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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: energy in UK
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:24:16 +1000
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On 18/04/2025 1:56 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:44:15 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 16/04/2025 15:59, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>> On 16/04/2025 8:39 pm, Martin Brown wrote:
>>>> On 16/04/2025 00:17, john larkin wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:04:37 +0100, Martin Brown >>
>>>>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>> The big snag with Lithium batteries is their nasty tendency to catch
>>>> fire spectacularly.
>>>
>>>
>>> You can design the battery monitoring circuitry to prevent them doing it
>>> spontaneously. Electric bikes and the like may not be big enough to
>>> justify the expense, but electric cars and domestic solar panel back-up
>>> batteries certainly are.
>>
>> I'm less convinced of that than you are. I think you can pretty well
>> stop thermal runaway but only iff the sensors are done properly.
> 
> A tiny dendrite puncturing a separator can start an ignition wave that
> propagates in all directions at centimeters per second and ends in a
> fireball fast. All a sensor might to is to tell people to RUN.

At the moment lithium batteries are collections of quite small cells - 
roughly D-cell size.

A tiny dendrite puncturing a separator may start an ignition wave that 
can propagate at centimeters per second, but only inside that D-cell - 
and that would take a badly designed separator.

This sounds more like journalistic alarmism than any kind of 
peer-reviewed study.

> Utility-scale batteries are huge and forklifts move pretty slow.

South Australia has had a grid scale battery for years and now has 
several of them. They haven't caught on fire yet. A grid scale battery 
in another state did catch on fire during construction, but mechanical 
damage seems to have been the root cause, and the fire was pretty 
localised - confined to one refrigerator sized block of cells. the 
batter got built anyway.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney