Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, that was a most useful speech because it went into great detail about things that I just had not thought about. It is ridiculous when you cannot use things to make your life easy. As we get older, we are all going to end up using such things, and the amount of checking that goes on everywhere just gets worse.

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has introduced a timely, useful and important Bill. I am sure that it needs to cover all lithium-ion batteries as they are all potentially dangerous if they are not manufactured to the right standards and used right. As has been said, the real problem is that standard foam, wet chemical, powder or water extinguishers are ineffective for lithium-ion battery fires. They do not form long-lasting oxygen barriers, they deliver insufficient cooling and they are unable to stop the thermal runaway. You must use specialist fire extinguishers for them, so a provision needs to be added mandating the presence of such extinguishers in flats, houses or places where these batteries live for any period of time or are permanently installed, which is what I want to deal with.

Apart from small scooter batteries, large batteries are going to be used in houses, blocks of flats and places like that to store the excess energy being generated by solar PV at any given moment. I am looking at this issue right now for a house, and it will end up with two or three large lithium-ion batteries. We are dealing with a reputable company, so I am sure the batteries will be to the right standards and everything will be right, but it had never occurred me that we also ought to have the correct fire extinguisher, accessible and near them, just in case. I was thinking of putting the batteries in a nice inaccessible place out of the way, but I now wonder whether that could be a danger as well because you presumably have to have access to these things in order to check them. We need to think about these things. It is the large batteries that are worrying me, as everyone is thinking so hard about e-scooters and so on.

We have got the grid, and I can feed excess electricity into it to a limited extent. However, we are paid very little to do that and what I draw from it when we need it back is really expensive, so it is just not economically sensible. It is much cheaper and more effective for me to install these batteries, but that is not as safe. You should be able to take your electricity out of the grid for a very small marginal cost, having lent it to it for a while. In fact it probably ought to pay you since you have lent it to it for that period, and maybe you should get a small percentage on top of what you put into the grid because it has saved putting up yet another large windmill that is made of steel all the way up with carbon fibre in the rotor blades that cannot be recycled, so is not entirely environmentally friendly.

The other danger is that it is not helping the move to get people to use public transport. I was faced with a large poster on my Thameslink station this morning that said, “You cannot take e-scooters, electric bikes or hoverboards on to the station or the train”, so how do you get to your final destination affordably? Okay, if I come into London there is public transport, but if I go back home at night and I want to get a taxi—if I could get one—from the station at Sandy back home, it will cost £25 to £40. It is just not affordable. Therefore, if I were to do that, I would love to have some form of e-transport—except in midwinter.

Also, you have to be careful if you are flying. If, so that you do not run out of battery just when you are about to show your electronic ticket to the right face, you have a top-up battery pack for your telephone in your hold luggage, that will get scanned by scanners in many airports just to make sure there are not any batteries in your hold luggage. So, you are not allowed to do that. If the airport detects them, it will remove your bag. We had this problem in India. We arrived at an Indian airport to find that one of our bags was not there because of exactly that: the lithium-ion battery in it had been removed, although I cannot remember quite how. Anyway, it was sent to the airport early the next day, but the airport doubled as a military airport and was not open until 11 am, so we spent a lot of time sitting around when we were meant to be off doing other stuff. It wrecked that part of the day of the tour. You need to be very careful of that.

If we had safety standards for lithium batteries that ran across all devices, all batteries and so on, maybe we could do something about that. When the technology moves on, which I am sure it will, the problem will be solved, but maybe in the interim we could do something about it. I do not know what. My key point is about the large batteries in offices but particularly in dwelling places, because you do not have the back-up people to do something about it. I hope the Government will use this debate to usefully inform amendments they might want to put forward to their own Bills, because it has been incredibly knowledgeable, wide-ranging and useful.