[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host today, Anna Steingruber, joined by Josh Dinerberg to discuss energy storage concerns. Product certification standards for energy storage often lag behind changes in technology and safety concerns raised by highly publicized real world incidents and failures. Designers need to navigate the requirements of product certification while also staying up to date on research and development testing to meet the ever changing demands of the industry.
Here today to further discuss this topic is Josh Dineberg, P.E. josh oversees the Fire Testing Lab at CSA Group's Distributed Energy Resource Lab, and his team has worked with energy storage companies across the globe at every stage of the development process to help test and evaluate the safety and efficacy of their products.
Welcome today, Josh, and thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Great. So, just to get us started, for people who might not be familiar, can you tell us exactly what an energy storage system is?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Sure. So, I mean, at the core, an energy storage system is absolutely not a power plant. It does not produce any energy. It's really a place where you can put power when you don't need it and get power when you do need it.
From the standpoint of what we're looking at, we're looking at battery energy storage systems. Obviously you can store all kinds of forms of energy in all kinds of different ways.
But we're really exclusively focused on battery energy storage systems. These are systems that store electrical power in chemical battery energy cells.
They're really needed to support intermittent power sources, things like solar and wind, to ensure that there's a continuous supply of power even when those power sources aren't available.
And they serve as a place to put surplus power when you're making more than you need.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Great. And so how do these energy storage systems, and battery energy storage systems in particular, benefit different industries, the power grid or everyday people and consumers?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: So there's a lot of scales where these can kind of benefit consumers and industries in the grid.
So at a residential level, this might be a product that you keep right in your own home.
If you have solar panels on your roof, it can store that power being produced by the sun during the day so that it's available to you at night, that it's available to push back to the grid to get, you know, financial returns from your solar panels. And it's available to you during temporary power outages.
At an industrial and kind of commercial level, it's really critical to maintain operations during external power interruptions. So this becomes really, really important in the Modern economy for giant data servers, things that run global apps, web servers, data processing, even things like, you know, a server running a cryptocurrency system.
So these systems may employ energy storage systems to ensure that they have no loss of operations, no loss of data processing, no end user losses when they suffer temporary power outages.
At a much larger scale, energy storage systems can be used where we have clean energy sources that produce power intermittently. So if you have a very large solar farm or wind farm where power can come and go during the cycles of the day or during the cycles of the weather, you can, it's a place to put all of that power so that you can meet demand when it's needed. And then on the grid scale, even for traditional kind of fossil fuel power plants or nuclear power plants, they're really necessary technology to store energy at the end user locations.
So often these power plants are very far from the urban areas where the power is under high demand.
And kind of the American pipeline of the electrical grid is often too small to get this power at the peak demands from the power plant locations to the areas where the users need them. So these energy storage systems can be really critical to place into the areas of high demand, to push power there when demand is low and have available available power during the entire time that the high peak demand is, is needed.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: And so for these systems, why are we testing them? And why is the testing and certification so important in particular for these systems?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: So energy storage, I mean, all products that contain energy or hazardous components really need to undergo testing and certification.
But it's really critical within the energy storage world because they contain a large amount of energy in a very small volume that's inherently dangerous because these are high voltage electricity sources, but also potential chemical inflammability hazards produced by the cells.
These end products also need to go out in the world where they are going to interact with electrical grids with intermittent service, out where there's end users using them with various maintenance programs. And in the world where there's events like lightning strikes, floods and wildfires. So certification is really important. It kind of provides a minimum level of performance for the users.
It really can take safety off of the mind of the end consumer, let them focus on buying products based on quality and performance instead of constantly being worried about minor safety flaws and the hazards inherent to them.
Beyond certification, we also reference testing here.
Testing is really critical to provide the data needed to really understand how to protect these systems in the real world.
What kind of detectors may be necessary to find a Failure before it occurs. What kind of sprinkler suppression system is going to be necessary to control a fire hazard should it occur?
But for these energy storage systems, which are serving a broad need, really critical to the kind of the future of our infrastructure. And it's really important to maintain at least this minimum level of certification safety and going above and beyond with the test data to help designers really install them effectively.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and you just touched on this a little bit, talking about why the testing is important. But what specific risks are involved with energy storage systems? And do you have any examples of some of the safety risks or other things?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Sure. So energy storage systems, specifically battery energy storage systems, we're primarily focused right now. The prevalent technology in lithium ion battery energy storage system.
So what we've combined is a high voltage electrical hazard, which obviously high voltage electricity produces a lot of potential hazards for arc flas, flashes, you know, electrical shocks to people, two electrical components contacting each other and causing a short producing a lot of energy.
But in this lithium ion battery energy storage world, we also have a chemical cell used to store this electricity that includes potentially flammable liquid solvents and a lot of energy packed within those cells. So when that energy is released, it can become heat. And that heat can cause other cells to fail. That heat can cause the solvents within them to produce flammable gases, which can create potential hazards for deflagrations and explosions and also a large severe fire event. So we've kind of combined this chemical flammability hazard with a high voltage electrical hazard. So it's really critical within these components to stay focused on safety, combining those two hazards together.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Right. And so when you are conducting the test on a system, what exactly are you evaluating? What are you looking for?
[00:08:34] Speaker B: So at a, at a root core, I mean, I am obviously the kind of the fire testing specialist at csa. My focus is mostly on fire and explosion hazards.
But as a broader product testing of an energy storage system, there's a whole bunch of other things and basic safety and component reliability that we're looking at. So anything from as simple as the users can't access these high voltage parts, that individual component failures aren't going to cause a cascading failure throughout the system. You know, one electrical component that shorts a relay that burns out isn't going to cause a cascading failure that ends up in a cat catastrophic fire.
That components aren't installed so close together that high voltage will cause arcs and sparks between them.
We also look at things like the functional safety of how the hardware and the software talk together in the, in the end use condition, doing failure modes and effects analyses, things like that. Now, on my side, I'm primarily focused on these fire and explosion hazards from the battery chemistries themselves.
So a battery cell that fails produces, turns its electrical energy into, or turns its chemical energy into electrical energy, which becomes heat energy very, very quickly. So this can create really high temperatures and produce flammable gases. So the problem there is that high temperatures can cause another cell to go into this exact same reaction. So you can get a kind of a cascading, propagating, thermal runaway reaction through these battery cells that keeps producing more and more heat and more flammable gases.
So testing has really been focused on the ability of these systems to prevent the growth of a small event. A single cell going into a thermal runaway, overheating, producing flammable gases from spreading to all the adjacent cells around it and creating an event that can't be stopped.
We're also looking at how those flammable gases can accumulate within these systems and produce potential explosion hazards. They do not ignite into fire and preventing the buildup of flammable gases from those conditions. So those are really the, the primary fire and safety focuses of, of an energy storage system test.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And so you've already talked some about some of the tests that you do and what you're conducting. But what does a day actually look like in your lab? Are you working on multiple different tests? Are you kind of focused on one big thing? What's your day to day look like there?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: So that depends quite a bit. I mean, we do very small scale experiments on individual cells, so we may be able to look at many of those in a day.
We also do much larger experiments on, you know, grid scale level energy storage systems. And that may take several days to several weeks to set up and run a single experiment.
A typical day. We're almost always focused on safety, the safety of the personnel, the safety of the attendees and our clients who are coming to see the test to make sure that we understand what might happen during a test. Obviously, I described some of the hazards of these systems.
We're creating those hazards and those failures intentionally within our lab testing. So we really do a pretty extensive preliminary analysis. What might happen, what electrical hazards are present after we've run this test, what, when can we go touch this safely, when can we go near it, what might happen after the test, things like that.
So we spend an awful lot of time going through all these safety checks and what to do if something happens, kind of Our second measure is, you know, making sure that the test is run in a high quality way. So we do a lot of checks again on our instrumentations. Every plug, every thermocouple is measuring where it should be, that the system is installed the way the manufacturer specifies it to be installed, that we've charged everything to the right voltages. They need to go to a lot of reviewing last minute test changes with a lot of stakeholders. Right. It's, it's going to be important that we see how this transducer responds. So let's move it from here to here. Let's do this and this.
So there's 99% prep on safety and quality.
Then the 1% of our day is kind of creating this failure, seeing what happens, sitting back on our hands and letting the system do what it's going to do. I often find this part where it's on fire or producing flammable gases and failing to be the most boring part. I like all the safety checks and pre test checks, but everybody else seems to enjoy the fire. Finds that the most exciting part.
After a test, you know, we, we got to watch these things really closely.
We have to go do inspections after a test, take pictures, disassemble, disposal, dispose all of this stuff safely.
And that also requires again, a lot of pre check failure analysis. What could happen? What are we protecting ourselves from? Do we have the right protective equipment? Always. First comes safety of the personnel, then the building, you know, then the effectiveness of the test.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a very important day. Keeping people away from fires is, I would say a top, a top priority. So good for you.
Moving away kind of from what you're actually doing and talking about codes and standards. What kind of are these, the current state of energy standards? And do you think that they're keeping pace with the evolution of the technology and with all of the safety considerations that you're speaking about?
[00:14:20] Speaker B: So we initially started this with a statement, right, that it's really difficult for codes and standards to keep up. This battery energy storage is a continuously evolving technology.
Obviously we see a lot in the news and the media. It's playing a big influence in kind of the economy of the next generation here. So it's a very focused on technology that's continuously changing.
That being said, codes and standards are always going to lag behind these rapid changes in technology. But in the energy storage world, we have a very active group of participants within our codes and standards development processes that really keep a continuous improvement process moving forward.
Over the last several years, these have really focused on increasing the resistance and reliability of these energy storage systems to prevent a small failure in, you know, maybe one cell, five cells going into a thermal runaway from becoming 5,000 cells becoming a thermal runaway hazard. And I think that there's been a lot of progress and development in this, both from the standard side to evaluate it and the product side to prevent this.
So a lot of new standards are focused on the outcomes of kind of more catastrophic failures. Within csa, we've been working on a new standard to evaluate large scale fire testing.
So we now know we're pretty resistant to single failures creating a severe event within these systems, but they still may be exposed to a wildfire or a flood or a lightning strike or some other catastrophe that can result in a much larger fire event. We've seen this in the, in the news in several events around the world in the last couple of years.
So we've been focusing on testing these large scale events, design determining if these can be consumed on their own, Giving the first responders in the communities that will install these the information they'll need to know kind of what these worse events will look like and how to respond to them properly. We're also working on some newer standards focused on testing the detection and suppression technologies that can be used for these types of failures. So we're constantly evolving.
There's new technologies in these batteries constantly coming out. So. But we don't know what we don't know. A lot of these newer technologies are straying away from lithium ion technologies, going towards solid state, other solvents, things of that nature. But we don't know what we don't know. So the goal of those is to become potentially more fire safe while still meeting the energy demands.
But this testing and the scope of the standards really give those new technologies an opportunity to demonstrate if they are more safe within the framework of the existing testing. We're not giving out theoretical safety exemptions.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Got it. And kind of going off of that as you're working towards new codes and standards.
What should a company do if they see a need or encounter a need for something that doesn't exist yet? Is there a place that they can go or something that they should say.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: So the best way to deal with any of that is to participate and put comments into the public forums on existing safety standards.
These are publicly available to comment or to become members of these committees and participate in the development process and make sure it focuses on those particular new needs.
That being said, that's a slightly less flexible process.
We do currently a Lot of custom testing, R and D development, testing to kind of do safety evaluations outside of the existing standards. We do a lot of this right now at CSA that may involve abusing batteries in different ways, evaluating different types of batteries that don't fall within the current scope of standards, or running tests to produce data to kind of develop performance based safety evaluations. This is pretty common in the fire protection engineering world to produce the data needed to determine the safety systems that that may be required to protect different hazards.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Got it. And how can engineers, developers, anybody else, stay informed about new or upcoming standards that might impact the products?
[00:18:51] Speaker B: So again, I guess kind of like the last question, the best way to do that is to be involved in the code and standards committees process.
They are open for public comments. Even if you're not a member, you can always kind of request membership and participate in those committees.
Aside from that, you can sign up for standards notices.
You know, CSA and some of the other nationally recognized test laboratories do automated standards notices. We also participate in a lot of live industry events where we promote new standards, changes to standards, new tests, were able to run things of that nature.
And when people are our customers, we already host a lot of events and webinars to inform them of this and send notices and informs. That's a mechanism that we use kind of to let existing clients know a standard that they have, a product that's been certified to, has changed in some way that may affect their product. And we automate that and let them know those changes are coming.
Great.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Well, those were all of the questions that I had. Is there anything that you didn't think you touched on or that you wanted to say or that you wanted to leave the listeners with otherwise?
[00:20:11] Speaker B: I guess the last note I would leave is, you know, we touched on a lot of the hazards of these battery energy storage systems.
And these are real hazards. They can produce flammable gases, they can ignite and produce a fire.
They do include a lot of unique chemicals that can create different environmental risks, whether in the air or getting into the groundwater.
That being said, there are a lot of safety mechanisms. There is a lot of focus on safety in this industry and I'm really happy to be a part of that through my role at csa. And we really focused on improving the overall safety of these products and informing the end users, informing the first responders what the real safety hazards are and helping them come up with better ways to properly deal with it.
We certainly touched on, you know, the applications and uses of these energy storage systems.
I believe they're a pretty important technology to move our economy and our energy infrastructure into the next generation for the next several decades.
So I think they're a critical thing. I don't think we can really get rid of them. There obviously are potential safety hazards, but the more knowledge we put out there about what those hazards are, the better we develop the protections against them and understand how to deal with them. When we see certain types of failures, I think the better off everybody's going to be served. So I appreciate you having me today. It's been great.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks so much for coming and thanks so much for leaving us with that slightly more positive note. I do think you're right, there's always hazards and always dangers, but these are definitely not a technology that's going away. So just being aware of that and aware of also all of the things that they are helpful with is great. So thank you again.
And to our audience, this has been Josh Dineberg, talking all about energy storage systems and testing them for their hazards. I've been Anna Steingruber, an editor with Consulting Specifying Engineer. For any more information on energy storage or relating topics, you can check out our other articles, podcasts or
[email protected]. make sure to tune back in every other Tuesday for more conversations and we'll talk to you next time.
