Concerns about fires loom large in communities, but data shows the tech is no more at risk of failure than boring legacy infrastructure like substation transformers.
By Julian Spector, Canary Media, 23 October 2026
Battery fires are like shark attacks: frightening events that loom cinematically large in the American psyche and almost never actually happen.
As batteries have become America’s top choice for new on-demand grid power, community concern about their fire risk has emerged as a limiting factor on the technology’s growth. There’s no disputing that battery fires have happened, and have been nigh impossible to put out by conventional means. But a dataset compiled by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute shows that these fires strike in the U.S. even less frequently than sharks.
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