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Spotlight

New York’s Battery Backlash Catches Fire

Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?

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Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.

Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.

According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:

Staten Island polling.Heatmap Pro

Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.

This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.

“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”

I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.

I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.

“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”

Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …

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Spotlight

The Blast Radius of Interior’s Anti-Renewables Order Could Be Huge

Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.

Wetlands, Donald Trump, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.

Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.

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Hotspots

Idaho’s Lava Ridge Wind Farm Faces a New Fight in Congress

We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.

The United States.
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1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.

  • House Republicans this week advanced an Interior Department appropriations bill that would indefinitely halt federal funding for any permits related to the proposed wind facility “unless and until” the president reviews all of its permits issued under the Biden administration. Biden had completed permitting right before Trump took office.
  • Trump had already ordered a stop to construction on the project as part of a Day 1 flurry of executive orders. But if this policy rider becomes law, it could effectively handcuff any future president after Trump from allowing Lava Ridge to move forward.
  • While Democrats tend to view riders like these unfavorably and attempt to get rid of them, government funding packages require 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, which often means partisan policies from funding bills passed by previous Congresses are challenging to get rid of and can stick around for long stretches of time.
  • By that same logic, one would assume that the need to hit that 60 number now requires Democrats, so wouldn’t they need them and want to ditch this rider? Except one thing: it is exceedingly likely given past congressional fights that the party’s right flank in the House requests fresh concessions. Policy riders like these become chits in that negotiation – and I do expect this one to be an easy sop for this flank given the executive order is already in place.
  • There’s also the whole matter of whether LS Power will try to proceed with this project under a future president amidst increasing pressure on the company. That’s likely why Sawtooth Energy, an energy developer interested in building new small modular nuclear reactors, is now eyeing the project site.

2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.

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Q&A

How to Fight Back Against Anti-Renewable Activists

Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The Fight Q&A subject.
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This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.

On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.

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