How to Store Lithium-Ion Batteries Without Failing WHS Compliance
Search for lithium-ion battery storage requirements in Australia and you will not find one document that answers the question. No Australian Standard tells a commercial workplace how to store and charge the batteries sitting in its laptops, cleaning equipment, two-way radios and delivery bikes. What exists instead is a set of obligations spread across work health and safety law, electrical product regulation and dangerous goods rules. Assembling them into a working policy falls to you.
That gap catches out offices, retail sites, warehouses, schools and healthcare facilities more often than heavy industry, because heavy industry already runs formal hazard registers. A commercial tenancy with forty laptops, three cordless vacuums and a courier bike charging in the loading dock carries a real fire load and usually no policy covering it. Our guide to how lithium battery fires behave explains why that load sits outside ordinary electrical risk. Here is what applies.
Rule 1: The Duty Applies Whatever the Quantity
Your primary obligation comes from the model Work Health and Safety Act, which requires a PCBU to manage risks so far as is reasonably practicable. There is no minimum battery count that switches this on. Twenty phone chargers in a staffroom attract the same duty as a warehouse full of pallet jack packs, and the difference lies only in what a reasonable control looks like at each scale.
The duty covers use, storage, charging, handling and disposal. It also covers the batteries you do not own. Staff personal devices, contractor tools and visitor e-scooters all sit inside a workplace you have management or control of, which puts them inside your risk assessment whether or not they appear on your asset register.
Rule 2: The Standards Sit on the Charger, Not the Battery
The ACCC states plainly that no mandatory safety standard covers lithium-ion batteries or the products containing them. Chargers are a different matter. WA's Building and Energy regulator confirms that battery chargers must be tested against Australian Standards under the national Electrical Equipment Safety System, carry a visible Regulatory Compliance Mark, and be registered to an accountable Responsible Supplier.
This makes procurement one of your strongest controls. A charger bought online from an overseas seller may carry no RCM, no certification and no supplier anyone can hold to account. Write the RCM requirement into your purchasing rules and you remove a whole category of failure before it reaches the building.
Rule 3: Charging Areas Get Designed, Not Chosen
Most workplaces charge batteries wherever a power point happens to be free. WorkSafe Victoria's guidance on lithium-ion battery fires sets a considerably higher bar, recommending a dedicated charging area separated from the spaces where people work, positioned away from emergency exits and evacuation routes, and kept clear of heat, direct sunlight and moisture.
The same guidance recommends smart chargers that cut power when a fault is detected, and an accessible means of isolating chargers remotely if equipment ignites. It also carries a warning worth reading twice: some sprinkler systems cannot suppress a large lithium-ion battery fire, and confirming yours can is a question for a fire engineer rather than an assumption.
Where separation is not available, containment does the same job. A ventilated steel lithium-ion battery charging and storage cabinet gives you the barrier, the airflow and the internal power circuit in one unit, which suits tenancies where relocating the charging point simply is not possible.
Rule 4: Your Emergency Plan Has to Name the Hazard
Regulation 43 of the model WHS Regulations requires every PCBU to prepare, document and test an emergency plan. A plan written before batteries became a serious fire load will not mention thermal runaway, toxic gas venting or re-ignition, and a plan that omits the hazard cannot direct anyone's response to it.
WorkSafe Victoria's position is direct: emergency plans should instruct people to evacuate and not attempt to extinguish a lithium-ion battery fire. For most commercial workplaces that is the correct instruction, and it needs writing down rather than assuming. Our guide to who owns emergency procedures sets out what else Regulation 43 demands and who carries the duty.
Update the plan to cover:
- Where batteries charge and who checks them
- The warning signs staff report: swelling, heat, odour, noise
- Evacuation triggers and the instruction not to fight the fire
- Which extinguishing equipment is present and its limits
- Notification of emergency services and your WHS regulator
Rule 5: Volume Changes the Legal Picture
Small quantities sit under the general duty. Larger holdings move into dangerous goods territory, where storage quantities, manifests and emergency service notification come into play, and the thresholds vary between states. Distribution centres, equipment hire businesses and any site consolidating batteries for recycling should confirm where they sit before assuming the general duty is enough. Our article on fire rules by state covers how these jurisdictional differences play out.
If you manage several tenancies, the audit worth running is the simplest one available: walk each floor at 6pm and photograph every device left on charge. The gap between your policy and your building shows up in about twenty minutes.
What Good Looks Like
A commercial workplace meeting its lithium-ion battery storage requirements can point to a named charging location, a procurement rule, a trained staff group and an emergency plan that mentions the hazard by name. None of that requires capital expenditure beyond a cabinet. It requires deciding who owns the risk and writing down the answer.
If a cabinet is the control you land on, our breakdown of what a battery charging cabinet does covers ventilation, containment and the specification detail worth checking before you buy.
Book a Battery Risk Walkthrough
Checkpoint Group reviews battery charging and storage arrangements for commercial sites across Australia, from single tenancies to multi-site portfolios. We will tell you what your building looks like against the five obligations above and what closing the gaps involves. Call 1800 273 473 or book a site review with our team.
