(Yicai) June 24 -- China is considering carrying out safety inspections at some large battery energy storage projects following recent fires in South Korea and the United States, Shanghai Securities News reported.

Regulators are paying heed to experts who say China should conduct safety checks because the country has some battery energy storage stations that are not containerized, the report said today, citing industry insiders.

Two recent incidents overseas have raised concerns. A fire broke out at a battery factory in the city of Hwaseong in South Korea yesterday, killing 22 people, 17 of whom were Chinese nationals, according to local police. In San Diego, California last month, one of the world's largest lithium-ion battery energy storage projects, Gateway Energy Storage, also caught fire and burned for several weeks.

These blazes have given rise to warnings about China’s big projects, especially those without containers, Tang Liang, deputy secretary-general of the China Energy Storage Alliance, told Yicai. The Gateway Energy Storage fire evidently lasted so long because of this key structural difference, Tang added.

In containerized systems, it is difficult for a fire to spread from one container to another, whereas station-type projects stack a large number of batteries in a big building which makes them prone to uncontrollable blazes, he pointed out.

Fire extinguishing and anti-reignition technologies are needed to quickly cool entire systems, said Wang Qingsong, a researcher at a fire science lab of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. “This is also a vital guarantee for the safety of battery energy storage systems,” Wang said.

China added 46.6 gigawatt-hours of energy storage capacity last year, making up nearly half of the global newly installed capacity, according to data from the CNESA. Nearly all of that increase was lithium battery energy storage.

Editor: Emmi Laine