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“Newmarket should prepare for an emergency evacuation of its 3,000-horse population and human residents if the neighbouring 77-acre Battery Energy Storage System [BESS] goes ahead.”
That is the opinion of Professor Peter Dobson OBE, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford and three other eminent chemistry and physics professors.
Dobson added that “far too little attention has been given to the safety issues of these potentially hazardous installations being situated close to residences and animals”.
Given the number of recent fires and explosions at lithium-ion battery storage systems in the UK and around the world, the professors’ alarm is hardly surprising.
Lithium-ion batteries are “inherently unstable” and are prone to a phenomenon called “thermal runaway”. The result is a self-propagating fire which takes days to extinguish and belches out toxins over a wide area, not to mention the firewater run-off which has the capacity to poison an entire aquifer.
This year alone there have been fires at BESS sites in Aberdeenshire, Gloucestershire and Essex in the UK. The biggest fire in January was in California that took three days to extinguish after residents within a three-mile radius had been evacuated. It was the fifth fire in four years at the same site.
Days later there was a serious fire near Melbourne, Australia that took 70 firefighters to extinguish. A day after that, in Galway, Ireland, firefighters were hospitalised by toxic fumes and 1,300 people were evacuated at a lithium-ion battery fire.
But as a direct result of energy secretary Ed Miliband’s reckless and futile race to net-zero carbon, our economy is being trashed and the safety of everyone living in the vicinity of a BESS facility is being wilfully swept under the carpet.
Miliband is well aware that there are currently no government regulations being applied to ensure the safe manufacture, installation, operation and decommissioning of lithium-ion battery facilities.
There is also no legislation preventing the use of second-life lithium-ion batteries which pose an even greater safety risk.
Should such regulations exist, one would imagine that they would stipulate that explosion-prone BESS facilities should not be placed above high-pressure gas mains, as is the case with the proposed BESS site next to Newmarket.
Miliband passed this development in spite of the Planning Inspectorate turning it down. Not surprisingly, he has now passed the buck to Cambridge and Suffolk county councils.
They will have to decide, without the guidance of any government regulations, whether this scheme is safe. And my guess is that they will not have the expertise or resources to make a sound, or indeed safe, decision.
In addition to the danger this BESS facility holds for Newmarket, there are three wider moral issues that the councils should not turn a blind eye to, even if they are way out of their depth.
The first is that these BESS sites are required because we are increasingly reliant on unpredictable renewable power that is not guaranteed to create enough electricity when it is needed
Secondly, there is a question of the morality of these facilities, which will buy cheap electricity off the National Grid, store it at times of peak output and then resell it back to the Grid at a higher price.
There is also another more poignant moral issue. About 70 per cent of all BESS units and components are made in China, where they care not how the electricity is generated during the manufacturing process. Add to that the environmental damage created by mining lithium and the lack of recycling centres anywhere in the world for these batteries.
Given that it is two to three times more expensive to recover the rare metals from the batteries than mine more, it is clear the environmental damage caused by their production will only increase.
In effect, we are simply exporting our climate-change impact across the world to meet a spurious target.
The councils may also wish to consider the possibility that forced labour is used to create them. Government assurances that the Uyghur people are not being exploited by the Chinese to produce goods for the UK are nothing more than empty, weasel words.
There is also the security issue of covering our best agricultural land with Chinese hardware. It would be ludicrous not to assume that the Chinese government will be permeating these batteries with microchips obedient to Beijing. So how is that going to play out?
The experts believe that “there is a growing suspicion that details [of BESS fires] are being suppressed”.
In layman’s terms, lithium-ion battery failures could well be the biggest environmental disaster this country has ever witnessed. Especially if you locate them near gas mains!
Racing could be next victim of net-zero battery obsession
Newmarket’s 3,000-horse population and human residents ‘should prepare for emergency evacuation’ if controversial development gets go-ahead