PG&E’s Tesla battery facility catches fire in California

A Tesla logo is seen in Los Angeles, California U.S. January 12, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo

Sept 20 (Reuters) – A fire outbreak at PG&E Corp’s (PCG.N) energy storage facility on Tuesday that uses battery packs made by Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) has shut down part of Highway 1 in California.

This came about a year after another fire broke out in a Tesla’s “Megapack” battery unit in Australia during testing of one of the world’s biggest energy storage projects. read more

Power producer PG&E said it was working with firefighters to stop the fire from spreading at the California facility, which is one of the biggest utility-owned, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in the world. The incident has caused no electrical outage for customers, it added.

The electric utilities company said upon detecting the issue the safety systems automatically disconnected the battery storage facility from the electrical grid and that no onsite personnel was injured due to the fire.

Tesla was not immediately available for comment.

Tesla generates most of its revenue from its electric car business, but CEO Elon Musk pledged to grow its solar energy and battery storage business to roughly same size as its car business for the long-term. Tesla last year broke ground on its factory in Lathrop, California, to produce its large-scale, utility storage battery unit Megapack.

California’s Department of Transportation said a part of the highway was closed due to the battery fire and advised motorists to take an alternate route.

PG&E in April announced the commissioning of its 182.5-megawatt (MW) Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) – known as the Elkhorn Battery – located at its Moss Landing electric substation in Monterey County.

PG&E said batteries are charged when energy demand is low or when solar production is high and then provide additional capacity by sending that reserved power to the grid as demand grows.

It was not immediately known who is the battery cell supplier for Tesla’s battery products.

Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Josie Kao

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