How dangerous are battery storage fires, really? Despite the headlines, grid-scale battery fire failure rates have fallen 99% since 2018 - from around 4 incidents per gigawatt hour to under 0.1. Even as global deployment scaled into the tens of gigawatt hours.

Most people still picture a whole site going up in flames. The engineering tells a very different story. Dan Sherlock-Burke, Director of Asset Management at Gore Street Capital, joins Ed Porter for a technical look at how battery fire safety actually works - from the Moss Landing fire that shaped public perception, to the data that can flag a failing module weeks before it fails. He explains what really happens minute-by-minute when a cell enters thermal runaway, why most BESS fires trace back to operations rather than faulty cells, and why fire suppression isn't always the safeguard it appears to be.

They cover:

- Battery fire propagation: why "let it burn" is increasingly viable, and how modern container design has made fires spreading across a site vanishingly rare

- BESS fire statistics: how EPRI's failure incident database shows a fall from around 4 incidents per gigawatt hour in 2018 to under 0.1 today, a 99% reduction

- What causes battery fires: why only ~11% start with a faulty cell, while ~65% trace back to operations and integration

- LFP vs NMC battery chemistry: lower combustion temperatures, no self-supplied oxygen, and why lithium iron phosphate still isn't "inherently safe"

- Battery fire suppression: the contrarian case for why the wrong system can turn a fire into an explosion

Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, about battery storage safety and fire risk. Get started now.

You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter - Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.

0:00 - What everyone gets wrong about battery fires

2:42 - Battery fire propagation and site design

4:04 - Moss Landing fire: what actually happened

7:04 - LFP vs NMC battery chemistry explained

9:04 - Why lithium iron phosphate isn't "inherently safe"

13:08 - Using data to catch thermal runaway early

15:53 - EPRI's battery failure incident database

16:27 - How battery fire rates fell 99% since 2018

18:58 - What causes battery fires: the 11% vs 65% split

23:26 - Why most battery fires go unreported

28:01 - Inside thermal runaway, minute by minute

34:44 - Fire suppression and the explosion risk

39:09 - The Liverpool battery fire

41:11 - Rethinking battery fire suppression