Proposed Glenwood Landing battery storage plant draws residents' concerns

Plans for one of Long Island’s largest battery-storage plants in Glenwood Landing drew a chorus of outrage at a community meeting in Sea Cliff on Tuesday night as residents raised questions about its safety, cost and location.

Jupiter Power, a division of investment giant BlackRock, led the two-hour meeting with drawings of the proposed $250 million Oyster Shore Energy Storage plant on Hempstead Harbor, while making assurances on property taxes, safe operation and cleanup of the old petroleum depot.

"Our project can accelerate remediation of the site," said Jupiter’s Hans Detweiler, a project manager.

But residents, many of whom ignored a meeting format that required them to write down their questions for a Jupiter official to read, expressed worry that the planned 275-megawatt battery could be prone to fires and leave a toxic legacy. The facility would replace the Global Partners fuel depot on the parcel.

"We’re trading off one environmental disaster for another," Glen Head resident Chris Penzca, one of the more vocal opponents of the plant, said after the meeting. "We don’t want to live with the risk anymore. If Global’s going to clean it up, clean it up and let’s put something else there."

Battery storage facilities are a critical part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, with plans for dozens of them around the state and across Long Island in the next decade. But even in the few Long Island towns that have not placed moratoriums on their development, opposition has been fierce, most notably in Brookhaven, where at least five facilities have filed for building permits and one is under construction. The state and LIPA envision the facilities replacing smaller fossil-fuel plants and storing excess energy from wind farms during lower demand times, such as winter evenings.

In Sea Cliff, Jupiter officials and Paul Rogers, a former FDNY official who operates the private Energy Safety Response Group, tried to assure residents the new plant would be safe, citing strict new fire safety codes and project design, while potentially benefiting customers by powering up when energy is cheap and sending it back to the grid when power is most expensive.

Residents expressed doubts that those potential energy-cost savings would translate into lower PSEG bills. "They're here to make a profit," Penzca said. "They're not investing in our community." 

Detweiler said tax revenues would be the same or more to the town as the $320,000 a year that Global is paying, and that the Jupiter project was not commercially linked to or dependent on other pending projects, such as offshore wind or a large power transmission cable project called Propel NY that will run through the community.

The site is key, said Detweiler, because of its proximity to a LIPA substation and a 138,000-volt cable line that will charge up the batteries and dispatch power back to the grid at four- or eight-hour intervals. Residents argued the site is wrong because of the high population density around it and the lack of a feasible evacuation plan. Rogers said evacuation wouldn’t be the preferred response to any possible fire at the site, which he said would be contained.

Any potential fire would be "such a small event that the local community might not even be aware of it," he said, adding he could not "foresee an event that would cause an evacuation."

Rogers also tried to assure residents the plant’s lithium-ion batteries are "very different" from the e-bike batteries that have caused a rash of fires in recent years.

At least three lithium-ion battery storage plants have caught fire in New York State since the start of 2023, including one in East Hampton that burned for 30 hours in May 2023 and required more than a year to remediate and replace. That NextEra/National Grid facility, operating under contract to LIPA, restored operations at the site this summer.

Oyster Shore would house 200 to 300 battery containers, Jupiter said, each with 4,000 to 5,000 lithium-ion cells.

Both Oyster Bay and North Hempstead have declared moratoriums on battery-storage development, but Detweiler said the company was waiting for those to "roll off" before submitting new proposals for the project, likely next year.

Discussions about past fires and the potential for one at Glenwood Landing drew the loudest outbursts from residents, leading Detweiler to say the company was "going to reassert some discipline" during the meeting, referring to the written question format.

"It’s not fair," one resident said.

"You’re not engaging with the community," said George Pombar, president of the Glenwood-Glen Head Civic Council. He said after the meeting that the "number one concern for the community" remains safety, and added his group would "continue to fight" the project.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

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