A proposed Lithium battery storage facility near Northallerton in North Yorkshire has sparked fury from residents.
NatPower is heading up the project, which it has planned for the village of East Rounton.
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are devices which enable renewable energy to be stored and then released when it is needed. This allows for more efficient use of renewable energy.
As the UK moves towards Net Zero by 2050, increasing numbers of BESS are being built across the country. As of January 2024, there were 105 operational BESS in the UK.
In Northallerton to date, 283 people have objected to the project online, with only three supporting it. One of the main concerns voiced by residents is the huge fire risk.
So far in 2025, there have been at least four fires at BESS sites globally. Three took place in the UK, at Aberdeenshire, Cirencester, East Tilbury, and one in the US, at Moss Landing, CA.
27% risk of fire, every year
Andrew Sheldon-Thomson, of Northallerton, set up a Facebook group opposing the plans. The group has now grown to over 450 members.
Sheldon-Thomson pointed to some of the dangers that could arise from a fire at a battery site of this size:
The Moss Landing Battery site in the USA caught fire in January. The vapour cloud of poisonous gas has made people ill 40-50 miles away from the fire.
He worries that the same could happen at NatPower’s planned sites:
There’s a fairly substantial chance of there actually being a fire… essentially because the site’s so big, one battery in itself is not particularly risky, but you start putting millions of battery cells in a single place, only one of them needs to fail in order to set the others off. And you suddenly have quite a high fire risk.
Using fire incident data from the Electric Power Institute, alongside information on deployed BESS capacity at various sites from energy analyst company Wood Mackenzie, campaigners have estimated that each 1GW site could pose an annual 27% risk of fire.
Venetia Bell, resident of East Routon, drew attention to the impact on nearby villages that a fire at the site would greatly impact. Additionally, she pointed out that local businesses would also be at risk.
There is only one access road to the proposed BESS site and that is through the Arts and Crafts village of East Rounton. The local businesses could be put in jeopardy by the traffic and noise created by HGV’s, AILs and development staff travelling to and from the site.
Thermal runaway in North Yorkshire?
Jon M. Williams is the CEO at Viridi. The company manufactures BESS that are different from the ones we see in the UK. The systems are fail-safe, so there is no fire risk from thermal runaway, and they are also distributed. This means that instead of one big battery storage facility, a network of smaller battery storage units are attached to electricity meters in homes, businesses or communities.
When Viridi began producing batteries, even with its advanced manufacturing technology, the company found that roughly 1 in 10 million NMC lithium-ion cells would still have a manufacturing defect, which causes catastrophic thermal runaway.
Thermal runaway happens when lithium-ion batteries overheat uncontrollably, leading to fires and explosions.
Williams said:
This is a fuse. When it lets go, everything around it’s fine, but it’s captive energy. And if you let this fuse light off the rest of the energy, then you get an uncontrolled release.
Whilst Williams came to accept that this is “just a reality of this technology”, he decided that he wanted to try and control it.
After 5 years and essentially destroying $5m in inventory on testing, Williams landed on a solution. By ultimately replicating the control valve on a gas furnace, the energy stays within the cell, preventing thermal runaway.
The really good thing about this cell is when it lets go, it’s about a second and a half. You get all that energy, and it all dissipates. So if you could just stop that energy from transmitting for about two seconds, you have it.
Once the temperature of the cell reaches around 170º, the fuse trips, which triggers the vent. Instead of exploding, like other lithium-ion batteries, it holds the energy to prevent it from propagating to the next cell.
We allow it to phase change between liquids and solids that we have inside the pack… it turns into steam. And we don’t get any gas, we don’t get any heat, we don’t get any flame, and we don’t get any detectable release from the pack.
And that’s fail-safe. Because what we call fail-safe is that it cannot have any secondary effect.”
An alternative to grid-scale storage
According to Williams, grid-scale storage – like the sites in North Yorkshire – are not the best solution for energy storage. Instead, he suggests putting Viridi’s fail-safe technology directly behind consumers’ electricity meters.
You can double the units of energy a customer can buy through the meters.
Whenever the system’s not constrained, the battery can take energy. So in low periods where the system has capacity, it typically burns off in the form of heat. If you have distributed packs and we’re connected through a full IoT controlled system, I can tell the pack when to charge, when not to charge.
I can connect it to AI. I can monitor the grid and put everything in balance. The pack will take energy.
By putting batteries behind electricity meters, instead of grid-scale storage, the grid becomes 100% resilient:
If there’s an accident, an outage, a storm, you never lose power. The battery has a finite amount of energy. But even in that finite capacity, you will know as a consumer how long you have.
When you distribute storage, the benefits to the entire grid and the consumer far outweigh grid-scale storage.”
Williams also confirmed that the 1GW of storage that NatPower has proposed at each site in North Yorkshire it could easily achieve through distributed storage.
One of Viridi’s lead investors is the UK National Grid, but its batteries have not made it to the UK yet.
Currently then, BESS sites are not utilising fail-safe technology like Viridi’s. Local residents therefore continue to have significant concerns about the North Yorkshire sites.
Kevin Hollinrake, MP for Thirsk and Malton, said:
The proposed Bellmoor Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) near South Kilvington continues to prompt understandable local concern. Now that the formal planning application has been submitted, many residents remain worried about the potential loss of productive farmland, environmental impacts, and site-related risks.
I visited the site in November to hear directly from local residents and have been working closely with Cllr Alyson Baker to ensure their views are properly represented.Although I do not have a formal role in the planning process and am unable to submit letters of support or objection, I have been clear with the North Yorkshire Planning Authority: we must prioritise the protection of productive farmland for food production over its use for energy infrastructure.
Featured image via the Canary
