Utilities and their customers are both using a wider array of technologies. For public power, that includes incorporating new utility-scale assets, such as energy storage systems, as well as better recognizing how customer-sited, behind-the-meter technology can interact with the system. Today’s modern household potentially has a wide array of electronic devices: a laptop or tablet for each family member, an electric vehicle in the garage, e-bikes and scooters in the driveway, and smartphones. It might also have solar panels on the roof and a battery storage system to help keep these and myriad other household devices powered.
With the increasing ubiquity of these technologies comes new risks that are important to understand. Just as technology has evolved, so must utilities’ safety education and training about best practices.
Battery Boom
Most of these new devices contain a lithium-ion battery. According to a report from McKinsey & Company, the global demand for lithium-ion batteries is projected to increase to nearly 4.7 terawatt-hours by 2030 — a sixfold increase from the 700 gigawatt-hour demand in 2022.
“Any device with a lot of energy in a small footprint that is not designed, maintained, or operated correctly can fail,” said Matthew Paiss, technical adviser in the Battery Materials and Systems Group with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The higher the energy density, the greater the potential for that failure to release, whether it’s heat or gas. When it comes to batteries, lithium-ion is a very energy-dense technology.”
When manufactured, stored, and maintained correctly, lithium-ion is a safe technology. However, these batteries are unregulated in many common devices, and their failure can lead to a range of potentially hazardous issues, including fire.
“Lithium-ion batteries in technologies like e-bikes, scooters, and skateboards tend to be cheaper or knockoffs. [A lot of] people get them off the internet, and they don’t know what they’re getting,” said Scott Gibson, manager of the Energy Storage and Emerging Technology group at the Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington state. “There are e-bikes where emphasis has been put on safety and quality, and those are usually the more expensive ones. But when people buy something cheap off the internet, not a lot of thought has been put into battery safety.”
Utilities across the country are working to help consumers understand the risks of lithium-ion battery technology, how to use and store these technologies safely, and how to respond to emergency situations.
Another component is the need to build understanding and awareness of the safety measures related to utility-scale battery storage facilities. This includes training first responders about how to safely respond to incidents involving these facilities and helping other stakeholders understand measures built in to mitigate risk of incidents.
Outreach and Education
The New York Power Authority, which operates 16 generating facilities and more than 1,400 circuit miles of transmission lines, has installed two battery energy storage systems.
One system was installed at its headquarters in White Plains and is a 250 kilowatt-hour, 50-kilowatt battery storage unit. The second system is a 20-megawatt facility in Chateaugay that connects into the state’s electric grid. It consists of five 53-foot walk-in enclosures, each containing more than 19,500 batteries that can collectively store and dispatch up to 4 MW of power.
NYPA uses both installations to raise awareness about lithium-ion battery safety with the local community, including emergency responders and elected officials, as well as internal utility staff.
NYPA met with the fire department in both locations many times, inviting crews to walk through the facilities to show them the technology used, where the equipment is located, and the emergency response plan. The authority also held educational sessions in a classroom setting with the fire department to provide members with in-depth knowledge about the technology.
The range of knowledge among the fire departments varied greatly. “The fire department in upstate was rural, and they were volunteers; they had some knowledge, but it was new to them overall,” said Steve Wilkie, manager of research and development with NYPA. “We walked them through the whole gamut of information. In White Plains, there are two other installations in the area, so that department was somewhat familiar with battery storage.”
NYPA also ensured its internal emergency response team was prepared for any potential issues by holding one-on-one meetings with each staff member and making sure they have all the documentation needed to respond appropriately. As changes occur on the installation, Wilkie makes sure he communicates thoroughly with staff.
Wilkie’s experience in battery storage technology helps deliver the message effectively to fire departments and the broader community. In 1991, he worked with the power authority in nuclear generation, supporting one of its plants as a fire protection engineer. Later, he worked with another energy company as a fire protection engineer before returning to NYPA as manager of research and development.
It’s important to NYPA to spread the message of safe battery storage technology with the overall industry as well. The authority welcomes visitors to tour the facilities, including fire departments from other jurisdictions, technology providers and other stakeholders, like the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent, nonprofit energy research and development organization.
“The more outreach you do with local first responders and other stakeholders involved, the better,” Wilkie said. “You’re ensuring consistency from conceptual design through permitting and final system operations.”
Knowledge gained by these facilities in part led NYPA to participate in New York’s Inter-Agency Fire Safety Working Group, which aims to ensure the safety and security of energy storage systems across the state. In February, the group released 15 draft recommendations that include potential updates to the Fire Code of New York State.
“Most of the draft recommendations we’ve already implemented at NYPA to some extent. Some represent best practices we felt were important,” Wilkie said. “For example, if you go to the current New York State Building Code, it does not have a code requiring an emergency response plan for each installation. We thought an emergency response plan was very important as part of our installations and should be in the code.”
Shared Exploration
Snohomish County PUD took a similar approach to building understanding of battery storage technology.
It built a microgrid emergency backup system in Arlington, Washington, that includes a 500-kW solar array with smart inverters, a 1,000-kW and 1,400-kWh lithium-ion battery storage system, several vehicle-to-grid charging stations for the PUD’s electric vehicle fleet, and a solar tree.
“This project was designed to demonstrate everything you could do with and all the benefits of energy storage,” Gibson said. “We know it’s part of our future, so we need to understand the technical challenges, costs, and benefits.”
When creating the facility, the PUD began working with the local fire department to design the battery’s fire safety system. In fact, Paiss worked with the PUD to educate the fire department. As a former fire captain, he spoke the crew’s language and was highly effective in disseminating safety education to members.
The emergency response training is external, with the fire department, and internal, with PUD staff. “If there’s a fire, our crews will show up with the fire department; they have to know how to interact and who’s responsible for what tasks,” Gibson said. Every year, the PUD holds a meeting on the site to talk through the safety plan and conduct a fire drill.
The project also serves as an example of battery storage capabilities to the broader community. Snohomish County PUD works with commercial and industrial customers who are interested in building their own microgrids to move beyond diesel generators toward renewable energy. The PUD educates those customers on the costs of a microgrid, what it takes to build and maintain them, and offers tips to keep the installations safe.
National outreach is a top priority for the PUD as well. The utility shares reports and presentations with other organizations, like the American Public Power Association and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Staff travel regularly to industry events and conferences, like the Northwest Energy Systems Symposium and Energy Storage Summit USA, to discuss safety. The PUD offers tours of the installation to universities, organizations, and other utilities interested in learning more about the technology.
“Those organizations reach out to us because the PUD is already out there for being very innovative. We talk at many conferences and write numerous papers on topics like microgrids and EVs,” said Aaron Swaney, the PUD’s public relations and media liaison. “Very few people have done something like this, so when you actually build it, everyone wants to see how it’s done and how they can make it work for themselves.”
An Important Distinction
“We as a utility have been doing what we’re doing for 75 years, and now we have to change the way we’re doing it in the next 10 to 20 years — and there aren’t enough people at any one utility to do it correctly,” Gibson said. “We need to see what others are doing, share information, and talk about lessons learned and what’s working for utilities around the country.”
A top challenge is in educating the public about battery technology, primarily with the most commonly deployed lithium-ion batteries. It’s important to Snohomish County PUD and other utilities to explain the differences between lithium-ion battery technology in unregulated devices like scooters and e-bikes compared to the technology used in more-regulated areas, like utility-scale systems and light-duty vehicles.
“The biggest problem right now is guilt by association. Emergency responders respond in far greater numbers to personal mobility devices and e-bikes than to EVs and personal storage devices,” said Paiss. “The public associates lithium-ion failure with e-bike failure, but in those cases you don’t know who made them or how they were maintained. They are completely different from more-regulated technologies,” such as EVs and energy storage.
The Electrical Safety Foundation has materials to help educate consumers on safely using and storing lithium-ion battery-powered devices. These tips include looking for safety certifications on the batteries, disconnecting charging devices once charging is complete, and storing items in temperature-controlled locations.
