Battery Fires & Plane Crashes: Shocking Events Make Us Forget Routine Mass Death

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Recently, there was a large fire at a utility-scale battery storage installation in California. Rather than rehash that story, I’ll just point you to Steve’s article on that if you haven’t heard about it. As you can probably predict, a large battery fire was seized upon by anti-renewable propagandists, who treated it like they treat EV battery fires.

Worse, public officials responded with increased skepticism of future battery storage projects, while knowledgable people both defended the technology and pointed out that it has improved drastically (especially with LiFePO4, or LFP, batteries). Early battery storage systems, which will still be in service for years or decades, are simply more vulnerable to thermal runaway and fire than those built with newer battery cells are.

In the rush to defend battery storage technology, many of us have overlooked something even more important: context. We’ve forgotten that the slow march of routine death can rack up a toll that makes events like this battery fire look like nothing, but only if you’re paying attention.

To illustrate my point, let’s first look at plane crashes. When a commercial airliner crashes, it can often lead to hundreds of people dying all at once. When it comes to journalism and social media, “if it bleeds, it leads.” The King Kong of plane crashes was 9/11, where instead of a few hundred dying, thousands died.

After the 9/11 attacks, thousands more needlessly died, possibly doubling the death toll. But you didn’t hear about this on the news because only a few died at a time over the course of months. Instead of taking the plane, many people felt safer taking road trips, resulting in the airlines needing government bailouts. While you’re still very unlikely to die, you are more likely to die driving than you are riding in a plane.

Our tendency to look at the most notable and sensational events and then be emotionally affected by them can lead to epic failures in risk analysis. It’s something we all do, myself included.

Going back to the battery fire in California, the missing context that gets lost in the boundless bitter sea of emotion is the routine death toll from burning fossil fuels. Asthma, COPD, cancer, climate change, financial stress, and many other ill side effects of burning things for energy can all kill you. It’s not very likely to kill you personally, so when you see a huge fire in California right after another fire killed people, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that clean technologies are the bigger risk.

The risk we run is doing what travelers did after 9/11. If we halt new battery storage projects, we reduce the risk of large fires, but this comes at the cost of killing thousands of people per year who might have otherwise been saved by shutting some of the power plants down. Worse, if we shut down existing battery storage projects, we waste the investment that went into them while consigning people to die who were already going to be saved by the relatively small risk of a battery fire.

It’s hard to get people to think of these routine deaths because it’s uncomfortable, but we need to remember and apply that memory to our decisions.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.