Released November 17, 2025 | SUGAR LAND
Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)
Summary
Lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) have captured an overwhelming share of the global battery energy storage market, but high-profile utility battery fires have created a market opportunity for systems that use different battery chemistries and architectures designed to lower or eliminate the risk of "thermal runaway events."
Concerns Rise Over Lithium-Ion Batteries
There's a growing consensus in and around the electricity business that battery energy storage systems (BESS) are a critical part of the evolving electricity landscape, both for grid stability and decarbonization. For more on that, see October 27, 2025, article - U.S. Battery Market Sees Strong Growth Despite Near-Term Hurdles. But high-profile utility battery fires in California this past January and in Arizona in 2019 have led to increased safety concerns about lithium-ion batteries, which hold a near-monopoly of the utility-scale BESS market. For more on those fires, see January 21, 2025, article - Fire at Vistra's Moss Landing BESS Facility Under Control and September 19, 2019, article - Battery Energy Storage Systems are Hot, and That Could be a Problem.
Safety is a top cultural priority in the electricity business. Beyond utilities, battery safety is becoming an issue for commercial property managers who are considering installing BESS in the buildings they manage; large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers; and economic development organizations that face years-long delays in connecting planned projects to the electric grid, speakers told attendees October 30 at the "Experience POWER" conference in Denver, Colorado.
Alternative battery chemistries and architectures were discussed at three sessions of the conference, which was sponsored by Access Intelligence (Rockville, Maryland). For more on that conference, see November 3, 2025, article - Will Bright Outlook for U.S. Power Industry be Dimmed by Labor, Manufacturing Shortfalls?
"BESS will be a $500-billion-plus global market by 2030. Demand is insatiable," said one conference speaker, Giovanni Damato, president of CMBlu Energy A.G. (Alzenau, Germany). He estimated $400 billion of that market will be captured by electricity providers and $100 billion will go to "behind-the-meter" distributed installations at commercial, industrial and residential sies. His enthusiasm was echoed by other speakers.
Right now, he continued, lithium-ion batteries own about 95% of the BESS market. But he and other conference speakers said that alternatives designed to maximize safety at an affordable cost could cut into lithium-ion's share.
"Fireproof" Battery
Eric Sein, president of battery company Viridi (Buffalo, New York), also spoke at the conference. He said his company is selling "a very different lithium-ion battery," one that "eliminates risks of fire." Viridi's batteries utilize a patented technology, "lithium-ion anti-propagation technology," to eliminate thermal runaway events, in which the high heat generated by of lithium-ion batteries causes hard-to-control chemical fires such as took place in Moss Landing and Arizona. The company's battery units, which come in modular sizes ranging from 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) to 1.2 megawatt-hours (MWh), can be combined and scaled as needed. They can be installed indoors or outdoors.
Founded in 2018, Viridi seeks to improve on lithium-ion battery chemistry by adding an anti-propagation technology to the architecture that essentially shuts down the unit in case of damage to even a single cell.
"The fail-safe architecture allows distributed energy storage to go where it has not before," he continued. "There are so many use cases because our batteries can be deployed indoors."
He highlighted a 600-kWh deployment in a New York medical center and a 3.7-MWh deployment in a multifamily building. Because of Viridi's system architecture, those indoor deployments units did not have to include any additional fire suppression, HVAC capacity or ventilation.
Deploying a BESS inside a medical center or apartment building naturally raises fire and safety concerns. Stein said that Viridi has worked for two years with the New York Fire Department to test the safety of these batteries, and "they have a very high comfort with our architecture."
He estimated there are about 400 Viridi units in the field totaling over 80 MWh. His company's batteries have been deployed around the U.S., including in New York; Southern California; Burlington, Vermont; and Denver, Colorado. Sunbelt's mobile energy storage units utilize Viridi's batteries, which were deployed at the recent Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. The batteries can operate in temperatures ranging from -minus 10° Fahrenheit to 100° Fahrenheit.
Also, as the Viridi battery components are compliant with the Trump administration's Foreign Entities of Concern (FEOC), they will not be subject to tariffs until 2030. That lowers the effective cost of a $100,000 deployment to about $40,000, even less if the deployment is in a disadvantaged community (DAC), which carry additional tax credits. "That makes the math very attractive," he observed.
Stein also said his company's batteries can go through 4,000 charging cycles during their lifetimes, far more than lithium-ion batteries.
"Our batteries have a 15-year life and a three-year payback period," he said. "When you can take the energy density of lithium-ion batteries and make them fail-safe, that's really something. We think it's a game changer."
Key Takeaways
- Battery energy storage systems (BESS) could grow to a $500 billion market worldwide by 2030, according to speakers at a Denver power industry conference.
- But utility-scale lithium-ion batteries, the dominant type of battery in the market, has experienced high-profile fires, called thermal runaway events, in recent years. This has increased safety concerns about that type of battery.
- Viridi uses an alternate battery architecture that it said is fail-safe.
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