The Truth About Battery Fires - Gore Street Capital

**Ed Porter** (0:00)
I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission.
Here's something most people get wrong about battery fires. They picture a cell fault triggering the issue, but only 11 percent of incidents actually start that way. The more common cause, how the site was built, how the site is operated, the design around it. The good news, failure rates have dropped by 99 percent since 2018 The harder truth is that fewer than a third of incidents ever get a root cause attached. The question isn't really, are battery safe? It's how much better could we get? Today, I'm joined by Dan Sherlock-Burke, Director of Asset Management at Gore Street Capital to walk us through all of it. Before we dive in, if you want to go deeper on battery availability, ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, and if you're enjoying the show, please drop a comment, give us a rating. This helps us reach others who might find the show useful too.
Hello, Dan. Welcome to Transmission.

**Dan Sherlock-Burke** (1:06)
Hi, Ed. It's a pleasure to be here. I feel like I've walked into a famous area for me.

**Ed Porter** (1:12)
Yeah, it's our pleasure to have you here. I wonder if people do know this Eastern backdrop, having seen a few episodes, maybe it's just, it looks so specifically London. Anyway.

**Dan Sherlock-Burke** (1:26)
Yeah, yeah. And actually this is, for me also, it feels almost like a rite of passage as well now in the industry.
If you've got a voice and lots of opinions and worthwhile things to say to get onto this podcast, it's kind of a big thing. So yeah, pleasure to be here. Our pleasure.

**Ed Porter** (1:41)
And we love to make sure that people will use a platform so that anyone can listen to what's going on in the space, because we think it's super interesting. And let's get into it. So what's one thing that everyone gets wrong about fires in the battery industry?

**Dan Sherlock-Burke** (1:55)
So this is an interesting question. I think there's not one thing that everybody gets wrong, obviously, but if you come from the perspective of what does the public generally think is going to happen as well? I mean, we typically, I think if you ask the random person in the street, if that battery catches fire, what's going to happen? Their vision of it is the whole site is going to go up in flames and you're going to have this massive catastrophic event which could cause sort of wide reaching harm to the area. And if it's not actively dealt with, that whole site is going to be up in flames and it's a full write-off. In reality, that's a vanishingly small fraction of energy storage sites that we've got operating today.
It's really not something you're likely to see in a modern site whatsoever because design has improved so much that propagation from one container to another is massively reduced as well. And part of it's as well thinking that you need to actually come in and actively put out the battery fire to stop this propagation as well. There's a lot of requirement for say water on site to, we use it for sort of boundary protection where you actually sort of spray one container next to the one that's on fire and you try and prevent that propagation.
And that does help to mitigate propagation across the site. But if I was to actually change my answer, I think the use of fire water and the requirement for boundary protection is one of the big common myths. It's not to say it's not required in some instances, but genuinely nowadays, the let it burn approach where you don't bring water in at all, like that site is very unlikely to have the fire propagate across the site anyway.

**Ed Porter** (3:38)
Okay, so it's two answers in one, right? So you've said people might assume that a fire starts in the battery site and that means all of the battery site goes up. And you're saying that's not true, certainly in newer systems.

**Dan Sherlock-Burke** (3:48)
Very unlikely, yeah. It has happened. And unfortunately, last year in California, the Moss Landing fire is obviously going to stick out in a lot of people's minds, because it was a huge, huge event. The largest battery fire that we've really ever seen. Okay.

**Ed Porter** (4:04)
Well, for people not familiar with Moss Landing, let's go through it straight away. What is Moss Landing?
Why do people know it?

**Dan Sherlock-Burke** (4:11)
So Moss Landing is a facility, it was several facilities actually operating in California, unfortunately next to sort of protective wildlife areas as well, and very much in the vicinity of local population. So in terms of an area to put a giant battery storage system, pretty suboptimal.