Coolant leakage 'most likely' sparked gigantic Tesla battery fire in Australia

• A three-day blaze that entirely incinerated two large Tesla batteries at a vast energy storage space website in Australia was probably triggered by a coolant leakage, safety regulators said Tuesday.

The fire burst out on July 30 in a 13-tonne lithium "Megapack" battery, which is the dimension of a shipping container, and then infected a second battery at the website near Geelong, in Victoria state southwest of Australia's 2nd city Melbourne.

It took firefighters 3 days to bring controlled. No injuries were reported.

"One of the most likely source of the incident was a leak within the Megapack cooling system that created a short circuit that led to a fire in an electronic component," said a technical probe by the safety and security regulatory authority Energy Safe Victoria.

The fire spread within the initial battery and then to the adjacent battery, it said in the review, which rely upon a Tesla investigation, an assessment of the scene, video footage and data from the event.

The battery website-- one of the largest internationally-- is developed to save energy created by renewables as well as send out power to the grid.

The state regulator said it had actually told Telsa that it had "no argument" to work resuming on appointing the Victoria Big Battery project, constructed by French renewable energy company Neoen using Tesla batteries.

Adhering to the technical evaluation, Energy Safe Victoria said it would currently identify if there were any kind of security breaches as well as, if so, choose any kind of enforcement action.

The security regulatory authority stated Tesla has to give the final results of its very own investigation into why the fire spread to the 2nd battery.

It claimed both Tesla and also Neoen had actually coordinated in the probe.

The probe discovered that the initial battery to ignite was in service for 13 hrs prior to being changed to an "offline" mode, which turned off its tracking system and stopped alarms from being appeared.

It advised a series of adjustments to prevent a brand-new fire including checking each battery's cooling system for leakages and improving the alarm system as well as surveillance systems.

Designers were working to "fully minimize" the risk of fire dispersing from one battery to an additional, it stated.