How Angelo Zandona Brings the Power Plant Fire Safety Legacy Into Today’s BESS Industry

Introduction

Mission-critical facilities aim for 99.999% uptime, also known as five nines, which works out to just over five minutes of downtime per year. Industry surveys have placed the cost of unplanned downtime in large facilities at $1 million to $5 million per hour.

Those numbers used to belong almost exclusively to data centers and power plants. They are now starting to apply, in different forms, to battery energy storage. A grid-scale BESS provides peaking capacity, ancillary services, and arbitrage revenue. Every hour offline is revenue lost, and a major fire incident can put a facility offline for months.

Angelo Zandona, founder of Keystone Fire Consultants,  has worked on both ends of this transition. His background spans data centers and conventional power generation, and the practice he leads today is focused squarely on BESS. The lessons that power plants taught the fire safety community decades ago are now reshaping how the battery storage industry thinks about risk.

Why Power Plants Were Always a Fire Safety Market

Conventional power plants combine high-energy equipment, flammable fuels, and zero tolerance for downtime. A coal-fired boiler, a natural gas turbine, a large transformer, and a hydrogen-cooled generator are each a fire hazard on their own. Together, they are a system of interlocking risks.

The fire and life safety community developed entire bodies of practice around these facilities. NFPA 850, NFPA 851, and NFPA 853 cover specific generation and storage scenarios. Insurers, particularly FM Global, drove additional engineering standards. Plant operators built in-house fire protection teams.

Angelo Zandona‘s work in this sector taught habits that now sit at the core of how Keystone Fire Consultants approaches BESS projects today with hazard analysis at the equipment level, water supply planning across multi-acre sites, and very tight integration of fire protection with operations.

Where the Parallels Begin

A modern BESS facility shares more with a power plant than with a substation. The footprint is large. The equipment is dense. Mineral-oil-filled transformers sit alongside high-voltage switchgear. Battery containers hold hundreds of kilowatt-hours each. The fire risks are not identical, but the design framework is similar. Several specific parallels stand out.

•     Deflagration – Power plants have long dealt with combustible dust, hydrogen leaks, and natural gas piping. NFPA 68 and NFPA 69 developed largely from this work. BESS containers now apply the same standards to off-gas hazards from lithium-ion thermal runaway.
•     Water Supply – A power plant requires substantial on-site water capacity for cooling and fire protection. BESS sites need similar volumes for exposure cooling, even though water cannot extinguish the battery fire itself.
•     Emergency Response Coordination – Power plants train their operators and coordinate with local fire departments for joint response. BESS facilities are now expected to develop the same level of integration, often documented in an Emergency Response Plan under NFPA 855.

Where the Differences Demand New Thinking

The parallels are useful, but the differences are real and they have shaped how the BESS community is adapting older frameworks. A coal or gas fire can be starved of fuel. A lithium-ion fire cannot. Once thermal runaway begins, the cathode releases its own oxygen, and the reaction continues regardless of external suppression. This is why the containment philosophy in BESS is closer to “let it burn” than the active suppression that dominates power plant practice.

Toxic emissions are also different. Power plants produce predictable combustion products. Battery fires release hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen cyanide, and a mix of metal oxides that complicate air monitoring and cleanup. Recent incidents at the Gateway facility in San Diego (May 2024) and Moss Landing in Monterey County (January 2025) drew significant community attention to off-site air-quality impacts.

Finally, the failure modes are still being understood. EPRI, working with TWAICE and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, found that integration, assembly, and construction errors accounted for the largest share of root causes in cataloged BESS failures. That is a different failure profile than power plants typically face.

What the BESS Industry Inherited

Despite the differences, the BESS sector inherited a great deal from power generation. Fire and life safety consultants like Angelo Zandona did not have to invent the discipline of hazard analysis or build the case for early AHJ engagement. Those practices existed.

What changed was the technology being analyzed. Battery storage required new test methods, hence UL 9540A. It required new codes, hence NFPA 855. It required new emergency response protocols, particularly around off-gas and reignition risk. But the underlying framework, identifying the hazards, analysing the consequences, and mitigating them with engineered controls and procedures, is the same one that powered the power plant safety regime for decades.

This is why investors, insurers, and AHJs now expect a level of documentation rigor in BESS that earlier energy technologies did not face at the same stage. The expectation came from power generation.

The Investment Angle

For industry strategists and investors, this lineage matters. The growth of U.S. battery storage, from 1.5 GW in 2020 to more than 26 GW by the end of 2024 and a projected 50+ GW by the end of 2026, is unfolding inside a fire safety framework that already exists. Capital is not waiting for new standards to emerge. The standards are evolving in real time alongside deployment.

Texas, California, Arizona, and Nevada are leading deployment because they combine fast-growing demand, strong solar and wind resources, and grid-stress events that storage can solve. They are also jurisdictions with engaged AHJs who expect documentation modeled on power plant practice. Projects that bring that documentation in early are positioned to move faster than competitors who treat fire safety as an afterthought.

This is the strategic argument Angelo Zandona and the team at Keystone Fire Consultants make to clients evaluating new storage projects. The infrastructure of fire safety is a competitive advantage.

Conclusion

The battery energy storage industry inherited a mature engineering discipline from power generation and adapted it to a new technology with new failure modes. For investors, project sponsors, and strategists tracking the energy transition, the takeaway is simple. The institutional knowledge that protected critical infrastructure for the last 50 years is now protecting the next generation of grid assets. The professionals who carry that knowledge, Angelo Zandona and the team at Keystone Fire Consultants among them, are part of why the storage industry’s safety record is improving even as the deployment curve accelerates.

FAQs

How is BESS fire risk different from a gas power plant fire?

ANS: A gas fire can be extinguished by cutting fuel and using gaseous suppression. A lithium-ion battery generates its own oxygen during thermal runaway, so suppression strategies focus on containment and exposure protection rather than active extinguishment.

What is “five nines” uptime?

ANS: 99.999% availability, equivalent to about five minutes of downtime per year. It is the standard for mission-critical facilities such as Tier IV data centers.

Why do BESS projects need water supply planning if water cannot extinguish the fire?

ANS: Water is used to cool adjacent containers and structures, protect exposures, and prevent secondary ignition. NFPA 855 and most AHJs require a Water Supply Analysis as part of permitting.

What is the most common root cause of BESS failures?

ANS: According to a joint EPRI, TWAICE, and PNNL study, integration, assembly, and construction issues accounted for the largest share of failures where a root cause could be identified, rather than cell or chemistry problems.

How are insurers responding to BESS growth?

ANS: Insurers increasingly expect documentation modeled on power plant practice, including HMAs, ERPs, water supply analyses, and UL 9540A test data, before underwriting major projects.