An outbreak of fire at PG&E (NYSE ) Corp’s energy storage facility that uses Tesla battery packs (NASDAQ: TSLA) Inc was completely under control, according to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office in California late Tuesday night.
According to the North County Fire Department and the county sheriff, all road closures and advisory regarding shelter-in-place have been lifted.
This incident caused Highway 1 to be closed in California. It occurred one year after another fire broke out at Tesla’s Megapack battery unit in Australia, during testing for one of the largest energy storage projects in the world.
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California’s facility houses one of the largest utility-owned lithium-ion energy storage systems. PG&E, a power producer, said that the incident caused no outages for customers.
According to electric utilities, the safety systems automatically disconnected battery storage from the grid when they detected the problem. No personnel were injured by the fire. According to the company, it was alerted about the fire around 01:30 AM on September 20.
Tesla did not respond when Reuters asked for comments.
Tesla’s electric car business generates the majority of its revenue, but Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer, has promised to increase its solar energy and storage business to approximately the same size as the car business over the long-term.
Last year, the company opened a factory in Lathrop to manufacture its utility storage battery unit Megapack.
PG&E announced in April that it had commissioned its Tesla Megapack 182.5-megawatt (MW), battery energy storage system (BESS). Also known as Elkhorn Battery, the Elkhorn Battery is located at the Moss Landing electric substation of Monterey County.
PG&E stated that batteries are charged when there is low energy demand or high solar production. They then send the reserved power to grid when demand increases.
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It is not known at this time who supplies the Tesla battery cells.
