I was living in Albany when the Chevron plant went up in 2012. I had just moved their from the Millbrae hills a year prior (to get closer to bart, and my friends) - where I was down wind of San Bruno in 2010. So, I have bad luck.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't hold Tesla accountable, but the gently implied premise that somehow this is a battery-exclusive problem is distasteful me.
Horrible, toxic fires are not exclusive to batteries. I have personally lived through two horrible gas-based fires, which is anecdotal. However, there are tons of examples.
This current fire is a disaster, yes. And it should be investigated rigorously. And we should learn from it, and if willful negligence was involved, prosecute accordingly.
Storing battery-tier volumes of energy in spinning flywheels sounds terrifying on scale - a cursory search indicates 1kWh ~ 1 KG of TNT.
I guess it depends on the risk of an exploding flywheel, but batteries seem likely to fail in a much less explosive manner as opposed to a failed flywheel.
My thought was that a failed flywheel would be locally catastrophic but as long as you are not building homes right next to them, it would be safe for the surrounding community and not inconvenience or put civilians danger.
Typical flywheel energy storage relies on enormous mass rather than high rotational speed. I don't think that flywheel storage is necessarily hazardous.
This may not be Elon's fault. Maybe Li-Ion batteries for grid storage just aren't there yet. The facility next door to the PG&E/Tesla one had problems several months ago.
well, first off I am sorry to hear bad news and wish everyone affected well. Nobody wins in a real emergency and this is a hard job.
However, the quote about the California Highway Patrol at the bottom is not accidental or naive. There is a security response in California that is being implemented, whereby homeowners and private property owners are geofenced via their phones and other means, and the State of California has broad discretion on how far, and for how long, these emergency responses go on.
In other words, road closure was the old tool of the old Calif. Highway Patrol. But the new tools of individual GPS tracking via phone and vehicle, banning entrance and exit to very large areas, for broadly varying amounts of time, is being seized by emergency response agencies in the new times.
What is the proof of this? Two things from public sources.. One is the Mayor of a California town near Monterey actually, at a CalFIRE public briefing during an emergency, asking sheepishly how long the road closure to his entire town will be in effect, and the abrupt reply of the Highway Patrol officer on camera "it could be six months" .. Secondly, a website that shows new safety perimeters with status, that are very large (portions of a county) and did not exist as such previously.
ask Charlie Crocker at ZoneHaven and see what he says, on the public record
Where are the checks and balances here? How much capacity for tracking in real time is appropriate with private citizens in the USA during emergency response? What is the budget for ZoneHaven and its disclosed or otherwise partners ?
public money in emergency response means accountability and lawful transparency, particularly if you want to run for President of the United States, Governor Newsom.
I don't know the answers to any of those questions, and you haven't shown me anything but rants. Not that this would detract from any argument you made (if you had made one), but you sound like a goddamn lunatic.
And again: what does any of this have to do with the article?
public safety response is changing in the age of networking and GPS; new policy questions arise about legal and appropriate response between public officials and citizenry.
Again: what the actual fuck does this have to do with the article? GPS is not mentioned anywhere in there, nor in the linked article with the CHP statement. There's no evidence any of these road closures were implemented with anything other than old-fashioned roadblocks.
Do you have anything besides vague handwaving generalities without any specific concern, argument, or connection to the immediate story?
Or are you just trying to market ZoneHaven with comically bad fake criticism (a “praising with faint damn” inversion of the cliché “damning with faint praise”)?
Road to hell being paved with good intentions maybe?
Seems odd to me to order people to shelter in place when toxic smoke is an issue (another PG&E special?).
The ZoneHaven software seems to be evac management software split into an offering for first responders for planning evacuations, and an offering for the public providing a single place to look things up.
From the screenshots, I'm seeing metrics on expected population and # of vehicles. I can only assume there is some dual use concern over the fact that as these datasets can be fused with carrier handset location data, it's possible to implement a geofencing solution with a bit of kitbashing.
The previous mention of "a town in a county near Monterey having their Mayor told California Highway Patrol would keep their town's Interstate access cut off on a timescale of months" (no evidence offered or capable of being found on a cursory search, will check CalFIRE as recommended though), but assuming good faith, could be a valid reason for concern.
If nothing else, it actually got me searching as to whether anything like that was at all precedented. It's one of those things that I guess you take for granted won't happen, but when you start thinking about it, gives you a shiver.
Relevance to article can be inferred the poster finds application of this potential tool in such a hypothetical geofencing manner with no recourse or questioning disquieting. Which I can't necessarily blame them for; my "but no one would do that"/State overreach mental circuits have been getting increasingly Locked Out/Tagged Out over the last decade. The poster just might be kind of bad at communicating context, or over-relying on other people sharing mental context/priors for the meaning to fully come through.
Incomplete communication maybe. Lunatic, I think not.
Hate to be the one to break this to you, but that ship has long sailed. PATRIOT Act, NSA wiretaps, PRISM, Snowden, etc etc etc. For better or worse, if the US government wants to know where you are at any time, they'll just request cell tower records from your carrier and metadata from Facebook. They don't need to orchestrate some grand conspiracy to launder their actions through an evacuation management app.
> But the new tools of individual GPS tracking via phone and vehicle, banning entrance and exit to very large areas, for broadly varying amounts of time, is being seized by emergency response agencies in the new times.
Seems problematic, since neither people nor vehicles are currently required to have GPS interacting with a central server that could enforce this.
> What is the proof of this? Two things from public sources
Then why are neither cited, rather than non-verifiably described?
EDIT:
> ask Charlie Crocker at ZoneHaven and see what he says, on the public record
I’m sure, as what you describe would be a major extension of ZoneHaven utility to government that would be a selling point if it did work, the CEO of ZoneHaven would have pretty much the most reason of anyone on the planet to paint it as a thing that was imminent to be widely available and adopted.
But that’s a reason to be skeptical of him saying that.
> However, the quote about the California Highway Patrol at the bottom is not accidental or naive.
This isn't some authoritarian power play, they closed the highway because there's about 400 feet between the highway and the battery facility where there was an active lithium metal fire going on. As someone who lives in the vicinity, I can tell you that a larger road closure was also needed for some quite practical reasons: the power plant and adjacent town are fairly isolated and the places to set up closures where traffic can be diverted safely are quite far away.
The article doesn’t talk about how the battery pack caught fire. I would expect a lot of engineering to go into the safety of these packs. Details of what happened would be fascinating
At the Elkhorn Battery facility, the 182.5-megawatt energy storage facility went online in April 2022. The system includes 256 Tesla Megapack battery units on 33 concrete slabs.
So, it’s PG&E now trying to boost their base (non-cyclic) power supply but I suspect that it is not extreme charge/discharge cycle to be the culprit but probably the consumer load as being too excessive and overbearing on this facility.
35 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadI'm not saying that we shouldn't hold Tesla accountable, but the gently implied premise that somehow this is a battery-exclusive problem is distasteful me.
Horrible, toxic fires are not exclusive to batteries. I have personally lived through two horrible gas-based fires, which is anecdotal. However, there are tons of examples.
This current fire is a disaster, yes. And it should be investigated rigorously. And we should learn from it, and if willful negligence was involved, prosecute accordingly.
I guess it depends on the risk of an exploding flywheel, but batteries seem likely to fail in a much less explosive manner as opposed to a failed flywheel.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypw5x/largest-lithium-ion-b...
However, the quote about the California Highway Patrol at the bottom is not accidental or naive. There is a security response in California that is being implemented, whereby homeowners and private property owners are geofenced via their phones and other means, and the State of California has broad discretion on how far, and for how long, these emergency responses go on.
In other words, road closure was the old tool of the old Calif. Highway Patrol. But the new tools of individual GPS tracking via phone and vehicle, banning entrance and exit to very large areas, for broadly varying amounts of time, is being seized by emergency response agencies in the new times.
What is the proof of this? Two things from public sources.. One is the Mayor of a California town near Monterey actually, at a CalFIRE public briefing during an emergency, asking sheepishly how long the road closure to his entire town will be in effect, and the abrupt reply of the Highway Patrol officer on camera "it could be six months" .. Secondly, a website that shows new safety perimeters with status, that are very large (portions of a county) and did not exist as such previously.
ask Charlie Crocker at ZoneHaven and see what he says, on the public record
public money in emergency response means accountability and lawful transparency, particularly if you want to run for President of the United States, Governor Newsom.
And again: what does any of this have to do with the article?
Or are you just trying to market ZoneHaven with comically bad fake criticism (a “praising with faint damn” inversion of the cliché “damning with faint praise”)?
look at the website called ZoneHaven. If you live in California or the USA, maybe you should care about this.
Seems odd to me to order people to shelter in place when toxic smoke is an issue (another PG&E special?).
The ZoneHaven software seems to be evac management software split into an offering for first responders for planning evacuations, and an offering for the public providing a single place to look things up.
From the screenshots, I'm seeing metrics on expected population and # of vehicles. I can only assume there is some dual use concern over the fact that as these datasets can be fused with carrier handset location data, it's possible to implement a geofencing solution with a bit of kitbashing.
The previous mention of "a town in a county near Monterey having their Mayor told California Highway Patrol would keep their town's Interstate access cut off on a timescale of months" (no evidence offered or capable of being found on a cursory search, will check CalFIRE as recommended though), but assuming good faith, could be a valid reason for concern.
If nothing else, it actually got me searching as to whether anything like that was at all precedented. It's one of those things that I guess you take for granted won't happen, but when you start thinking about it, gives you a shiver.
Relevance to article can be inferred the poster finds application of this potential tool in such a hypothetical geofencing manner with no recourse or questioning disquieting. Which I can't necessarily blame them for; my "but no one would do that"/State overreach mental circuits have been getting increasingly Locked Out/Tagged Out over the last decade. The poster just might be kind of bad at communicating context, or over-relying on other people sharing mental context/priors for the meaning to fully come through.
Incomplete communication maybe. Lunatic, I think not.
Seems problematic, since neither people nor vehicles are currently required to have GPS interacting with a central server that could enforce this.
> What is the proof of this? Two things from public sources
Then why are neither cited, rather than non-verifiably described?
EDIT:
> ask Charlie Crocker at ZoneHaven and see what he says, on the public record
I’m sure, as what you describe would be a major extension of ZoneHaven utility to government that would be a selling point if it did work, the CEO of ZoneHaven would have pretty much the most reason of anyone on the planet to paint it as a thing that was imminent to be widely available and adopted.
But that’s a reason to be skeptical of him saying that.
This isn't some authoritarian power play, they closed the highway because there's about 400 feet between the highway and the battery facility where there was an active lithium metal fire going on. As someone who lives in the vicinity, I can tell you that a larger road closure was also needed for some quite practical reasons: the power plant and adjacent town are fairly isolated and the places to set up closures where traffic can be diverted safely are quite far away.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-has-rel...
So, it’s PG&E now trying to boost their base (non-cyclic) power supply but I suspect that it is not extreme charge/discharge cycle to be the culprit but probably the consumer load as being too excessive and overbearing on this facility.