California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
See, that’s why I’m so glad they cleared a whole forest in a water protection area to build their german gigafactory.
Water and trees are totally overrated.
s/
Firefighter here. Sometimes a better and less harmful option is to let things burn and protect the area. I went to a semi wreck that was hauling diesel and on fire on its side in the grassy median about 100’ away from a storm drain. Trying to put that out with just water would have become an environmental nightmare if all that fuel would have gotten washed into the storm system.
“But electric bad” is what this kind of news will make rednecks think, and they will over sentionalize the conflagration of an ev battery
My primary is a prius and I’ve done auto work and tech repairs for like 25 years now.
I’m not buying an all electric EV, yet. They’re still wasteful and heavy and the battery tech isn’t quite good enough. EV’s pretty much have a life of 15 years on them (after going through tires faster) and then off to the junkyard once the battery goes out. I have high hopes for the solid state batts from Samsung hitting some production EV’s in 2027, though. Lighter, faster to charge, and longer lifespans. Until that, I’m sticking to hybrids, where the battery is less than 100 pounds, cost a few grand instead of $15,000 and you can swap one out at home in an afternoon with no special/expensive equipment.
I went through “Bedrijfshulpverlening” (Dutch, if you want to run it through translate just in case I mess up the correct translation). I guess it’s business first responder or something.
When we were attending the fire training part and we were teached about fires, someone asked “what if there is a car fire”. They said: “starting petrol car fires can be extinguished with a portable extinguisher if you are lucky. But electric car fires, leave them alone. They seal the cars in special water-filled containers and leave them alone for two weeks. There are reports that even after the two weeks, when the car was retrieved from the water, the fire started again on it’s own. Firefighters really hate electric vehicles”.
Lithium is a metal right? Putting water on a metal fire usually just makes the fire worse.
Lithium isn’t just a metal it’s a metal that has a rapid exothermic reaction with water. Or at least that’s what I remember my high school Chem teacher saying.
You are right, but in the case of a Lithium battery fire the strategy is to use the large thermal capacity of water to cool the battery until the reaction is done.
I just remembered i can even name myself as a source when i fucked up and punctured my phone battery while disassembling it (those dumbasses used large amounts of adhesives to mount the battery and i wasn’t careful enough). I simply dropped it into a bucket of water and waited it out.
That’s when it’s not even on fire, right? Like pure sodium or aluminium (I forget which one combusts in water and which was just the air)?
business first responder
"alright, is everyone here? this is an all-hands meeting. Where is Joey? Is he in the bathroom again? He’s missed the last 3 meetings… Anyway. Top of the agenda, there’s apparently a fire, right over there. Fires are kinda hot and so we have been sure to stay a good distance away, as to not raise the temperature of everyone’s complimentary bottled water, handed out at this meeting.
Now it says here that we should tackle this situation as quickly as possible. Has anyone run the numbers by the finance team? We don’t want to spend too much on this. The big-wigs upstairs never think about the big picture, and really I don’t see why one fire is worth pivoting all our available resources. Samantha, yes?"
“Sir, the fire is growing at an alarming rate, shouldn’t we just postpone the meeting and focus on the fire?”
“See, that’s exactly the kind of thinking the execs have. But if we spend all our resources, cuts will be made, and jobs will be lost. Not mine, of course, but others. Did anyone do a PR analysis on us ‘putting out this fire’ versus just running a week-long ‘we are sorry’ ad campaign?”
(lol I just got the thought and ran with it)
Remember that non electric cars are still dangerous too. Just think about how often you see a wreck that has cops, firetrucks, and cops all around it. That isn’t going to make the same level of national attention as an electric car burning would get.
There are a lot of reasons WHY news agencies disproportunatly show the downsides of green energy, and I’m hardly scratching the surface, but here’s my personal reasoning:
News sites like to over dramatize green energy dangers as they are funded by fossil fuel companies (ads). Theres a large amount of disinformation that they misleadingly tell people, take for example birds running Into windmills is something a LARGE amount of people know and think is an issue. However, statistically fossil fuels cause ~50x (iirc) more bird deaths per unit of energy than windmills due to birds being an apex preditor. Another example is that nuclear waste is a big issue that will prevent nuclear energy from becoming superior when that issue was solved several decades ago.
Yes, elon sucks and some of his practices should be banned, but it’s still green energy and you can’t let it distract you from the benefits of all electric vehicles.
There are a lot of reasons WHY news agencies disproportunatly show the downsides of green energy
Electric cars are not “green energy” - that’s utter bullshit.
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the energy consumption of electric cars is about as clean as the power plant that produced said energy - if that happens to be a fossil fuel plant, it’s dirty as fuck, just with the pollution in a different location from where the car is driving If you have renewable energy, then yes, they can be cleaner, but:
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we don’t have enough (mineable) rare earths to replace even a sizeable fraction of the world’s car market with electric vehicles
The dirtiest, least efficient coal power plant is still IMMENSELY more efficient than a car combustion engine. When you don’t have to make your energy generating device mobile, you can get a LOT more power from your fuel.
Maybe spend some time learning about a subject before you make claims about it. There’s less chance of looking like an ignorant fool that way.
Let me guess. You spend a lot of time in /c/fuckcars and therefore find ANY type of car bad and pointless?
First things first: Yours is a straw-man argument. I said that electric cars are not “green energy” because it matters how the energy is produced. You, however, argue for the better efficieny vs. combustion engines. I did not even MENTION combustion engines. So watch your tone, dumbass :p /s
Regarding your straw-man, I’ll bite:
Efficiency of an electric car is up to 65% including losses when charging. Efficiency of a Diesel powered car is up to 45%. Producing a liter of diesel costs about 1.13 times as much energy as is contained in a liter of Diesel fuel, which - even assuming 100% efficiency on winning that energy - is further bringing down the efficiency to 45% * (1 / 2.13 ) = 21% (one unit gained per 2.13 units invested). A coal power plant is at best reaching 45% energy efficiency, bringing the overall efficiency of an electric car down to 65% * 45% = 29.3%. That makes an electric car operating on coal generated electricity about 29.3% / 21% = 1.395 or about 40% more efficient than a Diesel powered car.
And this does NOT include that electrical vehicles are - due to the weight of batteries - around 50% heavier than combustion engine cars, and that battery life is much shorter and then generates a lot of electronic waste.
Accordingly:
The dirtiest, least efficient coal power plant is still IMMENSELY more efficient than a car combustion engine
Not true. Numbers for the most efficient coal power plants are just about equal with the efficiency of the best Diesel engines. But even moderate Diesel engines stay around 40% efficiency, whereas coal plants can be in the 30%-40% range easily.
When you don’t have to make your energy generating device mobile, you can get a LOT more power from your fuel.
- generally, larger generator = better efficiency, yes, however:
- see above: this does not necessarily hold true when the batteries increase the total weight of your car by 50%
While - all things considered (I honestly did not expect the production of Diesel to be quite so energy-inefficient) - electric cars fare better if driven at constant speed (or with good energy recuperation mechanisms on braking) and not taking into account the battery life, energy investment into that and chemical waste produced on production / disposal, they are far from getting “a LOT more power” from an “IMMENSELY more efficient” power plant.
Maybe spend some time learning about a subject before you make claims about it. There’s less chance of looking like an ignorant fool that way.
Likewise.
Not this nonsense again. 60% of EV owners have solar panels for starters
Secondly, they’re becoming increasingly less reliant on rare earth metals and all that can be recycled anyway
Their battery can be used for v2g to assist solar and further transition
Finally, they’re incredibly effectively compared to combustion.
In comparison to combustion and hybrid, they’re way cleaner over the entire life
And now with sodium batteries coming into the market, they’ll increasingly become so.
Are they as clean as bikes? No
But not everyone wants to be isolated within 5km of public transport and their home.
I’d have to travel 2 hours by train to get to work, and wouldn’t be able to go mountaineering or hiking anymore
Also, what’s with the nonsense about there aren’t enough mineral resources.
EVs don’t need to use lithium batteries. The technology can evolve with any battery chemistry or power source.
Whereas gas or hydrogen is limited to those two options permanently
Hydrogen in particular has absolutely s*** efficiency in all parts of the process. It’s only clean if you ignore the high energy wastage
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Solar panels need to run for a couple of years before they produce net energy considering the energy invested into production
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Source on battery production being less reliant on rare earths?
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Speak English, please - I am not looking up abbreviations to argue with you
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See my other reply here: https://lemmy.world/comment/12349903 Efficiency of an electrical car is better, but absolutely not “incredibly” better, as per the numbers I checked while writing that comment
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How much cleaner EVs are, depends on the source of energy mix (which at charging stations outside your home, you can hardly control) - if renewable energies are used, they are certainly cleaner. If fossil fuels are used, they are at best (not counting the waste from battery production and disposal) as much cleaner as the efficiency improvement (which is about 40% over Diesel engines, by what I calculated from sources that were acceptably credible for writing an internet comment as opposed to a scientific paper)
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I was not speaking about “mineral” resources, I was speaking about mineable rare earths. Because there are plenty in the Earth’s mantle, but we can’t get to those.
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Again, source please on how EVs do not need rare earths for batteries
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Agreed for the time being, but if research allows to improve the process for generation of hydrogen, it could be a cleaner combustion fuel
In summary: I am not arguing for combustion cars, I am arguing against EVs not for individual use cases, but as a “this solves all problems with combustion engines” - because it is not a solution applicable to the world market for personal mobility.
The best solution is a proper public transportation system - good bus connections and trains that can operate “by wire” without the need for batteries.
- A great deal of electricity is produced by renewables these days, and that percentage increases every day.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240221-1
- There’s plenty of lithium. Lithium batteries are also recyclable, unlike fossil fuels.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
- Sodium ion batteries are also a thing.
As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there’s no argument here.
Re:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
- the article focuses on lithium, which is not the only problematic material used in electric batteries
- the first source I checked (on total lithium in the world) was offline, so I could not confirm my suspicion that the author was talking about the total amounts including those inaccessible in the Earth’s mantle
- the author admits herself that we have “enough lithium for decades to come”, which is in-fucking-credibly stupid, because this planet has been around for billions of years, and one of the biggest flaws of mankind has been to empty a natural resource over a few decades “coz profits”. Creating a demand for a resource that would only make it last a few decades would create another clusterfuck like all the wars and blood shed over crude oil. As a matter of fact, for mining conditions, we already have this clusterfuck, if you look at e.g. how cobalt is mined in the “democratic” republic of Congo
Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?
By the way - sodium requires salt, and that’s also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we’d extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).
My overall point is: the world’s car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.
They have “Tesla Semis”?
Yep, the Tesla Semi has been in limited production, and in use as a hauler. It’s got up to a 500 mile range on its massive battery bank (with real world loads clocking at least 375) and it way outperforms diesel in the performance category.
Of course, you still have to charge it, so that bit has to be sorted out first before long haul is viable with these.
