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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?

battery
Heatmap Illustration

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 Moss Landing Fire Is Radicalizing Battery Foes

From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.

Texas battery project.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.

Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.

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Hotspots

Trump May Approve Transmission Line for Wind Project

And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.

Map of renewable energy conflicts
Heatmap Illustration

1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.

  • This is a huge deal. For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.
  • The Bureau of Land Management sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act.
  • According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project itself is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
  • The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment, which is standard practice and required under the law to proceed. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way for the transmission line may come as soon as this May.
  • We’ve asked BLM for comment on how this complies with Trump’s executive order ending “new or renewed approvals” and “rights of way” for onshore wind projects. We’ll let you know if we hear back.
  • It’s worth noting, however, that BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?

2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.

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Q&A

What’s the Deal with Battery Storage Regulation?

A conversation with Nikhil Kumar of GridLab

Nikhil Kumar, program director at GridLab
Heatmap Illustration

Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!

The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.

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