NYC Bill Takes Aim at Battery Energy Storage Systems

14 minutes read

Is it possible to write about battery storage without sapping your energy? I’m going to try.

After all, it’s a real estate story. And it features pandering politicians and paranoid constituents.

This month, City Council member Frank Morano fed some red meat to Tottenville constituents fighting a 16,000-square-foot battery storage project.

“As these battery storage facilities continue to be built across our city, including right here on Staten Island, we cannot rely on blind trust or internal monitoring alone,” Morano said.

His solution: a bill to pile more regulations onto what is already a long, thorough and arduous process.

Morano is saying he doesn’t trust the Fire Department, which already regulates battery systems. Of course, no Staten Island politician will actually say “I don’t trust the FDNY,” given the borough’s love for firefighters and cops. But how else should “we cannot rely on blind trust” be interpreted?

Battery energy storage systems are a relatively new lease or sale opportunity for property owners. They began operating on commercial sites in the city a few years ago.

But the first residential BESS was completed only this month. It was installed on a Chinatown property by Brooklyn SolarWorks and Briggs & Stratton.

The project took nearly eight years. Most of that time was spent navigating what Brooklyn SolarWorks called the city’s “notoriously restrictive permitting guidelines for residential BESS systems.” The applicants said they even helped the city develop its permitting framework.

“There are some legitimate safety concerns, but anyone who says these batteries haven’t been tested beyond the extreme just doesn’t know what you have to do to get a battery approved in New York City,” T.R. Ludwig, CEO and co-founder of Brooklyn SolarWorks, said in an interview. “There’s an extreme amount of oversight. The FDNY is probably the most restrictive agency in the country when it comes to what’s required.”

Yet Morano, a Staten Island Republican, doesn’t think the rules are stringent enough — or he is just trying to show his Tottenville constituents how responsive he is.

Hence his bill, which among other things would require large outdoor battery storage facilities to provide the FDNY with live, continuous access to system data and mandate annual inspections by independent engineers.

“This legislation is about common sense — real oversight, independent verification, and full transparency for the public,” his statement said.

A lot of what’s in Morano’s bill is already required. Before battery equipment is even sold it is rigorously tested — including a burn test — and monitored by highly credentialed professionals. On top of that, the FDNY must approve systems for use in the city, and they must be tied into the property’s fire alarm system. That means the FDNY knows immediately if there’s a battery fire.

“You have to jump through so many hoops with the Fire Department,” Ludwig said. “Hearing arguments that it needs more oversight shows me [the critics] don’t know what’s going on in New York City.”

And if there is a fire, battery systems have redundant stops in place to keep them from getting out of hand.

Moran’s idea to have the FDNY eyeball battery facilities 24/7 strikes the Brooklyn SolarWorks CEO as not just unnecessary but impractical.

“The Fire Department is already doing so much,” Ludwig said. “An agency that already has so much to deal with is going to create a whole new infrastructure to monitor private batteries?”

The Chinatown project, on a building owned by Bruce Langone, paired a 19.6 kilowatt-hour battery system with a solar canopy. It’s small compared with other systems across the city, but it’s a proof of concept for a residential property.

Battery energy storage systems capture power — from the sun by day or from the grid at night, when electricity rates are low — and feed it back into the grid when demand is high. They are especially useful in preventing blackouts on hot summer days.

For property owners, it’s a revenue source — another way to monetize their land or rooftops.

But despite safety improvements in the past few years, fear of thermal runaway events, which can trigger fires that are hard to extinguish, has prompted localities across New York and in at least 16 other states to declare moratoriums on lithium-ion battery projects.

New York has the most, with 97 moratoriums. New York City has resisted taking that step, instead relying on its intense regulatory structure.

“New York has some of the most stringent fire safety rules for energy storage systems anywhere in the world,” Sequoya Cross, VP of energy storage for Briggs & Stratton Energy Solutions, said in a statement.

The best-case scenario for Morano’s bill is that in the course of failing, it sparks a discussion that shows New Yorkers battery storage is safe and essential. Because if Morano’s office is getting a lot of calls from constituents upset about batteries, just wait until there’s a power outage on the hottest day of the year.

“New York City has the oldest grid in the world,” Ludwig said. “It’s aging and it needs help. We have to get creative with how we solve these grid issues. Batteries are a great way to do that.”