Fire crews tend to smoldering battery in Chandler
Chandler fire crews on Thursday used a robot to open a door and ventilate a massive battery in Chandler that has been smoldering since Monday.
The battery is in an approximately 6,000-square-foot building off 56th street south of Loop 202, and used to store electricity for the power grid. It is owned by a company called AES Corp., and it stores energy for Salt River Project.
Mark Miller, an AES Corp. spokesperson, said it’s too early to speculate the cause of the incident and emphasized that resolving the situation safely was the top priority. Miller said an investigation into the cause will be underway over the coming weeks.
“There will be extensive work to understand what happened,” Miller said.
Chandler firefighters had been keeping an eye on the smoldering facility since Monday morning and Thursday opened a door to the building with a robot to avoid risk to first responders, Battalion Chief Keith Welch said.
After nine first responders were injured by a similar battery fire at another utility in 2019 in Surprise, SRP spokesman Scott Harelson said the utility was sure to communicate with local firefighters about how to handle problems that might occur at the Chandler facility.
The facility is called the Dorman battery storage system and SRP announced it in 2018. It has a capacity to store four hours of electricity with an output of 10
megawatts of power, about enough for 2,500 homes.
Welch said crews used the robot to open the door shortly after 7 p.m. and planned to monitor the facility for several hours at least before sending another remote vehicle into the facility to check the interior conditions.
“It has gone as we hoped,” he said. An interior sprinkler system has been spraying water on the smoldering battery since Monday, he said.
“It’s going as it’s designed as far as
suppressing the hazard in there and keeping the atmosphere cool,” Welch said.
He said it’s unknown how long it will take to get the problem under control but that about 30 businesses that were asked to voluntarily evacuate could be allowed to resume normal operations Thursday evening.
“It’s going to be a slow process,” he said of controlling the battery problem.
Several large batteries like the one having problems are installed around the state to store electricity and make it available on the power grid when customers need it.
The Dorman project was considered a pilot, though utilities in Arizona plan many more like it to take advantage of ample solar power generated during the day so that it can be used after dark, when customers still use lots of electricity but solar plants don’t generate electricity.
The battery in Surprise that exploded in 2019 was storing energy for Arizona Public Service Co., and exploded when it was smoldering and fire crews opened a door to ventilate the facility.
Several things went wrong and led to the 2019 explosion, but the lack of a plan contributed to the injuries because firefighters opened a door on the facility about two hours after arriving on the scene, and two minutes later, the facility exploded, according to a technical report of the event.
The explosion sent eight firefighters and one police officer to the hospital.
The smoldering was caused when a battery cell essentially shorted out, overheated and damaged other battery cells nearby. That facility also was built by AES, using lithium ion batteries from LG Chem.
That was the second fire that APS has had at a battery installation. The other was in Flagstaff. APS installed that battery in 2010 and it ignited in 2012 and threatened to ignite a larger blaze.