Fighting battery fires like the one at Summerside Sunbank is an evolving science, says expert

SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. — “What can you tell me about your battery fire?”

It’s a question Summerside’s Fire Chief, Ron Enman, found himself facing a lot recently. He had travelled to Vancouver, B.C., for an annual conference hosted by the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.

On Sept. 7, a fire broke out in one of four utility-scale lithium-ion batteries at Summerside Sunbank. It eventually spread to a second battery and burned for a week, causing widespread health and safety concerns in the community. It wasn’t declared officially out until Sept. 21.

Despite how ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries have become, fires at that scale are still rare, so it made national news. When Enman showed up at the conference just a few days later, it was a big topic of conversation.

Every fire chief in the country is facing the same concerns and one of those is how to handle lithium-ion battery fires, big and small.

Unfortunately, Enman said, he didn’t have much to report.

“A lot of questions; people just trying to find out what they could about it,” he said. “I didn’t really have a whole lot to tell them. Water is not effective on this; our main concern was cooling the (batteries) that were beside (the ones on fire).”

There just aren’t a lot of people out there with practical experience in fighting big battery fires. Summerside discovered that itself when it started casting around the world for experts and advice on how best to deal with its situation.

Despite that initial uncertainty, Enman said he could not be more proud of how the community, and especially his firefighters, handled the situation.

It was a real challenge to both man the efforts at the battery fire site and ensure the city had adequate fire protection coverage, but they got through it, he said.

“It was unbelievable. There wasn’t any complaining. Everyone knew what we were up against and they were good for the long haul,” said Enman

That experience will likely help someone else down the road. Enman expects that the city will be fielding calls now, the next time a large battery fire happens in another community. As such, the city is talking about putting together a package of data and information that it can pass along when it gets those calls.

Enman said that ever since Summerside decided to invest in battery storage capacity for Summerside Electric, he has been trying to keep abreast of the technology and the firefighting practices associated with it. But the technology is so new and in such an early stage of adoption that there just isn’t much out there to go on. It’s also evolving all the time, with various manufacturers using different materials and technology.

“I think every fire chief right across the country that has any type of system like this battery storage system is doing research all the time. There’s a lot of theories and ifs, and what ifs, but there’s just not a whole lot of information out there,” said Enman.

Battery fires are a growing problem around the world, but are not well understood. Canada has no clear national records about how many cases there are here annually, though the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs have been warning about rising instances of fires for several years.

Part of the reason for that increase in incidents is simply because the technology is very good at what it does, so it’s seeing wider adoption all the time, said Vinny Gupta, an assistant professor in fire safety engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

Gupta studies fire hazards and prevention in emerging technology – like lithium-ion batteries.

“Most of the incidents that you see are much smaller. But there have been, particularly with the rise of data centres, with off-grid storage and so on. We are seeing an increasing frequency, just by having more and more storage, more and more fires at this kind of large industrial scale in places like the U.S., places like Australia and so on,” said Gupta.

“It’s an issue of rising concern globally. It’s something fire departments, engineers, asset owners and communities are all trying to deal with on a global level. This is why we’re hearing about this more, just because we’re seeing more and more batteries.”

Utility-scale lithium-ion batteries are made up of many smaller cells all stored in confined, enclosed spaces. Summerside’s Sunbank was rated to be able to hold 10 megawatts or 20 megawatt-hours before the fire. If one of those cells overheats and starts to burn, it can quickly spread to its neighbours, which overheat and burn, spreading to their neighbours in turn and so on.

The result is a fast-moving, high-intensity fire. It’s a process known as thermal runaway and it’s part of the reason lithium-ion battery fires can be so dangerous and unpredictable.

Once that process starts, said Gupta, there isn’t much firefighters can do about it other than try to keep it from spreading, but that is easier said than done.

Summerside, for example, had several blitz nozzles (high-output, self-supporting water nozzles) pouring water on its fire for days on end – and it was still a distinct possibility that it would spread.

Enman described the situation as “a bag of cats,” referring to its unpredictability. But added that having those blitz nozzles on hand were instrumental in their efforts to keep the fire from spreading.

Gupta said the most common cause of lithium-ion battery fires is external damage to the battery itself. In a car, for example, that would be something like a collision.

But catastrophic faults due to manufacturing defects are not unheard of. Overheating due to overuse is another possibility.

Summerside’s battery fire is still under investigation and Gupta could not hazard a guess as to what might have caused it.

However, he did say that lessons will be learned from Summerside’s experience.

Asked whether residents should be concerned about future investment in utility-scale lithium-ion battery technology, Gupta said he could not answer that, but did say that people live with potentially hazardous technologies every day; the key is knowing what to do when the unlikely becomes reality, which is where his research is focused.

“I think it’s important for people to know that, yes, there are health hazards associated to this (technology). But also at the same time, all of us live with these same kinds of batteries. They are in our laptops, in our phones and so on.

“Risk is always something that is around us. It’s about ensuring that we have the proper risk management and mitigation protocols in place.”

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Colin MacLean is the assistant managing editor at the Journal Pioneer in Summerside. He can be reached at cmaclean@postmedia.com and followed on X @JournalPMacLean.