In July 2021, a fire broke out in the 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery battery energy storage project in Australia. The investigation results showed that the cause of the accident was the thermal runaway of the battery cells caused by the leakage of coolant, which eventually caused the fire.

Recently, a technical report on the findings of an expert on the accident, written by experts from Fisher Engineering and the Energy Safety Response Group (ESRG), was released to the public. And when the fire happened, the energy storage system was still under construction, and the accident damaged two Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system units (a total of 212 units were planned to be installed in the project). Fortunately, this "safety incident" did not cause casualties to the on-site personnel, emergency personnel and the public.

Tesla has taken a series of measures to prevent similar accidents from happening. It is worth noting that some of the circumstances that led to the fire in this accident are unlikely to have occurred in the system that was officially put into operation, as the unit was being tested at the time, was manually disconnected and some conventional monitoring, control and data acquisition modules Connection.

Tesla has already addressed many of the factors that contributed to the accident, including improving inspection procedures for the cooling system and adding more alerts to the Megapacks monitoring system. A few months ago, one of the ESRG chiefs, Paul Rogers, a former firefighter turned expert in battery energy storage safety, said that battery fires are extremely rare, but we need to take all possible measures To avoid risks, once an accident occurs, we must know how to deal with it, otherwise the consequences will be very serious.