Overseas power stations have been experiencing consecutive fires, and the safety of energy storage is undergoing a major test!

In the second half of 2026, the alarm for global energy storage safety sounded again. On September 18th, a fire broke out at the Moss Landing energy storage station in California, USA. This station was one of the largest lithium-ion energy storage projects in the world at that time. After experiencing a catastrophic fire in 2025, it flared up again after more than a year.

The Moss Landing energy storage station in the USA caught fire again. Picture source: KION Central Coast

Just three days later, a fire broke out at an energy storage facility of Korea Electric Power Corporation. 28 lithium-ion battery packs were burned. On September 22nd, an energy storage facility in Lavern City, California, USA, exploded and caught fire. Residents nearby were asked to evacuate urgently. On October 2nd, a PCS equipment fire occurred at the Kayak energy storage center in Florida, USA. On October 12th, a finished product warehouse of a lithium-ion manufacturing factory in Tangjin City, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea, caught fire again. Meanwhile, the same warehouse had just experienced a major fire in the end of August. On October 19th, a fire broke out at a household with energy storage equipment in Bavaria, Germany.

In less than a month, these consecutive accidents once again brought energy storage safety to the forefront of the industry. A notable change is that in recent years, energy storage accidents have no longer been limited to cell thermal runaway. Energy storage converters, thermal management equipment, electrical protection systems, and even retired batteries can all become sources of safety risks.

For the Chinese energy storage industry, which is accelerating its large-scale development and global layout, the real question to be answered is not just how to prevent a fire, but how to ensure the safety and reliability of an energy storage station throughout a ten-year or even longer operational cycle.

Why did it reignite after a fire?

In the past two years of global energy storage accidents, Moss Landing was undoubtedly the most representative case. This energy storage station, located in Monterey County, California, USA, was operated by Vistra Energy and had a total project scale of 750MW/3000MWh.

On January 16th, 2025, the Moss 300 energy storage facility of this project suffered a severe fire. This fire caused extensive damage to battery equipment and led to the emergency evacuation of about 1,200 residents nearby. According to the subsequent information released by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), approximately 56,000 battery modules were burned in the accident.

However, this was not the end of the accident. In the early morning of September 18th, 2026, the damaged building that had been out of operation for more than a year once again emitted thick smoke. The US EPA confirmed that the fire originated from the remaining battery modules in the building, and about 1,300 modules burned in this fire.

What is even more alarming is that after the 2025 fire, the station had carried out long-term cleaning work, with approximately 40,000 complete battery modules removed, discharged, and sent to recycling facilities. However, some areas were still left with live batteries due to structural damage and difficulty in safely accessing them. It was not until the latest fire that the cleanup in these damaged areas had not been completed.

It is important to note that the fire in September 2026 at Moss Landing was not a recurrence of a normal operating energy storage system failure, but a re-ignition of batteries that had not been properly disposed of after the accident. The exact initial cause still needs to be investigated.

Moss Landing exposed a long-neglected aspect of energy storage safety: the cessation of a power station’s operation does not mean the disappearance of safety risks. Even if the external power supply is cut off, the batteries inside may still store a large amount of electricity; even if the fire has been extinguished, the partially damaged batteries may still pose new risks due to internal damage, insulation failure, and other factors.

The deeper issue is that the energy storage industry has been investing a significant amount of resources in the construction of power stations, product delivery, and operation, but has not given the same level of attention to post-accident clean-up, disposal of failed batteries, and decommissioning and recycling.

The lesson from Moss Landing shows that energy storage safety not only requires considering how to prevent accidents during normal operation, but also must consider how to safely shut down the entire power station in the event of an extreme accident.

Among the more than ten typical accidents in two years, where exactly are the most likely problems to occur?

Moss Landing is not an isolated case. By reviewing the overseas public reports of energy storage station accidents since 2025, it can be found that accidents not only occur in large-scale grid-side power stations, but also in industrial and commercial energy storage, ongoing projects, and supporting electrical equipment.

Putting these accidents together, at least four types of risks worthy of attention can be seen.

The first type is the risk of thermal runaway of the battery itself. Internal short circuits, manufacturing defects, overcharging, overheating, and long-term aging can all lead to thermal runaway of the battery. Once a continuous exothermic reaction occurs inside the battery, the temperature can rise rapidly and release flammable gases, and in severe cases, spread to adjacent battery modules. Although lithium iron phosphate batteries have relatively good thermal stability, it does not mean that there is no risk of thermal runaway.

The second type is the risk of integration of the energy storage system and electrical equipment. The fire incident at the Kayak project in the United States occurred in the PCS equipment, not in the battery container. The energy storage scale of this project was 74.5MW/223.5MWh, and the fire area was limited to a single inverter cabinet. This indicates that even if the battery cells themselves do not have abnormalities, the energy storage converter, cable connections, insulation systems, switch protection, and auxiliary electrical equipment, etc., may also become accident hazards.

The fire of the Townsite Solar energy storage system in the United States. Image source: FOX5 Las Vegas

The third type is the risk of insufficient system thermal management, fire prevention, and isolation capabilities. The energy storage system is composed of a large number of battery cells, electrical equipment, control systems, and fire protection facilities. Any failure in one link can weaken the protection ability of other links.

The fourth type is the risk of operation and post-disaster handling that is increasingly receiving attention. For example, in the Bautzen accident in Germany, although the fire-affected facilities were disconnected from the grid, the fire department still needed to continuously cool and monitor the temperature to prevent the expansion of thermal runaway. Moss Landing further proved that the risk of damaged batteries can persist for more than a year.

Recently, Intertek CEA (formerly the American Clean Energy Association) released the 2026 edition of the “Global Energy Storage System Manufacturing Quality Report”. The report states that in the audits of the manufacturing quality of battery energy storage systems conducted in 2025, the vast majority of problems found were “system-level defects”. Mainly, the integration of containers involves manual assembly in wiring, piping, and fire protection systems. The key to future competition is not only the innovative breakthroughs in battery technology, but also the ability to truly build an integrated energy storage solution that includes hardware, software, safety, and services and can be scaled up.

Why are energy storage devices becoming more advanced, but fires still cannot be avoided?

According to the industry database of the CESA Energy Storage Applications Committee, from 2022 to September 2026, a total of 130 lithium battery and energy storage industry accidents occurred overseas. The countries involved in the accidents are highly concentrated, with the United States, South Korea, and Germany accounting for nearly 70%. Among them, there were 39 accidents in the United States, accounting for 30%; 31 accidents in South Korea, accounting for 23.85%; and 18 accidents in Germany, accounting for 13.85%, totaling 67.7%. The following are 8 accidents in the United Kingdom and 7 accidents in Australia, and 4 accidents in France.

Table 2: Proportion of safety accidents in the lithium battery and energy storage industry in various countries from 2022 to September 2026

It is worth noting that although South Korea’s installed capacity is much smaller than that of the United States, the number of accidents is similar. This is related to its earlier adoption of the ternary battery technology and the well-established disclosure system; moreover, Germany has a prominent 18 cases in medium-sized storage, reflecting the safety shortcomings of residential energy storage in Europe.

From the perspective of accident scene types, there were 97 fires in energy storage stations, accounting for 74.6%; 23 fires in production and recycling, accounting for 17.7%; 5 fires during transportation/logistics; and 3 fires in data centers. According to application scenarios, there were 47 cases on the source-grid side, 22 cases on the residential side, and 19 cases on industrial-commercial side – large-scale storage and residential storage are the two ends of risks. Moreover, 59.2% of the accidents occurred in the “operated” state, indicating that the risks are mainly exposed during the operation phase rather than the construction and commissioning phase.

The fire of the storage container in Bautzen, Germany (Image source: TAG24)

However, the occurrence of accidents does not mean that the industry’s safety level has regressed. In October 2026, the report “Risk Factors and Failure Statistics of Lithium-Ion BESS” released by the US Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) showed that from 2018 to 2025, the annual failure event rate per deployed GWh of global energy storage systems decreased by approximately 98%.

This means that with the significant growth in the installed capacity of energy storage, the actual failure event rate per unit installed has significantly decreased. However, the decline in failure rates does not mean that the consequences of a major accident can be ignored. In fact, the special nature of energy storage fires lies in the difficulty of handling after the accident.

Firstly, the energy storage batteries store a large amount of energy, cutting off the external power grid connection cannot immediately eliminate the electrical and thermal risks of the batteries. Secondly, the combustible gas released by the battery thermal runaway may accumulate in a confined space, forming a combustion or even explosion risk. Fire departments need to control high temperatures and must also prevent harmful smoke and electrical hazards. Finally, energy storage fires also have the risk of re-ignition. Even if the fire is extinguished by firefighters, they may still need to continue monitoring the temperature and isolate, discharge, and safely transport the damaged batteries.

Taking the fire in La Verne, USA on September 22, 2026 as an example, the local fire department not only needed to control the initial fire source but also needed to continuously monitor the temperature changes of adjacent battery units and take water cooling measures. In the Moss Landing accident, the fire department adopted a strategy of monitoring and allowing the damaged batteries to burn out based on the on-site conditions.

This indicates that there is no simple and unified fire extinguishing plan for energy storage fires. It cannot be assumed that all fires can be directly extinguished by spraying water, nor can it be generally determined that lithium-ion battery fires cannot use water. Truly effective emergency response must be formulated based on the battery type, on-site electrical conditions, fire scale, gas risks, fire water conditions, and personnel safety.

For energy storage enterprises, the fire protection system should not only be equipment to be equipped during project acceptance but should also be a fully considered component in the design of the energy storage system from the beginning.

What really needs to be vigilant is that safety verification does not keep up with product iterations.

In recent years, China’s energy storage industry has made significant progress in cell manufacturing, system integration, and cost control. However, rapid expansion has also brought new challenges. On one hand, energy storage cells are developing towards larger capacities, and the energy density and single-cell capacity of energy storage systems are constantly increasing; on the other hand, fierce market competition has continuously compressed product prices, and the delivery cycle of enterprises has become shorter. Large-capacity battery cells do not inherently imply safety issues. What truly deserves vigilance is that the pace of new product iterations exceeds the ability for adequate testing and long-term validation. As energy storage products evolve from 280Ah and 314Ah to larger capacities, the battery cell structure, battery grouping, thermal management, and system protection schemes may all change. If enterprises directly infer the safety of the entire system based solely on the test data of individual battery cells, they may underestimate the risks in extreme conditions.

Especially as the capacity of individual energy storage containers increases, once a thermal runaway occurs, the potential energy scale that the system needs to manage also increases. Safety verification must extend from the test data of individual battery cells to battery modules, battery clusters, energy storage units, and even actual power station scenarios.

At the same time, the price of an energy storage system includes not only battery cells and PCS, but also BMS, thermal management, fire protection, electrical protection, system testing, and subsequent operation and maintenance services. If bidding and procurement overly focus on the initial equipment price while neglecting safety redundancy, testing depth, and long-term operation quality, enterprises may lack the commercial incentive to conduct sufficient safety verification.

Of course, low prices cannot be directly attributed to the cause of accidents. The real problem lies in whether the project has reduced key safety requirements due to cost compression. Energy storage stations are heavy assets and long-term infrastructure. For a power station planned to operate for more than ten years, the equipment cost saved in the early stage, if replaced by long-term downtime, major maintenance, or even fire losses, the economic performance of the project throughout its life cycle may be completely rewritten.