It took firefighters 3 days to bring the blaze nether power aft a occurrence broke retired successful a 13-tonne lithium 'Megapack' artillery astatine the Geelong site.
A three-day blaze that wholly incinerated 2 elephantine Tesla batteries astatine a immense vigor retention tract successful Australia was astir apt sparked by a coolant leak, information regulators said Tuesday.
The occurrence broke retired connected July 30 successful a 13-tonne lithium "Megapack" battery, which is the size of a shipping container, and past dispersed to a 2nd artillery astatine the tract adjacent Geelong, successful Victoria authorities southwest of Australia's 2nd metropolis Melbourne.
It took firefighters 3 days to bring nether control. No injuries were reported.
"The astir apt basal origin of the incidental was a leak wrong the Megapack cooling strategy that caused a short circuit that led to a occurrence successful an physics component," said a method probe by the information regulator Energy Safe Victoria.
The occurrence dispersed wrong the archetypal artillery and past to the adjacent battery, it said successful the review, which relied connected a Tesla investigation, an introspection of the scene, video footage and information from the incident.
The artillery site—one of the largest globally—is designed to store energy produced by renewables and nonstop powerfulness to the grid.
The authorities regulator said it had told Telsa that it had "no objection" to enactment resuming connected commissioning the Victoria Big Battery project, built by French renewable vigor steadfast Neoen utilizing Tesla batteries.
Following the method review, Energy Safe Victoria said it would present find if determination were immoderate information breaches and, if so, determine connected immoderate enforcement action.
The safety regulator said Tesla indispensable supply the last results of its ain probe into wherefore the occurrence dispersed to the 2nd battery.
It said some Tesla and Neoen had cooperated successful the probe.
The probe recovered that the archetypal artillery to drawback occurrence was successful work for 13 hours earlier being switched to an "offline" mode, which turned disconnected its monitoring strategy and prevented alarms from being sounded.
It recommended a bid of changes to forestall a caller occurrence including checking each battery's cooling strategy for leaks and improving the alarm and surveillance systems.
Designers were moving to "fully mitigate" the hazard of fire spreading from 1 artillery to another, it said.
© 2021 AFP
Citation: Coolant leak 'likely' sparked elephantine Tesla artillery occurrence successful Australia (2021, September 28) retrieved 28 September 2021 from https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-coolant-leak-giant-tesla-battery.html
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