30 | Doug Wilson — Sr. Fire Plans Examiner, Scottsdale AZ Fire Department

About this episode

Doug Wilson discusses strategies for preventing battery fires and the challenges of fire code updates in relation to energy storage systems.

🚒🧯 What’s the best strategy to prevent future battery fires? What type of energy storage system (ESS) does the fire department think is best? How do we build safe energy storage systems? For answers, we turn to Doug Wilson—Senior Fire Plans Examiner for Scottsdale, AZ Fire Department—in conversation with BioZen Batteries’ CEO Nate Kirchhofer. You’ll hear about Doug’s 30+ year background in both public and private Fire Protection as a registered Fire Protection Engineer, and some insights about the unique career path that that role entails, as well as some of the handful of universities that offer 4-year and/or Masters degrees in Fire Protection Engineering. The conversation dives into the challenge of proactively staying ahead of new ESS technologies while working from a retrospectively-published 3-year code cycle for the International Fire Code (IFC) from the International Code Council (ICC). Doug comments that, “ the Fire Code is published every three years. … The previous one was 2021 and the next edition will be the 2024 Code. When the 2021 code first started being written, it was in 2018, using 2018 technology. It wasn't adopted until 2022. So, in 2024, we were working…

People in this episode

Host: Nate Kirchhofer

Guest: Doug Wilson

Topics covered

• battery fires
• energy storage systems
• fire protection engineering
• fire safety
• fire code
• best practices

Keywords

• battery fires
• energy storage systems
• fire protection
• fire code
• fire safety
• Doug Wilson
• Nate Kirchhofer

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Scottsdale AZ Fire Department, International Fire Code, International Code Council

Places: Surprise, AZ

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