Battery Electric Storage Systems (BESS) are being rolled out at a rapidly increasing rate as the UK gears up to deliver the ambitious “Clean Power 2030” (CP2030) action plan. After a battery plant incinerated itself in Liverpool in 2020, there has been widespread public concern about the risk of fires in the BESS systems now being built all over the country.
There were no more similar incidents in the UK up to January this year, which may have led to unjustified complacency on the part of the authorities. Any such complacency was rudely shattered by fires in two UK BESS sites on two consecutive days in February 2025. Both sites were under construction – one in Tilbury, Essex, and the other in Rothienorman, Aberdeenshire.
It turns out that these fires were two of four worldwide on four successive days. This coincidence is astonishing given the relatively low and steady rate of fire incidents over the last few years, as numbers of BESS plants increased. But, is it just a coincidence, or is it a sign of systemic problems emerging in design, component quality and workmanship?
Fires in Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are not inevitable. “Strong economic incentive and insufficient safety regulations” caused a spate of BESS fires in South Korea. Is the same thing happening in the UK?
It’s like the ‘Wild West’
The Rothienorman fire comes at a bad time for renewable energy’s public profile in the north-east. An apparently random and uncontrolled BESS roll-out in Aberdeenshire was already generating vociferous popular opposition, exploited of course by the Conservatives and Reform UK, and putting in jeopardy the SNP’s already slender majorities in the area.
To compound the problem, there has until now been no strategic oversight of BESS proposals, with the result that the consenting pipeline now contains four times as many proposals as are needed to meet the Clean Power 2030 action plan. There are steps afoot to change this, with the Network Electrical System Operator (NESO) establishing a prioritised list of proposals for grid connection to replace the current first come first served approach. But the benefits of this will take time to appear.
Meanwhile, the mass of applications in the pipeline, each considered individually with no strategic context by over-worked planning departments, gives a not-unfounded impression of a ‘Wild West’.
Energy Voice reports that: The number of renewable energy schemes, including battery storage, in Kintore has raised concerns [that] the Aberdeenshire town is being “steamrollered into an industrial zone.” Aberdeenshire West MSP Alexander Burnett said the ten projects within a 1.5 mile radius of Kintore will do “irreparable damage” to its “spectacular countryside”.
“The locals are revolting”
In response, local protest groups in Aberdeenshire are teaming up and amassing a fighting fund. Though energy is reserved, the legal battles will involve the Scottish Government not the UK government, because planning is devolved, and the campaigners will fight on safety grounds.
At FMQ’s on 28 February, North-East Scotland conservative MSP Donald Lumsden asked pointed questions of John Swinney, who has agreed to look into the issues and give a written response.
CP2030
The overall Clean Power 2030 plan is good, including pre-application approval-in-principle/rejection. This will save a lot of time and effort by allowing proposals that don’t make sense strategically to be culled early.
CP2030 also proposes increasing the emphasis on community benefits. The amounts currently offered are derisory, £1500 per MW generation capacity, and are widely seen as an upper rather than a lower level. In my view, communities and councils should be much more ambitious, negotiating for benefits of the scale Shetland received from the oil boom in the 1970s.
Is there enough regulatory oversight?
Codes of practice for BESS systems are being developed but are still largely provisional and aren’t mandatory unless the local planning department says so. Currently, developers don’t even have to notify the local fire and rescue service unless the site contains 25 tonnes or more of dangerous materials.
In Aberdeenshire, the council has capped storage applications to 49.9MW, so that they do not have to be considered as major developments and only have to meet local planning requirements. These smaller sites do not trigger comments from SEPA and do not generate fire plans. If a fire starts, the local volunteer Fire and Rescue services are neither trained nor equipped to deal with them. Their only option is to stand back, ensure people are safe, and let the fire burn itself out – which can take days.
This would be OK if the plants hardly ever caught fire. They shouldn’t – they should be safe by design. If batteries do fail, they should fail safely, and the system should shut down until the fault is rectified. If they catch fire, the design should ensure damage is contained to a very few batteries and square metres, without spill-over beyond the site.
This assumption that fires are improbable is not borne out by recent evidence.
Do we understand the problem?
Analysis of a spate of accidents in BESS plants in South Korea in 2017-19 indicates that the problems most likely lie in the design and workmanship rather than the technology. The technology can be made safe, but that doesn’t happen by default.
After the latest cluster of incidents, if BESS was a type of aeroplane, the entire fleet would have been grounded until the designers and regulators had bottomed out the cause of the fires.
If the fires are now happening more often than the risks assessments assumed, rollout and operation should be halted until the developers fund professional fire cover. They should also subject their systems and workmanship to rigorous third party electrical and fire safety checking in both design and construction stages. And every site needs a fire plan.
The Scottish Government and councils need to impose stringent safety and workmanship requirements on the installers.
Do we need BESS at all?
Because renewable energy is variable depending on the whims of wind and cloud, and the march of the seasons, surplus energy is often produced; and it’s wasted unless it’s used or stored.
BESS are the most compact and possibly the lowest carbon way to store energy at the moment. They need much less land and concrete than pump storage schemes. You need a surprisingly big hydro dam high up, and an equal sized area of water low down to pump up from, to store meaningful quantities of energy.
Individually, BESS sites typically only store enough energy to run for a couple of hours at full output. What’s the point? Well, there are going to be a lot of sites. When you add up lots of 2 hours, you end up being able to power the country for quite a while when there is no wind. So, in the big picture, they do make sense. The devil is in the detail.
Why are there so many BESS plants proposed in Aberdeenshire and East Lothian?
Much of our offshore wind energy developments are off the coasts of Aberdeenshire and East Lothian.
The best place for BESS is as near the generation source as possible, for several reasons. One, is to minimise constraint payments, paying wind farms to reduce output, which everyone is up in arms against. A second, is to reduce the load on the grid between the overproducing generator and the eventual end user. Third, it’s much quicker to install a BESS than build a pump hydro system – roughly one year versus ten. And fourth, as far as Scotland’s future is concerned it is much better to store the energy here than build supersize power lines to scoot it down to England.
Does it all come down to land ownership yet again?
Landowners are clearly happy to have BESS on their land, otherwise they wouldn’t accept them. But do the landowners live on the land? Many of the sites where BESS are being proposed are owned by private equity funds, absentee landlords trying to capitalise on the renewables boom.
Often, they are putting BESS on good agricultural land that would otherwise, and did, provide a livelihood to tenant farmers. Why not put them on grouse moors, golf courses or brownfield sites instead?
This has ugly echoes of Scotland’s history. Are absentee landlords and developers putting local residents at risk with shoddy cut-price unsafe BESS installations? It would seem to be a legitimate question. Why does every single question about Scotland’s future come down to land ownership?
Urgent action is needed to restore confidence in the Scottish Government’s willingness to regulate these systems properly, to ensure that communities benefit from the installations and aren’t subject to 21st Century clearances, and to exert strategic control over the current fragmented and shambolic ‘Wild West’ situation in the planning and consenting pipeline.
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