What Happens When Solar Farms Catch On Fire?
If you want to make someone nervous, tell them something might catch on fire. Cue hysteria.
But as farmers, we already understand fire risk. Barns catch fire, as do tractors, combines, electrical wiring. Hay is notoriously not flame-retardant, either.
What’s curious to me is the repeated admonishments we get about grazing on solar: “Oh, you just wait until a fire starts. Grilled lamb all around!”
So all other agricultural infrastructure is now suddenly fireproof?
I’m not cavalier about fire, nor is any other farmer I know. I just know that we’ve spent a long time figuring out how to manage fire risk because modern farming involves electricity.
Solar companies have had to figure out how to manage fire risk, too.
So let's talk about what actually happens when there's a fire at a solar farm.
Fires Can Happen at Solar Installations
Fires involving photovoltaic systems can and do happen. Per the DOE, design flaws, defective components, faulty installation, electrical arcing, and hot spots are common causes, which is also why solar installations (like other infrastructure) are subject to safety requirements and electrical codes.
They’re inspected. Often.
The DOE also explains that fires caused by photovoltaic systems are very uncommon.
Correlation does not equal causation, and possible does not mean probable. Acknowledging a risk doesn't mean living our lives in perpetual fear.
Car accidents happen, yet I still get in one and drive my kid to school. Am I a negligent parent for doing so? A logical person would say “probably not,” so why am I an irresponsible farmer for grazing my sheep around panels that could, theoretically, maybe, one day, catch on fire?
The risk of fire on solar farms shouldn’t be used as a reason to ban all solar farms. Tractors catch fire, too. One did just last week in my town. I’m not hearing a call to ban all tractors. No, it’s just a reason to maintain tractors properly, to carry fire extinguishers, and pay attention to dry vegetation.
It doesn’t mean tractors are incompatible with agriculture.
What’s Actually Burning When A Solar Panel Catches On Fire?
First, let’s clear up something people get confused: a solar panel is not a lithium-ion battery. Battery storage is also not found on every solar site. None of the nine sites we graze include storage. (And I’ll get to the battery fire question in a moment).
A widely reported 2023 fire at a solar facility in Chaumont, NY involved a cargo container filled with lithium-ion batteries to store electricity. Though it was widely reported on social media as “a solar fire” the fire had to do with a cargo container filled with batteries, not a field of photovoltaic panels spontaneously combusting.
We need to talk about what’s actually burning. If I told you there was a “farm fire,” you'd probably want to know whether I meant a hay barn, tractor, propane tank or grass field. The same distinction applies here, too.
The flammable portions of a solar panel include polymer layers, some plastic components and wiring insulation. Most of the panel itself is made from nonflammable materials such as glass and aluminum. In one interesting example, a wildfire burned through grass underneath a three-acre California solar array without igniting the fixed-tilt panels mounted above it.
Yes, a panel can be damaged by fire. But a fire occurring around solar equipment and an entire solar array serving as a tinderbox for wildfires are very different things.
What is Actually Flammable?
Solar photovoltaic systems are electrical systems, and electrical systems can fail. A fire can start somewhere completely unrelated to the solar (ie, a grass fire outside the fence) and spread to the panels. Fires can also be caused by:
Design errors
Adverse weather
Damage from debris
Poor installation practices
Infrequent maintenance
The panels themselves, though, aren’t giant slabs of firewood.
Again, the U.S. Department of Energy says that a solar system spontaneously bursting into flames is extremely rare. It is much more common for a building fire to begin somewhere else (for example, because of an electrical or lightning-related issue) and spread.
There aren’t great numbers on solar fires because, for reporting purposes in the US (perhaps because they’re too infrequent to exist in a category on their own), they’re lumped into an “other” category along with fires of non-solar causes. That said, we can pull data from other parts of the world.
In 2013, Fraunhofer ISE examined fire incidents among Germany’s roughly 1.3 million PV systems. Over the preceding 20 years, PV systems had been involved in 350 fires, but the solar system itself was identified as the cause in only 120. Just 75 resulted in major damage. Put another way, Fraunhofer calculated that only 0.006% of Germany’s PV systems had caused a fire resulting in major damage.
What Happens if There’s a Fire Around Solar Panels?
Firefighters respond to it. There are additional considerations because photovoltaic systems produce electricity when exposed to sunlight. According, again, to the DOE, responders identify the system, shut down what can be shut down, account for electrical hazards while extinguishing the fire, and make sure the scene is safe afterward.
That does require training. But we have that in place already. In fact, the Department of Energy's Solar Training and Education for Professionals program has provided tools to more than 10,000 firefighters and fire-code officials for dealing with solar equipment during fires.
Penn State Extension makes the point quite well for us, too: firefighters don't need some exotic new piece of equipment to fight a fire at a solar array, but they do need to understand the electrical system and receive appropriate training.
That’s not strange. Firefighters already change their response depending on what they’re dealing with. A house fire demands a different approach than a barn fire than a hay loft fire than one involving a propane tank.
Solar adds another set of hazards responders need to recognize and manage, but that’s not an argument against solar.
Another criticism I’ve heard is that “firefighters have to wait” to respond to solar farm fires. Well, yeah. They have to wait when responding to any fires involving the utility or transmission. This past summer, a tree fell on a power line by my parents’ house. The local fire department had to wait around before extinguishing the blaze because NYSEG needed to cut the power first. None of this is new.
What About Wildfires?
In my opinion, wildfires should be used as a reason to build MORE solar, not less. Wildfires are already a growing problem independent of solar development.
EPA's climate indicators show that the amount of U.S. land burned by wildfires has increased since the 1980s, with the largest increases in the West and Southwest. Climate change is one contributor: higher temperatures, longer dry seasons and drought can create conditions that make large fires more likely and extend fire seasons.
In other words, we need to think seriously about managing vegetation and wildfire risk whether or not there’s a solar panel in sight.
We graze livestock under solar panels, and we know dry vegetation burns. That’s why proper vegetation management is (and should always be) a routine part of operating ground-mounted solar sites. Our sheep and cattle consume plant material that would otherwise continue growing, mature, and potentially become dry fuel.
In doing so, they dramatically reduce fuel for fires and can help serve as built-in firefighters. Sheep and goats have long been used for fire suppression.
A 2022 study published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews looked specifically at vegetation-related fire hazards at photovoltaic power plants. The researchers found that accumulated vegetation can increase fire risk, particularly in dry conditions, but that the risk can be reduced through proper vegetation management. Their study specifically evaluated sheep grazing and mowing, and concluded that grazing or mowing and removing biomass can reduce fire hazards at solar sites.
Which is interesting, because vegetation management is exactly why our sheep are there.
They aren't grazing solar sites because somebody thought sheep would make the annual sustainability report more adorable.
They're working. They consume and trample vegetation that would otherwise continue growing, mature, dry down, and potentially add to the available fuel load. Doing this on solar sites is just another chapter in a familiar story: grazing has long been used as a fire suppression tool.
Does grazing make a solar farm magically fireproof? Of course not. Neither does mowing a roadside, clipping a pasture, or clearing brush around a barn. Fire prevention on grazing lands is simply about reducing the amount of fuel available and making a bad situation less likely to become a worse one.
“But It’s Surrounded By a Fence”
Yep. So are our other pastures. Fencing is an unusual concern with solar farms, particularly when people imagine firefighters trying to reach a fire, or sheep trying to escape it.
And listen: I don’t want to get the call one day that a solar farm we’re grazing is on fire with sheep around it. I also don’t want to get the call that our barn is on fire with animals inside it. It’s scary, but it’s also a risk we shoulder as farmers.
Perimeter fencing is hardly an exotic feature of agricultural land. We have fences around livestock at home because that’s generally preferable to allowing several hundred sheep to make independent decisions about where they want to spend the afternoon (like in the road or a coyote’s digestive tract).
Obviously we want firefighters to be able to access a site when they need to. But that’s why every site we’ve ever been on has very clear signage and protocols about gates, roads, shutoffs, contacts, equipment locations, emergency plans, etc.
“There is a fence” doesn’t mean a site is an impenetrable fortress. First responders have been figuring out how to access fenced properties for a long time.
What About BESS Fires?
I used to refrain from writing about battery storage fires because I didn’t consider myself well-educated in them. Over the last year, I’ve talked to quite a few people who DO know what they’re talking about, and consumed a lot of information about how and why they can be addressed.
Lithium-ion battery energy storage systems, or BESS, present a different fire hazard than photovoltaic panels. Thermal runaway can produce intense heat and gases, and the appropriate response admittedly is different than putting out a barn, house, or grass fire.
In 2023, a lithium-ion battery container caught fire at a solar facility in Chaumont (the example I told you about earlier) and continued burning for several days. Nearby residents were initially asked to shelter in place while officials monitored air quality.
The lesson from a battery fire isn’t necessarily that battery storage is inherently uncontrollable or firefighters are helpless to deal with it. In some BESS incidents, the professional advice can sound counterintuitive: rather than aggressively trying to extinguish the affected unit, responders may isolate it, protect surrounding equipment, monitor conditions and allow the involved unit to burn in a controlled manner.
It sounds terrifying when you’re accustomed to thinking that successful firefighting means spraying and spraying and spraying until the flames disappear. But battery fires just don’t work that way.
In a recent letter to the editor from a career emergency responder discussing battery storage fires in New York, the author addressed this exact misconception. He explained that outdoor battery installations are designed as separated, containerized units so a failure can be isolated, rather than necessarily attacking the fire by flooding the equipment with water.
We’ve also gotten considerably better at this since the massive BESS build-out began. New York recently updated its approach to battery fire safety, and responses have accordingly reflected that progress. During a battery fire in Warwick, Orange County, the fire remained confined to the affected equipment. There were no injuries or evacuations, and reporting on the incident said there was no identified impact to public safety or air quality. Firefighters brought the incident under control within hours.
The Electric Power Research Institute maintains a database specifically tracking significant safety-related failures at commercial, industrial and utility-scale battery storage facilities. Its analysis shows that BESS failures have become increasingly infrequent as the industry has matured, even as deployment has rapidly increased. The global failure rate per gigawatt of deployed storage fell 97% between 2018 and 2023, even as the amount of installed battery storage increased dramatically.
Yes, batteries catch on fire. But we don’t design systems based on the assumption that nothing will ever malfunction. We design them so that when something inevitably does malfunction, one failure doesn't cascade into something much worse.
We Should Talk About Fire Risk
Solar or BESS developers shouldn’t tell communities there’s nothing to worry about. That’s why they generally don’t. But they also need to do a better job, in my opinion, of providing the right context.
There’s always something to worry about. We can worry about electrical equipment failing, vegetation catching on fire, or firefighters not being well trained. We can worry day and night, until our hair turns gray and falls out. We can lose sleep over it.
Or, we can develop solutions to mitigate risk and develop best practices for when the worst case happens.
And we have.
Dealing with risk doesn’t mean pretending the risk doesn’t exist, or eschewing solutions to modern needs just because of those risks. No system is risk free.
If that were our standard, agriculture itself would be in serious trouble. Everything about farming is risky: tractors, dry grain, hay, wiring in barns, electric fences, propane.
Sometimes things catch fire.
So we build codes. We maintain equipment. We manage vegetation. We train firefighters. We plan for emergencies. And when something goes wrong, we learn from it.
I’m aware of fire risk on solar farms. I’m not afraid of it. I just know it exists within a larger context. But that’s the problem with context, isn’t it?
It ruins a perfectly good panic.
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