fire risk

Nobody wants their PV systems to catch fire, but little is known about how to actually prevent such incidents.

A recent fire at an Amazon warehouse, with an estimated $500,000 in damages, has been linked to an issue with a rooftop solar system, according to Susquehanna Hose Co.

Pieces of solar panels were found in an area of ​​several kilometers around the warehouse. The local municipality has urged farmers to prevent livestock from eating the fragments. An expert on fires in PV arrays, however, told pv magazine that these fragments are not dangerous for the animals.

The deflagration-prevention system combines automatically controlled door locks with a smart controller which manages signals from fire safety inputs such as smoke, heat, or gas detectors. It is applicable from 50 kW to multi-megawatt cabinets.

Dutch research institute TNO has released a series of guidelines to reduce fire hazards in rooftop PV installations. The study follows a series of fire accidents that occurred between 2018 and 2020 in the Netherlands, for which the main causes were identified.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has confirmed a recall notice for some of LG Energy Solution’s battery energy storage systems due to potential fire-related risks.

The Australian rooftop PV market is expected to eclipse all previous records in 2020, but a new report has raised serious questions about the fire safety standards associated with small-scale solar installations.

The municipal firefighters of Ullum have been working for about an hour-and-a-half to extinguish a fire in the inverters of the Ullum photovoltaic park, owned by Argentinian energy company Genneia.

A very small number of PV systems installed on Australian rooftops are considered to be potentially unsafe, the nation’s Clean Energy Regulator says in a new report. It identifies water entering DC isolators as the greatest risk and the most common cause of PV system failures.

Scientists from China’s State Key Laboratory of Fire Science have analyzed the combustion behavior of flexible PET-laminated PV panels. They found toxic gases including sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen cyanide and a small amount of volatile organic compounds are released when such a PV system burns.