Protecting Lithium-ion Buses and Depots

So I was going to ask this later, but since it's come up a few times, let's talk about some of those gaps.

The report does a gap analysis and it points out that the current fire codes, as you guys have mentioned, haven't caught up adequately to address the hazards of lithium ion powered buses.

What are some of those major gaps that exist right now that are keeping some of these transit authorities and safety managers up at night?

I think we're having to lean on the traditional infrastructure for the building fire code, sprinkler systems, detection systems.

Go to your standards, NFPA 13, NFPA 72.

We can rely on 855 a little bit because it's the same scale of energy, hazards, risk profiles.

But none of those are specific to the vast array of hazards that are present in a bus depot.

And you have to realize all of the different types of operations that are going in there.

We're not just storing batteries inside a depot.

There's a lot of active operations going in and out.

There's charging.

maintenance, you know, activities and other risks that are coming into play.

So what we're having to do is rely on some of these other, you know, traditional building codes and traditional fire safety strategies, but it's kind of a, you know, square peg in a round hole situation in a lot of ways.

I will say we are the new NFPA 800 code, the battery safety code.

There is plans to address it.

I know that's still in draft and that's not released to the public yet, but There are some preliminary provisions in there, so it looks like in the future that code may take some steps to fill the gap that currently exists from all of these piecemeal of other standards.

Are most of these designs and things that are happening now, are they just performance-based? How are they...

How are they figuring this out on the fly without the prescriptive codes? What are some of the strategies that they're using?

I think a lot of it is prescriptive.

You can go back to fundamentals in the building code on types of facilities where a sprinkler system may be required and turn to NFPA 13 for... for some basic categories of where things fall and what kind of levels of protection, what kind of, you know, detection may be needed.

The concern is the gap between, you know, where that would traditionally be classified versus taking the battery hazards into understanding of the hazards.

So that's mainly where the gap currently lies.

You can take in performance-based assessments.

One of the things that we push in the report or the approach that we took to it was doing a hazard mitigation analysis.

So really looking at the potential risks that can come from introducing battery electric buses into these facilities.