Renewable energy’s inconvenient battery truth: fire risk

A battery fire at a Tesla facility in Australia is a reminder that even the promise of endless wind and solar comes with real-world risks. Generating power from sun and wind is now the cheapest form of energy in the world. When combined with battery storage, it has become a critical answer to the world’s quest for a climate-friendly energy solution.  But the utopian image of limitless, nearly carbon-free energy does not come without a cost. Like any large, industrial source of power generation, renewable, carbon-free power, can be big,…