The Battery Revolution Is Getting Deadlier

As liberals around the world rush to electrify everything from scooters to cars, they may be overlooking a growing risk from chemical fires caused by the lithium-ion batteries used to power these devices.

Lithium-ion batteries, which power most modern rechargeable electronics, have fundamentally different chemistry from lead-acid batteries, which makes them more prone to burst into flames. Earlier this month, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission launched a nationwide campaign to raise awareness about the potential dangers of lithium-ion batteries amid a measured uptick in fires sparked by the electricity source.

Although this potential danger has always existed, it has become more pronounced amid an exponential increase in the number of battery-powered devices entering the market.

In one harrowing incident earlier this summer, a cargo ship carrying 500 EVs became engulfed in flames off the Dutch coast after a car battery malfunctioned. The fast-spreading fire quickly grew out of control and killed one crew member while injuring several more. It took emergency response personnel days to extinguish the blaze.

As one conservative German politician pointed out, such a scenario on board a car ferry, rather than a relatively empty cargo vessel, could be catastrophic. In October, Australia warned ferry operators on the fire risks involved in transporting EVs, with a recommendation to store them on unenclosed vehicle decks.

In February, The New York Times also reported a “growing risk of battery fires in New York” from electric cars, e-bikes, and e-scooters. In total, the number of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in the Big Apple has increased from 28 in 2019 to 104 in 2021 and 216 in 2022. There were 79 injuries and four deaths from these fires in 2021 and 147 injuries and six deaths in 2022. According to the New York Fire Department, lithium-ion battery fire fatalities for 2023 will likely surpass the last two years combined.

In May, a fire caused by a lithium-ion battery in San Francisco injured five and nearly cost dozens of people their lives. In Parma, Ohio, an area just south of Cleveland, the fire department has reported more than 100 fires sparked by lithium-ion batteries this year alone.

The reaction of liberal politicians to these fires has been to demand more regulation and more oversight of the companies producing these batteries. In true socialist fashion, the left hopes to solve a problem created by “green” government mandates with more government mandates.

But the real problem may be with the lithium-ion batteries themselves and the rush to electrify everything before the requisite technology was available.

Professor Peter Edwards, who holds the chair in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, told me that the structure of lithium-ion batteries means that when fires do break out, they are very difficult to extinguish.

As he explained, a lithium-ion battery fire is not a conventional fire, but a chemical fire. While conventional fires need oxygen to burn, chemical fires do not. The stored energy of a chemical only intensifies the flames.

“Such a fire burns quickly and uncontrollably, emitting numerous toxic gasses like hydrogen cyanide and fluoride that can threaten anyone nearby more than the heat,” he said. These blazes can often reach maximum intensity in just a few minutes.

This fact was on full display earlier this year in Wakefield, Massachusetts, when fire crews needed 20,000 gallons of water to put out a single EV that had caught on fire on the side of the road. Wakefield Fire Department Chief Thomas Purcell told reporters that his firefighters can usually put out a gas-powered car fire with “half a tank of water.”

“If those battery packs go into thermal runaway, which is just a chemical reaction, then they get super-heated and they run away. You can’t put them out. They don’t go out. They reignite. And they release tremendously toxic gases,” Purcell continued.

Professor Edwards said that his predecessor, the “father of the lithium battery,” Professor John B. Goodenough, was extremely worried about the mass use of these cells. “In the 1990s, when some in the industry started implementing the batteries, the fire problem became so severe that the then-research leader Exxon closed the program,” he said.

Lithium-ion researchers openly admit that they are still studying how to fight and eliminate chemical fires in electric vehicles and don’t know the answers. “We’re still working on understanding electric vehicle fires and how best to put them out,” confessed Victoria Hutchison, senior research project manager at the Fire Protection Research Foundation.

One University lecturer, an experienced chemist in New Zealand who requested anonymity, fearing attacks due to his dissenting views, told me that the political class closes its eyes to the violations of the battery industry. “Nowadays, the path of innovation from laboratory to production is three or four times shorter than it was even in the 1990s,” he said. As a result, many poorly evaluated products reach the markets.

He shared Professor Edwards’s fears of exposing consumers to harm due to the chemical fires. “We know how to prevent them in laboratories, but our safety standards are too expensive for the car makers,” he added.

Despite the risks, however, liberal politicians throughout the West are continuing to push for the aggressive implementation of electric vehicles. In the United States, President Joe Biden has proposed regulations that would require two-thirds of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2032 to be electric – effectively an EV mandate for most of the country. Many European countries have rolled out similar requirements.

Such mandates may prove a serious threat not only to national economies, but to the health and safety of entire populations as well.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.