NFPA Journal - Winter 2024 - 25

demand for lithium-ion battery cells is forecast to
increase from 700 gigawatt-hours in 2022 to 4,700
gigawatt-hours by 2030, a nearly seven-fold surge
in less than a decade.
It may be playing catch-up, but the safety community
isn't completely unprepared to confront this
energy revolution. Years of work by fire researchers
and battery manufacturers have led to safer batteries
and new insights that have, over time, improved
suppression, installation designs, responder tactics,
and more. This collective knowledge, however, is
currently scattered across industries and research
papers, meaning that a facility manager or fire
department must comb through many different
sources to find recommendations and best practices.
To address that need, the NFPA Standards Council
in December is expected to approve an ambitious
project to create a new code, tentatively called NFPA
800, Battery Safety Code, which will bring all the disparate
knowledge around battery safety into a single
document. If the new code is approved, the aim would
be to provide protection guidance across the lifespan
of a battery, from manufacture to deployment to its
eventual disposal. In some areas, the new code would
reference established standards, such as NFPA 855,
Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy
Storage Systems, which have been crafted by technical
experts using testing data and real-world experience.
There are many other important aspects of lithium-ion
battery safety, however, where the research is
less robust and the guidance much murkier. " There
are a lot of holes, " is how Hutchison described it. If
and when a technical committee begins crafting the
new battery code, it will rely heavily on fire researchers
at labs and universities around the world to fill
those gaps.
" There are still a lot more questions than answers, "
said Amanda Kimball, the executive director of the
Foundation. " But there are a lot of people doing
work right now to get those answers. "
Protecting Responders
Some of the biggest and most difficult unanswered
questions center around the fire service, as the work
of firefighters covers the worst-case scenarios. At
this point, fire departments still have no plugand-play
solutions to some basic questions about
responding to these incidents. There are still differing
opinions, for instance, on how best to handle
a fire involving big lithium-ion batteries like those
used to power vehicles and energy storage systems:
Do you try to put it out, or do you let it burn? If you
put it out, how?
During an electric vehicle (EV) fire in August,
fire crews in northern California sprayed an astonishing
50,000 gallons of water on a Tesla Semi's
NFPA .ORG/JOURNAL * NFPA JOURNAL | 25
Four people
died in a fire that
started in an e-bike
repair shop in
New York City in
2023. Hazards
involving lithiumion
batteries used
in micromobility
devices have
resulted in a
growing number
of fires and deaths
around the world.
PHOTO BY HU PANXUE/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
http://nfpa.org/journal
NFPA Journal - Winter 2024

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