Review based on Arthur Claire’s LinkedIn post.
Many people think that BESS fires are always due to the batteries 🔋 🔥 This is not what the data are saying.
Chinese researchers just published the most complete root-cause breakdown of global BESS fires from 2016 to 2025 with 102 incidents analysed.
Qingyu Zhou, Guowei Zhang, Guoqing Zhu, Diping Yuan, Multidimensional Characteristic Analysis of Fire Accidents in Electrochemical Energy Storage Stations and Study on Current Fire Safety Status, Applications in Energy and Combustion Science, 2026
Highlights
- A statistical review of 102 fire incidents (2016–2025) identifies temporal, regional, and technical risk patterns in electrochemical energy storage stations.
- Most incidents occur during operation and maintenance, with ternary lithium batteries being the primary hazard source.
- Field surveys of 18 stations highlight insufficient fire protection investment and weak emergency preparedness.
- Targeted strategies are proposed to enhance system design, thermal runaway monitoring, and lifecycle safety governance.
The root cause split is super interesting:
- System defects: 54.5%
- Battery faults: 21.2%
- Human error: 15.2%
- Environment: 9.1%
There are more than twice as many system defects as battery faults! Meaning that BMS misjudgement or thermal management gaps are more impactful than battery defects when it comes to BESS fires.
This is why we always recommend to do a full capacity test during FAT and/or site commissioning of each BESS. And why we focus so much on the thermal management KPIs of the BESS during our analyses.
When was the last time you checked your BESS assets’ temperature?
Note the paper has Appendix B. Supplementary materials and here you can download the excel file listing the 102 fire incidents:
References
- Qingyu Zhou, Guowei Zhang, Guoqing Zhu, Diping Yuan, Multidimensional Characteristic Analysis of Fire Accidents in Electrochemical Energy Storage Stations and Study on Current Fire Safety Status, Applications in Energy and Combustion Science, 2026