North Shore residents oppose battery storage, power line projects

Several hundred residents crowded North Shore High School’s auditorium in Glen Head last week for a community meeting in which leaders took aim at projects that are linchpins in the state’s plan for a carbon-free energy grid in coming decades.

Speakers during the nearly two-hour meeting raised concerns about a 275-megawatt battery storage facility planned for the waterfront in Glenwood Landing at the site of a legacy fuel oil port facility. If built, the project, called Oyster Shore Energy, would be among the state’s and the country's largest battery storage facilities.

Speakers at the meeting raised the specter of fires, impossible evacuation plans, pending fire-safety codes and impacts on traffic, insurance rates and home values if the plan is approved by the Town of Oyster Bay.

"We don’t want to be the next class-action community," said Christine Panzeca, a resident who led a presentation about the planned battery storage unity by Jupiter Power. She noted that most of the company’s existing projects are not in densely populated areas. "We need to pause and we need to assess what’s coming here."

Speakers also took aim at a major transmission line project known as PropelNY Energy, which would install chiefly underground high-voltage cables through major transmission corridors of Nassau County, including about 15 miles of the North Shore community.

"This project is going to create incredible congestion in the area," said George Pombar, president of the Glen Head-Glenwood Civic Council, adding that the impacts would be felt for years. 

The biggest concern about the battery facilities, speakers said, was the danger of fires. The facilities are intended to store energy from a generation of new renewables such as offshore wind, while replacing small plants called peakers that burn natural gas and diesel fuel.

Residents from Southold to Holbrook, and Babylon to Oyster Bay have raised concerns about them, even as Gov. Kathy Hochul charges forward with a plan for 6,000 megawatts of the units across the state by 2030.

Widespread community opposition to battery storage poses significant challenges for the state and LIPA’s plan to transition the power grid to mostly green energy by 2050. The batteries are considered critical to helping balance grid demand when intermittent wind-energy isn’t being produced (primarily in the summer), while providing essential on-demand power when fossil-fuel generating plants are retired in coming decades. There are few other alternatives to the batteries, and larger ones will be needed to help store green energy when demand is lower, chiefly at night.

Newsday has reported that developers have submitted preliminary plans for dozens of battery facilities across Long Island and the state. Among them, according to the New York State Independent System Operator, are a 110-megawatt facility in Holtsville that has garnered strong local opposition. 

Panzeca pointed to battery fires around the county and raised questions about the ability of local fire departments and the community to respond. "If we have an event here I don’t think we’d be able to evacuate," she said, suggesting "shelter-in-place" orders would be relied on. She also raised concerns that the batteries, many of which are made in China and could be subject to damage or defects, would be operated remotely once commissioned.

Doreen Harris, president and chief executive of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which is administering the state’s green energy programs, said draft changes to the state fire code released this summer will go a long way toward helping address local safety concerns about the battery systems.

The project's developer, Jupiter Power, a subsidiary of finance giant BlackRock Alternatives, issued a statement to Newsday in advance of the meeting, saying its "top priority is to operate safely throughout the entire life of the project."

"Jupiter Power is committed to a comprehensive local community engagement process for the Oyster Shore Energy project," Hans Detweiler, senior director of development, said in the statement. He said the project will "accelerate the cleanup of a contaminated oil terminal and, if approved, could substantially reduce current environmental risks to Hempstead Harbor." It will also "create jobs and increase local government revenues relative to the current oil terminal."

The company submitted an initial application to Oyster Bay Town in late 2022, and has been "working to redesign the project in response to comments from the public and the Town."

Oyster Bay, like more than half a dozen towns on Long Island, has a moratorium on battery storage units in place, while the state is in the process of updating fire safety codes around the units. Jupiter said it plans to "wait for the code updates to finalize before we resubmit an updated zoning application to the town."

One of the dozens of fires that have impacted battery storage systems, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, took place at a National Grid/NextEra-owned facility in East Hampton last year, which burned for about 30 hours and took a year to rebuild. That $55 million facility is back in operation, storing some energy from the newly commissioned South Fork Wind Farm.

If the Glen Head facility is approved, construction would start no sooner than 2026, Jupiter said, and the facility could be in operation by the end of the decade.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.