Riverhead should halt review of battery energy storage applications until state concludes probe of recent fires

Riverhead should take the governor’s decision to open an inter-agency investigation of battery energy storage fires this summer as a warning. The town ought to take swift action to put the battery energy storage code it adopted in April on hold.

Residents asked the Town Board to enact a moratorium on battery energy storage facilities, and the board rejected the request. Residents asked the Town Board not to act on a battery energy storage code outside of the comprehensive plan update, and the board rejected that request as well.

Prospective battery energy storage applicants, their attorneys and consultants assured town officials that the “modern” lithium ion battery storage systems currently being deployed are safe, that their construction prevents thermal runaway events — which can cause potentially catastrophic fires — and that there was no reason to delay adding this use to those allowed by the Riverhead Town Zoning Code.

Within a few months, we’ve learned otherwise.

We have to step back and ask: What was this town’s urgent need to move forward with this code?

We know that one battery energy storage company had already filed a site plan application for a proposal on Edwards Avenue and a second company was looking to file an application for a proposal on Mill Road, just north of the rail road tracks. We don’t know what other plans might be in the offing, because development plans are usually aired at closed-door meetings with planning department staff and two members of the Town Board long before they ever see the light of day at a public meeting. That’s exactly what happened with the two known battery energy storage proposals.

Riverhead officials seem to have gone out of their way to create a pathway for these applications to be reviewed and approved. The Town Board even voted to spend $10,000 to have the planning consultant, BFJ Planning, which had already been retained for the comp plan update, to do a separate environmental assessment on the proposed battery storage code. The board agreed to that extra work at an extra $10,000 fee, even though studying battery energy storage systems was already included in its scope of work for the comp plan update — and was included in the fee quoted for that scope of work.

If that weren’t bad enough, BFJ’s proposal for its $10,000 environmental review said the proposal “assumes that no potential significant adverse environmental impacts are identified” during the assessment and a negative declaration will be adopted — meaning no further environmental review would be needed.

So not only did the Town Board agree to pay $10,000 for something that was included in the comp plan scope of work — and fee — in the first place, the outcome of the planner’s review was a foregone conclusion.

All this begs the question: What was the rush?

Neighboring towns took a more prudent course, allowing time to thoroughly review the technology and applicable safety precautions before adopting a code to allow this use in our town — including in the Agricultural Protection Zone and in one residential zoning district.

Moratoriums on this use are in place in Southold and Southampton, but in Riverhead, town officials forged ahead.

It bears noting that one of the two developers we’ve learned about so far — Hexagon Energy, which wants to build a 100-megawatt battery energy storage system on Mill Road, on a site abutting a densely populated senior community — boasted during public hearings about the safety of its storage technology, a brand new system built by Powin Energy. Hexagon said it chose Powin because of its technology and track record of incident-free operation. That changed about six weeks ago in upstate Warwick, when two Powin systems — both the “Centipede” system pitched for Mill Road in Riverhead — caught fire at a 12-megawatt Convergent Energy facility. The Warwick facilities had just begun operation.

That was one of three fires this summer at battery energy storage facilities, including one in the Town of East Hampton. All three fires were at facilities far smaller than the two proposed thus far in Riverhead. Yet the fires burned for days, causing road closures and, in one instance, an evacuation of a one-mile area surrounding the facility.

In light of these incidents, the governor established an inter-agency working group to probe the cause of the fires and the make safety recommendations for moving forward with new facilities.

We are all well aware how committed the state is to developing adequate energy storage so that renewable energy systems can be sustainable and realistic. It could not have been easy for the governor to decide to pump the brakes on this much-promoted program. However, it was smart.

Riverhead should follow the state’s lead and make sure no new utility-scale energy storage systems are reviewed before all the facts and risks are known, before public safety is assured and before first responders have an opportunity to receive adequate training. To do otherwise would be just plain irresponsible.