Solar Panel Fault Known a Year Before School Fire
Potential safety issues with solar panels were known to a council for more than a year before a fire broke out at a primary school this month, following a similar fire at a community centre in June 2024. BBC News has the story.
Shanklea Primary School in Cramlington caught fire on July 5th, but Northumberland County Council said it had been aware of potential safety issues with the panels since June 2024 when a similar fire broke out at Northburn Community Centre.
A council spokesman said similar panels fitted on 141 of its buildings had been switched off as a “precaution” following the school fire.
Local Labour leader Scott Dickinson called the year-long delay “crazy” and accused the council of putting lives at risk.
“How lucky are we that the fire happened at the weekend?” he said.
“Somebody could have died.
“There have been two fires, we’re just lucky they have not been at a school full of children or a building that could have injured the workforce.”
A council spokesman said there had been “no requirement or recommendation” for the solar panels to be turned off following the Northburn fire but further action would have been taken if there were concerns over public safety.
Following the community centre fire, Northumberland Fire and Rescue Service began a plan to inspect all the council’s solar panels installed prior to 2019.
The spokesman said there were 81 schools, 10 fire stations, six leisure centres and 44 other buildings fitted with these solar panels in the county. They all remain open.
Worth reading in full.
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Was it the panels that caught fire? (Is that even possible?) Or the inverter? And how do you “turn off” PV panels? My suggestion to BBC News: come back again when you have some proper information to share.
You can’t, in most arrangements. This year I had a new inverter installed to cope with some extra panels as well as my 11 year old ones, and it has the DC switch mounted on it, so the DC cables off the roof are always live when it’s light enough. One 2-core at about 330 V DC, the other 110 V DC (the old and the new pair). Then there’s the usual separate AC switchgear to connect it to the AC circuits. Much of it is inside a proper plastic pipe, though, some of which is outside. How theirs was done may depend on the competence of the firm that installed it.
I guess they could have had some kind of DC cable fault in the roof area, such as a rat chewing thought the cable, but who knows?
With Miliband trying to roll out thgese and other kit on a vast scale it does seem long overdue to get thje technical requirements and installer training sorted out. After all, he told us, there are nearly a million people engaged in this.
Most solar panel fires are caused by wiiring/installation faults, for example, poor connections cause overheating and other wiring errors can cause electrical arcing. If Northumberland public buildings have had two fires recently I would suspect shoddy installation and/or poor specification and oversight of the of the jobs, since it is likely that just one company won a tender to provide solar installs for the county.
One way to turn off PV panels might be to cover them in a layer of black soot. Just an idea…
From coal fires, presumably?
JIM FORAN Fire Safety of PV Solar Panels. Subscribe now to see more great High Rise Fire CPD videos
This youtube video discusses how to cover solar panels to put out a fire and how they are always live from the panel to the cut off switch. Other videos on the channel deal with battery fires – very scary.
I wonder if it’s the roof material that ignites. Most flat roofs are covered with a bitumastic or rubberised material that would go up in the right conditions.
A year isn’t that long, compared with the fault at North Hyde substation that led to the Heathrow airport shutdown – 7 years at that place, if you read the Inquiry report. If they had dealt with the snag found in 2018, it would not have caught fire.
Didn’t Bristol maternity hospital have a similar issue? patients and babies were evacuated then the panel apparently caught fire.
If pv panels do burn there is no problem recycling them, just incinerate the blighters and use the heat to generate electricity.
Just stop using the bloody things.