. You'll probably want to rent. You don't want to sell it, You want to rent it to them anyway? Um, yeah, you can see that there's this one over in the corner. It looks like they got more over here under construction here.

This is why it wasn't fully online yet. Apparently it was discontinued from the grid, so I'm not sure what it was. Yeah, what it was doing. Do they even have like internal loads and things like surely they'd have some sort of like in the boxes next to them might have like a dummy load they can do like discharge cycles into.

I don't know if you know details, leave it in the comments down below. but yeah, it certainly was not finished yet. And uh, it's obviously nearby to these, uh, power lines here. So yep, it's Kamagutsa and the magic smoke has escaped.

But as Elon said, everything's better with fire. Now this raises a couple of interesting questions. like why would you know? Because obviously battery systems like this. they're exothermic, right? Which means that once they catch on fire, they're self-fulfilling They're self-perpetuating right? The fire will just keep going, the energy will just feed upon itself.

And you know, as Lithium, battery fires are serious business. They're practically impossible to stop once you start them. The only way to do that is to like isolate individual um, cells. you know, physical barrier or a space barrier.

And given all this land they've got, you gotta actually question, why do they have them so close together like this? I mean you, You see it in Um, here's here's the company that actually Um is in charge like they own this system. They bought it from Tesla. They're in store. I don't believe Tesla actually install these systems.

Please correct me if I'm wrong down below. But anyway, uh, Neo-n I guess is how you pronounce that. They actually run lots. lots of like renewable solar wind power storage.

They've got like seven power plants here, 33 wind power, 58 solar plants and stuff like that and you can have a look. This is their Victorian Big Battery so this is another look. It looks like they have a big substation over here and this is when early on it was. So the fire is like down here somewhere and this one's still under construction as we saw from the photo before.

and these ones. all this stuff here we saw that's um, actually to connect it into the grid and stuff I believe. So yeah, it's a Big Daddy. 450 megawatt hours? Um, absolutely enormous.

And before that, yeah, it was the Hornsdale. The biggest one here was the Hornsdale one. Hornsdale Power Reserve. Uh, they don't have any good photos of that and just look.

The fire is just like ripping into the ones next to it and they're like, like what is there what? like a foot of gap there between them? So it's I'm. I'm not sure how you can expect these to actually um stop spreading and this is supposed to be a photo of under construction. Although they're different because you'll notice that there's no fans on top of those. So um yeah, why? there's fans on top of these ones as you can see like each, uh, each unit there like has this big fan, what looks like a fan on the back of the thing.

So yeah, are these are the design of these ones any different? I don't know any commercial Tesla battery pack experts out there. um able to tell us what the Uh deal is or the Tesla just supply the the Uh rack units themselves which which we can have a look at. So yeah, let's actually have a look at. Here's inside one of these uh containers so you can see.

I'm not sure what capacity each one is, but you can see that they're individual slabs here. and of course these would be uh, like probably uh, 2170 cells in there like the standard Tesla cells from their Giga factory. And then you've got a water pumped liquid cooling up here like this, thermal management and I guess you can slide. these are in in racks and you can slide them in and out and they've got.

this is where they do cell monitoring and protection and all that sort of jazz. and they boast about that. So they boast that the individual battery packs like that, they can slide out. They boast about how hundreds of embedded sensors.

Power Pack offers unparalleled performance, safety and reliability, and temperature thermal control system. Internal liquid cooling dating system allows pinpoint temperature control within a power pack, a dual coolant and refrigerant loop system. But see, the problem is. and they're supposed to be weatherproof? Like um, yes, I don't know what the fan on the tops doing? Um, because looks like some of them need it and some don't.

I don't know. Anyway, the whole idea. Like each one of those might have like a thousand cells in it or something. Each one of those little packs might have like a thousand cells in, and when you got that many, you just like you're bound to get a Folia somewhere along the line.

So it's not. I'm not going to say it's not surprising, but you know it's like when you've got that many cells in there. And when potentially, um, because they're exothermic. If one of them develops an internal fault that heats up, then well, I'm not sure about the internal construction and how that you know that energy will be dissipated.

Sure, like, you know they can cut the load off to it and everything else which is fine and dandy. But because they're exothermic, that's not going to do anything. It's not the load causing The problem. it's internal to the cell itself.

So internal the physical construction and then that spreads to the next cell. It heats up and before you know it, you've come a gutsy yeah, I don't know if I'd want to be in the uh, high volume battery pack business like this. My own car. my Iron Hyundai Ioniq, uh, car has been recalled.

They've recalled them all worldwide because like eight of them caught on fire or something. and so you know it's like sheer numbers. It's it's going to eventually happen unless you use a non-exothermic battery technology. so don't know who this.

Chris Van Der Stock? Thank you very much. Here we go. Got some aerial footage but under construction. areas smaller than the football oval at Geelong's Gm Hba Football Overwatch.

This site is located 18 kilometers north west of Geelong and still very much a construction site with most groundwork done. Now as I said, with the amount of land they've got, you've got a question like why would you put them this close together? Or at least like you know, even if you're constructed like just a brick wall around each one or something that would just like individually contain each. Um, you know, like pod. I guess what is what? One of these things, you know, this whole thing, Um, obviously.

Or maybe like a double one or something like that. Or is it yeah, it looks like there's one of these controllery or something Or interface, uh, boxes, junction boxes or whatever for each one of these. I'm not sure if you know what they're doing, leave it in the comments down below. but yeah, why can't you put like just a big wall that's slightly taller than the whole thing like between these to stop the fire spreading? Now, like this is breaking news, so I don't know how damaged it's going to be, but obviously this one over here is going to that that looks damaged.

The metal looks like it's just warped and everything there and this one's completely gone. I'd be surprised if it doesn't spread a bit. Hopefully it doesn't spread further, but it could potentially spread to that one there. Um, you know it's given the the prevailing winds and stuff like that are going to, um, cause the issue there.

But uh, yeah. like why wouldn't you just spread them out a bit more? Have they done any calculations or testing as to like, you know how close these things should be together? Because you know, possibly if you just put a wall around it or something, or if you had a greater gap of course, if you doubled the distance. do you like, you know, half the you know, get a quarter of the heat? I don't know. fire experts down below Fieries, I'm sure I've got some in my audience.

Please leave it down below. But yeah, when you pack them so close together and that's you see in all the news reports that that is their main fear is that it's going to spread to the other packs and not only is that a cost impact, but well, the whole place going up. Yeah, and producing even more toxic smoke that's going to spread to local communities and things like that. That's very, very bad.

So yeah, I don't know why. obviously it's cost Once again, I don't think it's actually Tesla who actually installed this this. They just supplied the systems and help you know manage the installation and stuff like that. but it would be the owners who would you know make make the call on how close to put them together, what you know, whether or not you physically, um, separate them or put a wall between them or something like that.

Because this is common in data centers, my own Eev, blog, data center, for example, The golden rule is in a data center, you do not put your generator, your backup generator. You put that in a physically separate concrete room to the data servers and that wasn't done in the case of the Evlog server. So with the generator caught on fire, yeah oops it, you're well. they had to like sprinkle the whole uh room and the pole data center just flooded.

So it was. It was the water that damaged the surface. But the the concept is is the same that you physically keep these separate in a separate contained room. and they these are just, I don't know.

They figure they're out in the air. She'll be right. No worries. Okay, so it's not like a load thing.

Who knows what? I'm sure there'll be a huge well, no, but technically a private company owns them. Well, I think they're private. Um, there might be a public company. but anyway, basically a private company owns uh, this thing.

So I you know it's not being paid by our tax dollars I believe. Like the Um Energy Utilities. they just like, you know, hire these uh storage units. So I'm sure there's big money in the Victoria big battery.

And yeah, they just rent out the storage. It's cheaper than like on other online types of storage. And that brings me to the Hornsdale Power Reserve. I'll mention that a bit briefly.

There it is the Hornsdale Power Reserve. Um, that was Australia's biggest one. And that made all the news a couple of years back when Elon famously tweeted out that if we don't deliver this thing in like I don't know, 90 days or something, it's free. And sure enough, they actually delivered the packs and it wasn't free.

They had to pay for it. and um, so this is in um, South Australia When South Australia had the gigantic cascading blackouts and that was caused by yeah many things. Anyway, let's not go there. but um, they're they have actually released.

I was going to do a video on this and I never got around to it because it'd be quite a complicated one to do it justice. But it turns out this thing paid for itself within 12 months and then was making profit hand over fist. It was making money like there's no tomorrow and it basically became this big cash cow because they were just saving the money because the utilities had to rent these online. uh, I believe they were natural gas ones, or diesel backup and diesel generators or whatever that would spin up when they, when they needed them to for various, um, circumstances on the grid.

and they were renting, you know they they were paying like a like a monthly or a yearly rental thing and that's where they saved the money. These things when you purchase this and then once you've amatized the cost over a year or two it, you know it's then it's money for jam after that. So yeah, apparently the Hornsdale Power Reserve which was the biggest one at the time in the world I believe and it was a big deal and it was a huge success. So they were hoping and that was the same company.

so they were hoping to replicate the uh, success of that with, um, this new one They thought, oh, this is a cash cow, we'll build another, We'll keep building those. Thank you very much. You know you've got to be a huge company to invest the cash the Fiat into actually having these and buying these things because they buy these, they're an asset and then they rent them out to the utility companies at a very hefty profit. So yeah, I reckon the owner will be, uh, checking their warranty.

Imagine the fine print and the warranty for this thing. Is it like the owner's fault because they installed it without adequate protection to spread from you know, to the other ones. Like Tesla almost certainly are responsible for, like the one Rack I would guess. But then, what about the rack next to it? What about this one on this side of it here? What about like there? or do they supply the do they warranty the whole pod or the whole bank Like that? Um, and it's like, and what happened in like this bank, assuming that this one's damaged and has to be replaced, who's gonna, you know, who has to pony up the money for that? Well insurance, I don't know.

Um. but yeah. anyway, and anyone know exactly how many cells in a 450 megawatt hour and you can run the numbers? I'll leave that to those playing along at home for 450 megawatt hours, How many cells in this entire installation and calculate the odds of just one of them, You know, releasing the magic smoke, going exothermic, and well, taking out the whole lot. So yeah, like who's responsible if the whole thing catches on fire.

At what point is your insurance company going to go nut? You're you. You didn't install walls around these, so we're only going to pay for the one bank or something like that. And you're just not. You're screwed on the rest of them or something like that.

So insurance wise, I'm sure they're checking every dotted eye and every crossed tee in there, and I'm sure they'll save most of it. But yeah, look at that. Oh that poor bastard there. Yep, that's a roasted marshmallow.

You.