POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — It was standing room only at the Town Board meeting here Sept. 3. A glance at the agenda for the night, dominated by property maintenance orders and police officer hires, would not hint at what drew so much of the public out on a Wednesday evening. But it quickly became apparent once residents began speaking.
“Lithium battery stations often go on fire,” one said. “There’s been many of them, and I understand that you can’t use water to put them out … so they let fire smolder, just pouring toxins into the air.”
The board was considering whether to adopt new zoning codes to regulate the construction of battery energy storage systems (BESS) that would overturn an 18-month moratorium. Public comment both for and against the rules went on for about three hours at the meeting, with people voicing concerns about fire safety, pollution, environmental impact and grid stability.
“I think batteries will help us be less dependent on polluting plants, like the one in Newburgh,” another resident said. “My electric bills are going up; there are consistent rate hikes. I think batteries can help keep our bills low.”
Town Supervisor Rebecca Edwards said New York state recently adopted fire codes for BESS, the strictest in the U.S. Councilmember Ann Shershin said if the town wanted solar projects, it would need BESS nearby.
Councilmember Michael Cifone said he didn’t see the benefit to the town’s residents and expected it to go to developers and utilities.
After more discussion, several failed amendments and one minor adjustment to construction setbacks, the seven-member board narrowly passed the zoning rules along party lines, with the four Democrats voting in favor. This makes Poughkeepsie one of the first municipalities in New York to overturn a BESS construction moratorium.
This scene is playing out in towns and cities across New York as the state pursues its goal of 6 GW of energy storage by 2030. The Hudson Valley, New York City and Long Island are at the forefront of a massive battery rollout. Because of the state’s strong home rule provisions, municipalities have significant power over whether BESS facilities get built. A bill to get BESS under state siting authority died in committee in 2025.
Similar debates are being held on Staten Island and in Mahopac. Westchester County passed a local law upping safety requirements for BESS systems after a fire in 2023. That same year, National Grid pulled out of a BESS and solar installation in the Adirondacks because of community outcry. Another battery battle is gearing up in Kingston where Terra-Gen is planning a 250-MW facility on the site of a closed high school. Local officials and state representatives are divided on the issue, per Energy Storage News.
The Poughkeepsie Town Board had been thinking about BESS zoning for roughly a year. In September 2024, the matter was brought to its attention when locals learned of a local project and descended on the board with demands and questions.
Key Capture Energy, the developer of the project, had been eyeing an industrial parcel owned by Vassar College since 2019, Phil Denara, director of development for the company, said in an interview in 2024. The company wanted to build a 20-MW/80-MWh battery energy storage project there because it was close to a local substation. The project fell through before the zoning ordinance could be passed.
“We’re attracted to continuing to develop in New York primarily because of the policy mandates that are driving a lot of the industry,” Denara said. “The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act set an initial storage target which has been doubled by Gov. [Kathy] Hochul.”
Denara said the industry needed to “take ownership” and respond to the concerns of local residents and officials.
“We’re coordinating a lot at the local level, educating local communities and ensuring that they understand that this technology is important for our decarbonization goals both in New York state and more broadly across the globe,” he said.
Fire Safety
One of the most frequently voiced concerns in the debate over BESS facilities is over fire safety. In Facebook groups opposing local BESS projects, people share videos of e-bikes exploding. Others share conspiracy theories about Chinese military-linked companies infiltrating the U.S. battery storage supply chain.
But the recurring star of the show is the Moss Landing Fire in California, when in January a 300-MW BESS caught fire. People in nearby areas were evacuated. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, and EPA is leading an ongoing cleanup.
The environmental impacts are unclear. While local scientists at Elkhorn Slough, a national estuary reserve near Moss Landing, found that heavy metal contamination spiked in the aftermath of the fire, they aren’t certain about long-term ecological or health consequences.
“We don’t know yet what is going to happen in terms of the estuary habitats here,” said Ivano Aiello, a scientist at San Jose State University who studies the wetland dynamics of the area. “We are monitoring the microbes; we are monitoring the [animals, from] invertebrates all the way up to the sea otters, to understand whether those metals are moving through the food web.”
The Moss Landing site previously was a gas plant. Aiello said that it was unclear whether the pollution seen from the battery fire was comparable to the effects of previous emissions.
“We use sediments as a time machine,” Aiello said. “Once the emergency ends here, it’s one of the things I’d like to use the core samples as a way to assess.”
Matthew Paiss, a technical adviser on energy storage safety for Sandia National Laboratories and former firefighter, lives near Moss Landing. He said that in general, consumer-grade rechargeable lithium batteries were not manufactured to the same high standards as utility-scale batteries.
“People are looking for the cheapest battery they can, and if your job is as a gig employee and you’re delivering Uber Eats, and your $500 battery loses capacity, you’re going to take it to a local shop and get a couple cells changed out,” Paiss said. This kind of tweaking, coupled with hard physical wear and tear, was the cause of most failures, he said.
Paiss has studied the general causes of BESS failures using BESS Failure Database data from the Energy Policy Research Institute. In general, he said utility-scale battery fires occur because of installation errors and failures with overall protection systems. The Moss Landing facility kept many of their batteries in old buildings on site, which may have contributed to the fire by reducing “fire segmentation,” he said.
“Best practices moving forward are to limit the amount of propagation,” he said. “That’s why we’re seeing a lot of outdoor containers.”
Lakshmi Srinivasan, the team lead for EPRI’s energy storage program, said that since 2011, the rate of BESS fires has declined worldwide as the industry improves safety. Of the failures they’ve been able to isolate causes for, the battery cells themselves were not the most likely to cause fires. Other components, installation problems, bad thermal management and HVAC systems were the most common causes.
“The key takeaway from this work was actually that we know how to engineer controls and the balance of the system to prevent these kinds of failures going forward,” she said.
Local Government Outreach
What seemed to have the most impact on the Poughkeepsie Town Board’s decision to implement zoning was a panel discussion in June in which the Dutchess County Mayors and Supervisors Association met with experts to discuss BESS facilities.
The meeting, held at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services Conference Center, attracted policy wonks, local government officials, firefighters, first responders and concerned citizens. The crowd listened to presentations by Paul Rogers, a former New York City Fire Department lieutenant working for the Energy Safety Resource Group; Jeffrey Seidman, a Vassar College professor; and Jennifer Manierre, director of clean energy siting for the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency.
Seidman helped organize the meeting with town Supervisor Edwards. What originally had been an “old boys club” for local government officials became, for one night, a policy discussion forum.
Seidman explained the benefits of utility-scale batteries, primarily load shifting, enhanced grid reliability and reduced use of expensive peaker plants. Batteries would help reduce energy costs if built in sufficient numbers across the state, he argued.
“Demand for electricity is going up absolutely everywhere,” Seidman said. This meant more demand for substations and transmission lines. “Batteries save us money by not making us have to do those expensive upgrades.”
Manierre offered NYSERDA’s service to help local officials with zoning and planning and explained the role of batteries in the state energy plan.
Rogers reviewed the New York Fire Code development process, the safety considerations afforded to firefighters and the relative risks of fires at battery plants compared to more conventional buildings. Each facility needs to have an on-call person to handle emergencies and coordinate with first responders, he explained.
“We put these things in place to try to help … because our thing is to keep everyone safe,” Rogers said. “I’ll never say ‘never,’ but we significantly reduce the risk of an event taking place,”
Battery storage facilities were required by the fire code to undergo large-scale fire testing, he explained. This meant that manufacturers needed to test-burn entire battery cabinets.
“What the [testing] proves and validates is that if something takes place that it doesn’t leave the container, it stays in the container,” Rogers said.
Seidman told RTO Insider that local organizers were setting up another forum in Ulster County, where several battery facilities are planned. He hopes that by mid-November, a similarly productive conversation can happen there too.
“I think a lot of people are not ideologically or otherwise opposed to batteries, but they just don’t mean anything to them,” Seidman said. “Like, ‘why should we put our necks out?’”
Seidman said that he received a good response from town officials after the meeting and that one had invited him to a local temple to give a talk on batteries. He said he hopes his efforts can make a difference for the climate and local air quality.
“I’d love to make this a traveling road show,” he said. “This is something I would like to repeat.”
