As if California doesn’t have sufficient wildfire hazards, its drive to banish fossil fuels from the electrical grid is creating one other. On Tuesday a Tesla battery at a utility storage website in Monterey County caught fireplace, triggering the shutdown of the state’s scenic coastal freeway and shelter-in-place warnings for native residents.
California utilities have been putting in large-scale batteries to again up renewables and supply energy when the solar goes down. However now we’re studying that batteries have their very own reliability issues. It’s not clear how utility PG&E’s monumental 182.5 megawatt Tesla battery caught fireplace Tuesday, however the website needed to be disconnected from the grid.
