30 | Doug Wilson — Sr. Fire Plans Examiner, Scottsdale AZ Fire Department

🚒🧯 What’s the best strategy to prevent future battery fires? What type of energy storage system (ESS) does the fire department think is best? How do we build safe energy storage systems? For answers, we turn to Doug Wilson—Senior Fire Plans Examiner for Scottsdale, AZ Fire Department—in conversation with BioZen Batteries’ CEO Nate Kirchhofer.

You’ll hear about Doug’s 30+ year background in both public and private Fire Protection as a registered Fire Protection Engineer, and some insights about the unique career path that that role entails, as well as some of the handful of universities that offer 4-year and/or Masters degrees in Fire Protection Engineering.

The conversation dives into the challenge of proactively staying ahead of new ESS technologies while working from a retrospectively-published 3-year code cycle for the International Fire Code (IFC) from the International Code Council (ICC). Doug comments that, “the Fire Code is published every three years. … The previous one was 2021 and the next edition will be the 2024 Code. When the 2021 code first started being written, it was in 2018, using 2018 technology. It wasn't adopted until 2022. So, in 2024, we were working with the best technology we had in 2018. We're six years behind right now.”

The episode moves to a conversation about the 2.16 MWh Li-ion battery ESS fire and deflagration event that occurred in Surprise, AZ in 2019, and some thoughts about the best practices to avoid similar in the future. (Spoiler: get the Fire Protection Engineers involved early!) It’s hard to know what you don’t know about the safety of a new technology, and the tension between the urgency of deployment and maintaining rigorous safety and testing makes it challenging.

Below are some links for the “what's required” (ICC), “how to do it” (NFPA), and “testing it” (UL) resources for ESS discussed in the episode:

The International Code Council (ICC), including International Fire Code (IFC):

• ICC IFC Section 1206: Stationary Fuel Cell Power Systems
• ICC IFC Section 1207: Electrical Energy Storage Systems

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standards:

• NFPA 13: Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems
• NFPA 855: Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems

The Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Standards

• UL 9540: Energy Storage Systems and Equipment
• UL 9540A: Test Method for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)—the only consensus standard explicitly cited in NFPA 855

[Recorded 10 December 2024]