Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire District said at this point, most of the fire had gone out. A water-based mitigation system did not work as designed, Vistra's senior director of community affairs Brad Watson said at the conference. Earlier in the day, a Monterey Sheriff official had said there were no active fire suppression efforts going on, "as the best approach, according to fire staff, is to allow the building and batteries to burn."

Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
    6·
    20 hours ago

    You’re right, but I think less dense but safer and more sustainable options are the better choice for this

    • scratchee@feddit.ukEnglish
      11·
      18 hours ago

      We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.

      But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.

        • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          LIthium Iron Phosphate is cheapest relatively dense battery type. Sodium ion will be if lithium get expensive.

          • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            You can draw an arbitrary line of density you find good enough. But with how much space us wasted in some countries, that line should vary a bit place to place

            • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              1 hour ago

              With 40 foot containers providing utility or smaller scale storage solutions of 2.9mwh per container with LFP batteries, that is about 170mwh per acre. Before stacking. I don’t believe a lack of density matters anywhere in the world. Spare space inside buildings is usually sufficient for building needs.

              • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
                1·
                14 minutes ago

                A lack of density definitely matters in some places. I’ve been to a bunch of countries now, some have plenty of space, some really don’t

        • scratchee@feddit.ukEnglish
          21·
          18 hours ago

          Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.

          Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.

            • scratchee@feddit.ukEnglish
              1·
              7 hours ago

              Dams are a normally a power supply rather than a battery. I was more thinking pumped storage hydro. Which is usually done where theres 2 lakes next to each other at very different heights, so you can “store” power by pumping water up and release by pumping back down.