Hearth is to blame for a compact but major quantity of details-center outages which include a March 28 fire that brought on significant destruction to a info heart in France, and an assessment of world incidents highlights ongoing worries about the safety of lithium-ion batteries and their risk of combustion.

The use of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries in info facilities is expanding. Now frequently utilised in uninterruptible energy materials, they are predicted to account for 38.5% of the facts-center battery market place by 2025, up from 15% in 2020, in accordance to consulting business Frost & Sullivan.

Adoption is driven by Li-ion batteries’ scaled-down footprint, simpler servicing, and extended lifespan in contrast to guide-acid batteries. In addition, Li-ion energy storage is a key ingredient in renewable energy distribution, in accordance to Uptime Institute, which features resiliency services, information on constructing and managing details facilities, and certification providers.

On the other hand, Li-ion batteries present a increased fire hazard than valve-regulated direct-acid batteries, Uptime warns.

The agency identified in its once-a-year investigation of facts-center trustworthiness that 7% of outages were prompted by fires. (Connectivity problems—which include problems with fiber, community software, and configuration—are the most important result in, responsible for 29% of publicly documented outages.)

“We locate, every single time we do these surveys, hearth doesn’t go absent,” said Andy Lawrence, govt director of investigation at Uptime, in a meeting contact to focus on the firm’s new outage research.

Fireplace safety has constantly been a obstacle when it comes to batteries and thermal runaway, when warmth builds up in a battery a lot quicker than it can be dissipated. In excess of time, the sector has gotten a better comprehension of what results in thermal runaway in lead-acid batteries and formulated smart charging circuits that make improvements to detection and avert problems, said Chris Brown, main complex officer at Uptime.

“We realized a ton by way of the many years with guide-acid batteries. Now, lithium ion will come onto the scene, and it is a total unique animal,” Brown explained.

Weigh the pros and drawbacks of deploying Li-ion batteries.

Li-ion batteries burn up hotter than lead-acid batteries, and if the battery-containment device is broken, it doesn’t respond properly with oxygen or water, Brown stated. “We’re discovering that we do not totally, truly recognize all the failure modes of lithium-ion batteries at the instant, and the charging circuits are not capable to cope with them all,” he reported.

As with any battery, once a Li-ion battery begins to burn, it can be really hard to put out. “It’s heading to burn until it expends all of its electricity, and just dumping h2o on it does not really aid. It retains it from spreading, probably, but it doesn’t assistance,” Brown said. “And the fact that it burns significantly hotter than guide-acid batteries [means] it’s heading to do a good deal more injury. It’s likely to burn up a large amount extended mainly because it stores a great deal far more power. And so that is the problem we’re viewing with lithium-ion just about everywhere.”

In reaction, community authorities and regulatory agencies are enacting demands similar to the storage of Li-ion batteries.

Brown endorses information-middle operators pay back near attention to facility design and style if Li-ion batteries are element of the prepare.

“If you are wanting at employing lithium-ion batteries, then unquestionably search at segregating them into their have battery space,” he said. A battery space should really have at the very least a few of fire-rated partitions and ceilings, and operators should really take into account making use of a foam fireplace-suppression process “because at least foam will smother the hearth and assist to extinguish it, whereas h2o is just going to continue to keep it from spreading.”

When requested about the use of dispersed batteries, as opposed to a centralized UPS technique with financial institutions of batteries, Brown advises warning.

In the past, a regular technique was to take out each individual type of combustible device from the information corridor by itself. Now, with distributed batteries currently being put in in racks and rack-mounted UPSes, facts-center operators have to weigh the energy-efficiency gains of distributed Li-ion batteries from the hearth risks, Brown states.

“The excellent factor is that if it does catch fire, these are a great deal more compact batteries, so you may possibly be capable to comprise it to a couple of racks. However, there’s going to be smoke, and in the stop, any racks in that vicinity are likely to suck some of that debris into them. And though it may perhaps not result in failures right now, that is going to guide to premature failures in the foreseeable future.”

Men and women want to go into it with eyes huge open, carry out a cost—benefit investigation, and do what’s greatest for them, Brown claims. “But my recommendation is that you get batteries out of the information corridor. Which is the most dependable, most resilient matter you can do.”

Latest data-center fires blamed on Li-ion batteries

Lawrence referred to circumstances in which Li-ion batteries are suspected to be the trigger of information-middle fires.

One particular of the most notorious incidents occurred in early 2021, when the largest cloud company primarily based in Europe, OVHcloud, experienced a catastrophic hearth that ruined 1 of its facts centers in Strasbourg and ruined a neighboring 1.

A Maxnod information middle in France endured a devasting fireplace on March 28, 2023, and “we think it is induced by lithium-ion battery fire,” Lawrence said.

A lithium-ion batter fire is also the reported bring about of a big hearth on Oct. 15, 2022, at a South Korea colocation facility owned by SK Team and operated by its C&C subsidiary. The fire at the SK C&C facts heart reportedly begun in a battery area and affected the operations of  main South Korea tech corporations.

“Most of South Korea experienced an 8-hour company disruption. CEOs resigned. Federal government investigations and a number of class-action lawsuits have been initiated,” Uptime reported.

The SK C&C incident took tens of countless numbers of servers offline, including the IT infrastructure operating South Korea’s most preferred messaging and one sign-on platform, KakaoTalk, wrote Daniel Bizo, investigation director at Uptime, in a blog write-up.

“The outage disrupted its built-in cellular payment process, transport app, gaming system and music service—all of which are utilised by hundreds of thousands,” Bizo wrote. “The outage also affected domestic cloud huge Naver (the ‘Google of South Korea’) which reported disruption to its online research, browsing, media and blogging solutions.”

Kakao attributed the cause of the fire to the Li-ion batteries deployed at the facility SK Team has not disclosed its official conclusions.