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My name is Alan Francoeur and I have been researching and developing exotic alternative energy technologies since 1980, which includes acquiring at a later date and restoring the original EMA energy systems, originally developed by Edwin Gray and his team of engineers decades ago.
Alan Francoeur | LinkedIn
We had a serious Lithium battery fire that spontaneously ignited in our research lab on January 18th, 2026. The lithium batteries were not connected to any energy systems, disconnected and not being used, and were sitting on the lower shelf of the work bench and off line when the incident happened.
The Lithium battery brand that spontaneously erupted are the 230AH Li Time LiFePO4 12-volt version. They were originally donated to us to compare the performance characteristics on the dynamotor as compared to deep cycle Rolls lead acid wet cells.
I am on the understanding that LiFePO4 batteries are apparently supposed to be safer than other Lithium-Ion battery counterparts, which is why they were preferred. However they have failed, which led to great danger and a large amount of damage to our shop that was being used as a research lab to test and develop our electromagnetic dynamotor system.
That day, I went into our shop not long before noon to check on #1 dynamotor, which was running and being powered from Rolls lead acid batteries using six 2 volt batteries connected in series for a 12 volt circuit. Right at the moment I walked into the shop, I noticed one of the four lithium batteries, that were sitting on the lower bench, emitting thick heavy smoke which alarmed me greatly and the smoke escalated quickly.
The fire started with one of the lithium batteries that were connected on the end of the parallel connected stack, and fire began spreading very rapidly to the other cells in the batteries. I jumped into action - to fight the fire and save as much of the equipment and shop as I could.
During all this, I managed to cut the wires as fast possible on several of the connections to free them off the terminal leads, and began dragging the burning lithium battery pack and dropped them onto the middle of the lab floor, after which I then had to immediately evacuate the building due to increased heavy smoke and popping cells going off. It all happed way too fast.
After running, slipping and falling on ice to get a water hose, I connected the hose to an outdoor tap on the trailer, and ran back to the shop while dragging the hose and began spraying water in the shop onto the burning batteries to cool them down as fast as possible.
After I was able to cool them down slightly, I ran to our small excavator, started it, and crawled it up to the shop, stuck the boom in through the doors and grabbed hold of the burning batteries with the bucket and dragged them out of the shop far away to the other side of our landing, where they continued to burn for some time afterwards.
As all this was going on, my wife Jan had already called the fire department and they arrived at the time I had the fire stabilized. However, they could not drive the fire truck up here past the gate on the mountain hill and spun out on the icy forestry road and had to drive up here with another 4x4 truck. Before they arrived I had set up a large fan to begin moving fresh air into the shop to help circulate and pull the smoke out faster.
While they were here, they then made sure the battery fire was out and took many pictures of the destroyed batteries and shop, made their report, and could not do much of anything else from there.
There is heavy burnt damage on the end of the Onan phenolic mounting plate, including many wires and the Curtis controller, which will need to be replaced. The entire setup on the systems will have to come apart and be rebuilt.
All the inner walls in both sides of the shop are covered in black lithium and plastic heavy soot covering everything inside. There is also much damage on many tools, drafting table, blueprints, notes, many rare vintage tube ham radios, shortwave tube radio equipment, and much more.
The shop needs to be completely emptied out of all items to clean and save as much equipment and items as possible. If the shop cannot be repaired from the heavy burnt wood and toxic lithium smoke and soot damage, it will have to be demolished and rebuild from scratch, which is going to be allot of work with great expense.
The shop is now shut down until the building can be fully repaired or replaced and it will take some time to rebuild and recover.
We lost a lot of items, tools, parts, specialty materials, heavy OFC copper wires with related copper lugs, many specialty electronic components, and a rare Curtis motor controller that was used for the Onan energy system that is now burnt.
I do not know the costs of the damage on everything, but I do need to ask for as much help as possible to recover, replace lost equipment and materials, and fully restore everything so as to get all the systems back on track, which will take many months of work.
All this has just caused us much grief and hardship we did not need or can afford. What a terrible time this has been for us.
I do hope you can assist to help us restore the shop/lab and replace lost equipment and items, and get the energy technologies back up and running and moving forward again.
I appreciate all of you and I thank you all very much for anything you can do to help us recover.
Sincerely.
Alan Francoeur