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By Denise Civiletti - October 23, 2024
An energy company seeking an exemption from Southampton Town’s moratorium on battery energy storage facility applications faced scrutiny by Town Board members and strong opposition from the Riverhead Central School District Board of Education during a hearing on its exemption application last night at Southampton Town Hall.
NineDot Energy wants to build a five-megawatt battery energy storage facility and a small solar array on a one-acre parcel at 14 Enterprise Zone Drive in Flanders, a site in the industrial park that’s adjacent to the Phillips Avenue Elementary School.
The applicant petitioned for an exemption from the moratorium in late May, its attorney, John Armentano of Farrell Fritz told the Town Board last night.
NineDot Energy’s Vice President for Strategic Development Sam Brill said prior delays in the project already threaten its viability and further delay “really might kill it.”
“We got almost all the permits that we needed a couple of years ago when the moratorium hit and we were stopped in our tracks,” Brill said.
Battery energy storage systems, or BESS, store energy produced by solar arrays and wind turbines, for deployment at times when power demand is high but energy production is low. The facilities are considered essential to the viability of renewable energy technologies.
“Our product is very different from some of the ones that have gotten a lot of controversy in the town,” Brill said, apparently referring to the Canal Bess proposal to build a 100-megawatt BESS facility in Hampton Bays, which drew significant community opposition that led the town to enact a six-month moratorium in August of last year. The Town Board has so far approved two six-month extensions of the moratorium, which is currently set to expire in February.
NineDot is not proposing a utility grid-scale facility Brill noted, like the 100-MW Canal BESS. It is proposing a community-scale facility. “We are connected to the grid, but we’re much smaller. The project that we have in front of you this evening is a five-megawatt project. The actual square footage that’s covered with batteries is a couple thousand square feet. It’s quite small,” Brill said, designed to support “the smaller distribution area that’s closest to where folks live and your businesses.”
The facility is in a zone designated by LIPA and New York state as “the most stressed during those peak summer hours when there’s a threat of either having a blackout or brownout or firing up high-emissions peaker plants,” he said.
“We really feel like we are kind of a victim of circumstance,” Brill told the board last night. “If it hadn’t been for the very, very large, controversial project that drew a lot of attention,” he said, “our project would have already been built.”
The NineDot proposal got a negative declaration under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, Brill said. A negative declaration is a determination that an action will have no significant adverse environmental impacts and can proceed without a full environmental impact statement.
The proposal also received a special exception approval and a conditional site plan approval, Brill said, as well as approval from the Pine Barrens Commission for land clearing. “We signed our interconnection agreements with LIPA and had gotten incentives from NYSERDA [New York State Energy Research and Development Authority],” Brill said. “We were in the process of mobilizing and getting financing when the moratorium hit, and since then, we have not been able to proceed with the project,” he said,
NineDot now faces a NYSERDA deadline of May 2025 for “putting our project into service,” according to Brill.
NineDot’s consultant, Paul Rogers of ESRG Group, a former FDNY lieutenant in the hazardous materials unit working on battery energy storage systems and a member of the inter-agency working group appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in August 2023, tried to assure town officials of the project’s safety.
The working group was created after three fires at BESS facilities across the state last summer and was tasked with reviewing those events as well as existing regulations, with the aim of ensuring the safety of the BESS facilities.
Rogers’ safety assurances were met with skepticism, particularly from Council Member William Pell, who chastised the company for not reaching out to the Flanders Fire Department before making its application. Pell also strongly objected to the proximity of the proposed facility to the elementary school.
The building housing the batteries would be 460 feet from the Phillips Avenue Elementary School property line, along a field behind the school building itself.
“I think it’s too close to the school…I’m not going to put people’s kids at risk,” Pell said. “I think that it’s the wrong place.”
Brill told the board that NineDot met with the Riverhead Central School District superintendent and her deputies “a few weeks ago” and they had no problems with the project,” he said.
“At that meeting, they expressed no concerns about our project. They said they looked forward to if and when the project was approved, [and to] collaborating with us on … educational programming,” Brill said.
Council Member Cyndi McNamara told the applicant that the town received a letter yesterday from the school district “asking us to put the children first and deny the exemption.”
“That’s news to us,” Brill said. “It’s a little bit shocking,” he said.
Riverhead Board of Education Vice President Viriginia Healy, addressing the board via Zoom, said NineDot was misrepresenting its meeting with school officials.
NineDot met with the superintendent and the business official, Healy said. “They listened to their pitch, but they did not promise anything. And actually they said they were going to refer this to the Board of Ed and with that, we sent a statement,” she said.
Healy then read the Board of Education’s statement into the record.
The Riverhead Central School District supports clean energy, the statement said, “However, careful consideration needs to be given to the location of any clean energy and other energy facilities, particularly as it impacts some of our most vulnerable residents, our children.”
The Board of Education urged the town to “not consider this exemption request in a vacuum.”
“The proposed location of this battery energy storage system facility would be built within close proximity to the proposed sewage treatment plant that is planned to be built just several 100 yards away,” the school board said.
The district urged the town “to think about the children,” Healy read, “to consider how their learning environment would be affected, both directly and passively…
“Our children should always come first. But if this exemption were granted, the town would be making a clear statement that it does not care about their learning environment.
“Phillips Avenue Elementary is already facing enough issues with the building of the sewage treatment plant next to its property. We urge the town to not compound these issues by now building [an] energy facility that brings its own set of unique concerns to our residents directly adjacent to Phillips Avenue Elementary,” the statement said. The district asked the town “to please put the children first and deny this requested exemption.”
The exemption application did receive support on the record from Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy group based in Farmingdale that supports clean energy and the state’s transition away from fossil fuel energy sources.
Jordan Cristensen, the group’s program coordinator, told the Town Board that battery energy storage is the crucial missing piece for the success of the transition. The location is “ideal siting” for NineDot’s project. It is not near a residential area and complies with all codes.
“But maybe most importantly, it’s in an area of the grid where we really do need more energy, right? So the choice that we’re going to have to make is whether to move forward with, you know, small community battery projects like this, or to continue using fossil fuels in these peaker plants that are degrading our air quality and impacting the public health of the local residents,” Cristensen said.
“We’re just not going to be able to transition to wind and solar without the batteries to store this energy for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining,” she said. The project is small and “a a good test case,” Cristensen said, “and it makes perfect sense.”
The Town Board closed the hearing, but left the record open for 30 days for the submission of written comments.