The equipment cabinet sat inside its fenced compound, as it had every day since commissioning.
Then, on a February evening near Bendigo, it was on fire.
Flames moved out of the housing and into the grass on the site.
Black smoke drifted over the township of Raywood, in central Victoria.
By the time crews had it under control, the question was no longer about one farm, it was about five.
What a fire inside an inverter cabinet actually does
A solar inverter’s job is to take the direct current that panels produce and flip it into the alternating current the grid runs on. That conversion generates heat, and the cabinet holding the electronics is designed to manage it, drawing air through vents and shedding warmth into the space around it. Under normal conditions the heat stays manageable.
But an inverter also handles high voltage DC, which in large commercial strings can run to well over a thousand volts, and a fault such as a short circuit, a failed component or a loose connection can drive internal temperatures far past what the housing was built to absorb. Electrical fires in this kind of gear are generally traced to a short, an arc or runaway heat buildup rather than to the panels themselves.
The cabinet is not a sealed room; it breathes. So when equipment inside reaches ignition, there is a path outward through the same openings that normally keep it cool. At Raywood, that path led into standing vegetation, and the inverter fire that followed spread faster than it might have on bare ground.
How one cabinet pushed flames into the grass beyond it
On a Thursday evening in February, a fire at the Raywood solar farm and battery site, roughly 110 miles north of Melbourne, began in electrical equipment and spread into vegetation on the site. Reporting on the incident described the source as an inverter, while the Country Fire Authority’s own account described a transformer catching fire on a mid sized commercial solar farm. Either way, the ignition point was inside a cabinet, not on a panel.
The physical chain was short. Crews were called about 5.50pm, ten units from six brigades attended, and the scene was under control by about 8.30pm, with foam used on the burning equipment. A community warning went out over the black, toxic smoke drifting across the township. Firefighters reported that the density of smoke made access difficult.
No injuries were reported at the site. But the regulatory response that followed moved fast, and it moved wide.
Why inspectors went to five farms, not one
The fire broke out on 20 February 2025, in the middle of a two week safety blitz in which Energy Safe Victoria officers inspected 18 solar farms across the Shepparton, Bendigo, Kerang and Mildura areas. When officers attended the Raywood scene, the regulator says they observed a lack of adequate vegetation management, including insufficient fire breaks and vegetation that had grown too high. Officers also raised concerns about vegetation at four other sites owned by subsidiaries of the same parent company.
The result was a direction to stop generating electricity at five farms, at Raywood, Goornong, Ledcourt, Stawell and Moolort, effective from midday on Saturday 22 February. The regulator stated the directions would stay in place until it was satisfied vegetation was being managed appropriately. Fire breaks around electrical equipment matter here precisely because inverters and transformer boxes sit in paddocks where summer grass grows back quickly.
So the outcome for the operator was immediate. Five generating facilities stood idle while the ground conditions were brought back into line.
The gap a grass stem can reveal
The Raywood incident was not the first Australian solar fire to start inside a container of electronics. About a year earlier, a fire broke out at the Mannum 2 project in South Australia’s Riverland region while it was being commissioned; a subcontractor suffered burns and the damage bill was estimated at around A$250,000. Coverage of that fire was later corrected on its date, which is a reminder to check the year on any incident before repeating it.
The Raywood sequence shows how small the margin can be. Between a cabinet and the nearest uncut grass there may be only a few yards of cleared ground, enough on an ordinary day, but not when the fire starts inside the housing itself. A recently commissioned UK solar farm made a related point about design margins on a working site. The specification that matters is usually the one nobody rechecked after the last change on the ground.
What the fire break requirement is actually asking
A fire break around solar plant is not a complicated object. It is a strip of cleared ground at a defined width, with vegetation kept below a stated height. Under the regulator’s guidance, aligned with Country Fire Authority guidelines for renewable facilities, grass near electrical equipment should be no more than about four inches tall during the declared fire danger period.
The difficulty is maintenance, not design. Grass grows back, inspection rounds get stretched, and a strip that was clear in spring can be knee high by late summer. That is the gap this fire exposed, and the gap the directions were written to close.
Many solar fire incidents involve components people rarely inspect first: connectors, cables, junction boxes and battery units rather than the modules. Those cabinets sit scattered across hundreds of acres of farmland, and the water behavior of a solar site is one more variable that rarely appears on an equipment maintenance checklist.
Energy Safe has since said it directed eight solar farms in total to pause operating during high fire danger periods in 2025 while overgrown vegetation was cut back and other controls put in place. The requirement itself had not changed; what changed was how closely anyone was measuring against it.
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