Battery Electric Storage is No Silver Bullet – Sites Are Fire Hazards With High Capability For Damage To Residential Neighborhoods

Battery Electric Storage is No Silver Bullet – Sites Are Fire Hazards With High Capability For Damage To Residential Neighborhoods

The following answers were provided by Mr. Mezzacappa to our questions, which are  below: 

Is there anything that is being done about the BESS sites on Staten Island, particularly the one on Victory Blvd that your office is aware of?  

Multiple local politicians are opposing these sites, including the one on Victory Blvd, through a variety of measures, both regulatory and legal.

Assemblyman Sam Pirozzolo has successfully spearheaded opposition to this project, writing a letter that was co-signed by State Sen. Andrew Lanza, Assemblyman Mike Reilly and Councilmember David Carr. It urged the Public Service Commission (PSC) to deny Victory Blvd. project developer Hecate an extension after they missed the deadline to file a legally required decommissioning plan. The PSC granted the lawmakers’ request, denying Hecate the extension. As a result, the company must now present their request directly to the PSC.

On a more general level, Assemblyman Michael Tannousis has called for stricter safety regulations, including allowing greater community input, and requiring a minimum distance of 1000 feet between BESS sites and nearby homes and schools.

Are there lawsuits planned, is community pressure effective in this instance, or is there something else being done about these sites?  

Borough President Vito Fossella announced in April that he was filing a lawsuit to halt the proliferation of BESS sites on the island with attorneys Lou Gelormino and Mark Fonte, seeking an injunction against all such sites in Richmond County. The plaintiffs include 10 residents who live near several BESS facilities. This is the only lawsuit we are aware of to date.

The Energy Storage Program is overseen by a state agency, the New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). While there have been examples in New York State where community pressure has proven successful in delaying or even cancelling these projects, as has been done in Carmel in Putnam County and Oyster Bay in Nassau County, the fact that Staten Island’s local government is the New York City Council complicates the ability of local leaders to curtail development.

Community input is likely the best way to voice opposition to these sites. The planning process for BESS facilities mandates that public hearings be held, and a decision be made by the local reviewing board, and notices for the hearing must be published in local newspapers and mailed to landowners within 200 ft of the intended site.

While it’s easy to miss the notice, speaking up at these planning meetings is the most effective way to have local concerns taken into consideration, rather than protesting after the fact.

Battery Electric Storage is No Silver Bullet

By Michael P. Mezzacappa

As New York lawmakers push forward with green regulations intended to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions, local authorities have rolled out the construction of battery energy storage systems (BESS) at a quite rapid and alarming rate, as if it were a silver bullet. As New York plans on building one of the largest BESS sites in the nation on Victory Boulevard, which alone would power 10% of the climate goals of the entire state, it must heed the concerns of its residents.

To date, New York is home to more than 6,304 such facilities, and even more are proposed for New York City’s five boroughs. Residents are concerned about this unstable technology, and rightfully so.

Designed to take the place of a small power plant, BESS centers use super-sized lithium-ion batteries, otherwise commonly found in everything from phones and computers to electric scooters and plug in cars. Lithium batteries have drawn oversized attention due to a growing number of fires caused by the explosion of e-bike batteries.

Lithium-ion fires are known for burning hotter and faster than ordinary fires and they also emit toxic chemicals, further complicating any fire department’s ability to successfully combat them.

It is a fact that a fire sparked by one small lithium-ion battery from an electric bike or scooter, with motors of 250 to 500 watts, can take down an entire apartment building. Now, New York regulators are allowing companies to locate entire buildings full of these unstable batteries in the middle of residential areas, next to homes and even schools. A facility planned for Mariners Harbor would be 5 MW (megawatts), 10,000 times the power of a battery for an e-bike.

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There are currently 11 BESS facilities on Staten Island, and a total of 24 more of these projects have been additionally approved to be located here since 2020—including one that is planned to go up around the corner from where I grew up in West Brighton, a community of over 26,000 and one of the most densely-populated areas on the Island. The thought of what could happen should one of these sites catch fire is horrifying.

On the West Coast, Californians learned these lessons all too well. The Moss Landing Power Plant, 90 minutes south of San Francisco, has caught fire multiple times, including the Valley Center fire in 2023 and Otay Mesa fire in 2024. This January, as wildfires raged across Southern California, firefighters were also forced to contend with yet another lithium battery farm fire at the 630-megawatt (MW) site.

Yet this time it was far worse than previous incidents in 2021 and 2022, as 1,200 civilians were forced to evacuate, due to the emission of toxins, as the firefighters had to let the fire burn itself out, rather than risking damage to their lungs. After residents returned, many also reported feeling unwell. Then, a month after the initial blaze, the battery storage farm reignited, a total of five ignitions in as many years.

While Moss Landing, CA was over half a mile from any major residential area, imagine if this occurred in our backyard, like Charleston, Concord or Rossville.

FDNY deserves the utmost credit for their aggressive crackdown on illegal battery manufacturing and repair sites, and their ingenious methods of fighting lithium-ion battery fires, including special blankets to snuff out electric bike or car batteries. But even they would be challenged by one of these toxic infernos, lacking a large enough suppression system capable of extinguishing an industrial-sized lithium-ion battery farm fire.

Let us not forget that so many of these lithium-ion batteries are manufactured in China, which has cornered the lithium-ion battery market. China is responsible for nearly 80 percent of the global lithium battery production, and those manufacturers do not hold themselves to rigorous manufacturing and safety standards. When something goes wrong with their product, they often never respond to court summonses and generally carry no liability insurance. We also cannot easily obtain jurisdiction over these companies. I know that from personal experience.

This BESS technology remains highly unstable, and that scientific fact will not change, simply because policymakers want it to. I have litigated too many wrongful death and serious injury cases linked to the explosions of lithium-ion batteries to ever be an optimist on this matter.

Rather than recklessly embracing this technology simply to satisfy the state’s lofty climate goals set by the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which calls for reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050, Staten Island, New York City and our state leaders should seriously consider a moratorium on further BESS construction in residential areas and near schools. New York would do well to heed Assemblymember Michael Tannousis’ (R-Great Kills) calls for stricter safety regulations and mandatory community input before forcing more of these potentially dangerous sites on the public.

If New York’s leadership does not heed these lessons, and the concerns of their constituents, it will be to all our detriment.

Banner Image: Desert Sunlight Battery Energy Storage System: The Bureau of Land Management issued a Notice to Proceed with construction for the Sunlight Storage II Battery Energy Storage System project in Riverside County, increasing energy storage for the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm. Once completed, the project will provide up to 300 megawatts of additional renewable energy storage capacity, boosting reliability for the state power grid.  The project is on 94 acres of BLM-managed public lands near Desert Center in Riverside County. Image Credit – NextEra.