> ESV found a Megapack cooling system leak caused a short circuit resulting in overheating that led to a fire in a nearby battery compartment, which consequently damaged two Megapacks.
> There were further contributory factors with the Megapack in question being switched into an off-line service mode, resulting in the protection systems being inactive.
> A 24-hour delay in connecting the batteries to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system also meant there was no active monitoring of the Megapack alarms.
What the actual... how is something like this even allowed to be operational without monitoring?
You folks are acting as if some huge crime against humanity happened here. In reality nobody got hurt, the company who messed up will pay to put it right. They already indicated (in the linked report) that they learned from the incident and changed multiple things in their systems and procedures as a result.
And the cooling system should be continuously monitored for faults. Not just inspected after filling.
For the current to flow for long enough to heat the battery packs to cause a fire, there must have been a jet of water flowing for a long period of time. And no fusible links between that place and the battery.
It really seems like either very bad luck, or bad system design, or both.
Of course issues with sweet vs salt water
How many cooling system leaks (radiator+water pump related plumbing) result in vehicle engine fires per year?
I imagine the largest insurance companies have reasonably good data on this as a cause of total-loss of a vehicle.
How many times have you seen in person, or seen a photo of a burned out RV that somebody pushed too hard up a mountain pass without keeping an eye on the engine temperature?
The fault lies square with Tesla. No amount of RV analogies can dilute this.
Not excusing Tesla but the actual number of heat producing things that catch on fire every year (in general) because of cooling pump/cooling loop failure is quite a lot. In many categories of equipment.
I assure you an RV or other gas/diesel vehicle does NOT suddenly go "pop!" and produce an engine fire when the needle reaches the right hand side of the temperature gauge.
The temperature gauge warns you when the coolant is at risk of boiling; it's not a warning that the engine is about to spontaneously combust.
one of the points I was trying to make is that people don't maintain liquid cooling loops in general, and that's one of the more common instances of it.
do you live somewhere flat?
go ask the towtruck drivers who work the coquihalla highway in BC how many vehicle fires they see every year, and where those vehicle fires occur.
Almost none. Overheating is highly unlikely to cause a fire. Fuel leaks cause fires.
Fuel leaks and/or exhaust system failures, especially on turbocharged vehicles however...
This is the worst fault possible in an EV 101 scenario right here (touch metal -> instant death), so I'm surprised that with all Tesla's experience, they didn't consider an isolation leak as a serious fault. And I'm surprised that they allow the battery monitoring system to be disabled during servicing, especially the IMD (insulation monitoring device).
For example, typical solar inverter systems don't have isolation between the AC and DC sides. That means any chafed wire can be deadly. They do at least have leakage detection, but set at a 300mA level, which probably won't save your life.
Considering solar inverters already uses high frequency switching inside the per-string MPPT boost converter, it would have cost mere cents to put two windings on that inductor rather than one and get isolation with no downside.
The cynic in me says manufacturers don't add safety features not required by law, even if zero cost, because in the future laws might be updated to require that safety feature, preventing reuse of hardware already sold, which is good for business.
This is very yikes. I just installed such a system.
Do you know any way to test if that's a problem? And is it possible to fix without opening the inverter?
It's a battery pack, not a stash of U235 above the critical mass. Every recycling facility is more dangerous.
"The affected Megapacks failed safely despite total loss."
The paralels I can see:
- both involve energy installations.
- both happened in the same state.
The differences I can see:
- one involves a gas utility the other an electric one
- one has killed and hurt workers while the other did not killed nor injured anyone.
- one happened after several years of operation, the other happened during installation.
- one left the state without energy service for 20 days, the other did not affect service at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I love reading about how complex things go wrong, one of my favourite pastimes. So I thank you for your link. It just doesn’t seem that similar to me. Not sure you would be citing the same case for example have they not happened in the same state.
If I have to choose a failure which the Big Battery fire reminds me of I would rather choose the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse. Why? It seems these batteries had adequate safety functions and monitoring planned in for their operation. Just these systems were not activated during the installation in the right order. Similarly with the bridge it seems they did calculations with the full bridge in place, but nobody seems to have checked if the intermediate steps during the construction will stay up too.
Another similarility (to my untrained eyes) is the aim to install a system fast. The bridge project wanted to be a flagship for accelerated bridge building, and the big selling point of these Megapack installations is how fast they can be comissioned. With the bridge project we know that this demand for speediness was a contributing factor. Was it maybe also with the Big Battery fire too?
It's just in group signaling. "Hey this reminds me of <vaguely related thing>" is a more polite way of saying "look I know about X, I'm like you, gimme dat virtue points"
You see this on literally every virtue points (i.e. up-vote) based form of social media that's big enough that any given participant can blend in with the crowd.
The behavior is endemic these days you can't even post a picture of a rotten and falling down deck on the internet these days without some jerk derailing everything by dropping a link to the wikipedia page on the hyatt regency and then several more riding their coattails with quotes copied from the page.
He probably doesn't even consciously realize he's doing it.
A short in an offline device? That seems weird.
> A 24-hour delay in connecting the batteries to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system also meant there was no active monitoring of the Megapack alarms.
So a new pack was installed and connected but not monitored? What is the rationale behind that? Failures shouldn’t happen to new devices?
Any time a house is built, there's some time between the ceiling going up and the fire alarm installation being completed.
Nothing wrong with that - if it's done properly and carefully.
Interesting that even after installation Tesla are still involved in operationally managing the megapacks.
If you can make battery packs air cooled, that's a big, big weight saver.
