A Tesla Megapack caught fire Friday at a battery site outside Melbourne, Australia. Nobody was injured in the incident, which occurred during testing; the facility has been evacuated.
Retuers reported that a cause hasn’t been given. The site is run by the French firm Neoen.
“Neoen and Tesla are working closely with emergency services on site to manage the situation,” Neoen Managing Director Louis de Sambucy said in a statement.
The site had been disconnected from the grid and “there will be no impact to the electricity supply,” added de Sambucy.
CNBC says that the site is part of the state of Victoria’s efforts to use half renewable energy by 2030. The Megapack is one of a planned 210 for the site, one of the world’s biggest battery storage sites.
Around the time the fire broke out, Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered the following tweet.
Thank you, Elon.
There will be growing pains on the way to renewable energy and electric cars and electrified other things, and battery fires are among those; you may also be aware that internal combustion engine cars catch on fire. At any rate, I hope this doesn’t in any way deter Victoria in its renewable energy plans.
For Tesla, it will be another day with the words “Tesla” and “fire” in the same headline, which a normal company might care about but which Tesla will not, even more so because power storage — Megapacks, intended for utilities, but also Powerwall, intended for homes — is a small part of Tesla’s business overall, or something like seven percent of revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal.
I reached out to Tesla for comment and will update this post if it responds, though it probably won’t given that it has no public relations department.