Last week residents of Plattekill listened to a presentation by Rachael Walker, a Permitting Director for the Chalkstone Battery Energy Storage Project, that the company is proposing to build in town.

 

Walker highlighted a few aspects of the project as a way of understanding “why this makes sense for this community.” She said that batteries do not “care where the power comes from, they just store the energy.”

 

Walker said batteries, “are quite great for the [power] grid because they make power when it is needed; so if there is a surplus of power they can store that and when there is a real need for power, they can make it available. It will be a technology that will be considered important in stabilizing our grid now and into the future.” Walked expects that many communities will experience power outages as the impact from storms increases.

 

Walker said their facility will produce 300 mega watts of power, which is enough to supply 120,000 homes when power is needed. She said the project will provide tax benefits to Plattekill, which the company is in the process of calculating.  

 

Walker said this project is as, “benign as you can hope for because these are completely sealed steel boxes and they sit on a landscape and they do not move, they do not emit any emissions and they do not leach anything into the ground.” She added that battery storage projects do not create much noise and, “are approximately the sound of an air conditioning unit that you would have in your home.”

 

Walker said Chalkstone is very aware of fires that have happened at other battery storage facilities that are within driving distance of Plattekill. She spoke about an incident at Surprise, Arizona when during a fire at a battery storage facility, a firefighter went to open a door of an enclosed storage area and was blown backwards and seriously injured but managed to survive. She said because of this incident, her company and many others, now install batteries without enclosures to prevent a repeat of this incident.  She said when her company is considering an area, they meet with all of the surrounding fire departments to open a dialogue on emergency procedures and ways to protect the public.

 

Jake Steinman, Director of Development, showed a visual rendering of the proposed project, with the east-west Camp Sunset Road bordering the project to the north, not far from north-south Rabbit Run Road. He said the batteries will be inside containers that are 20 ft long, 10 ft tall and 8 ft wide.

 

“They will have doors on them in order to access the batteries within,” he said.   

 

Steinman said they are modeling their project using industry standards and, if approved, they will decide on the final layout and materials that will be used and set in place the emergency response plans with the fire department. He expects this project would become operational in 2029.

“We are in the very early stage of this project. We’re taking the opportunity to engage the community to let everyone know what’s coming. We don’t want to throw this at you at the last minute. As the project develops the community will be able to ask questions and address them as this project progresses,” he said.

 

The company fielded questions from the public and said they will hold additional Q&A sessions in the future.

 

In response to a question at the last Town Board meeting concerning battery storage facilities, Supervisor Dean DePew said the company came in and gave a conceptual presentation on their project to the town’s Planning Board.

 

“Basically they want to cite this project on 40 acres that will be subdivided from a larger tract of land off of Camp Sunset Road,” he said. “There are high tension power lines with a ton of power going through there and I believe they draw the electric off of those power lines and it gets absorbed into the batteries. They store it in the batteries and if the power goes out, they back-feed it into the main line. Supposedly it’s good that they store that power that can be re-used.”

 

DePew said the town does not know enough about battery storage and he encouraged the public to Google lithium battery storage incident, such as a past fire on the Warwick school property. He said when company representatives came before the Planning Board, a retired fireman, who was acting as a consultant to the company, was asked by the Planning Board about fire mitigation and suppression measures and whether additional

special equipment was needed.

 

“What was very disturbing to me is the gentleman made a statement that there is one word in fire suppression and that word is retreat. So that tells me that the fire department would not be actively putting the fire out but would retreat from the fire; that scares me and send up an alarm,” he said.

DePew said rather than enact a moratorium that would stop everything without a clear direction, a committee was developed to look closely at the project.

 

“The committee members have been reading about facilities like this and have been reaching out to other municipalities on the good, bad and the ugly and will come back eventually with a full report so we can see what path we are going to take,” he said.  

 

DePew said New York State is currently looking at different laws and regulations concerning these types of facilities and he wants Plattekill to fully understand these projects before moving forward. He also pointed out that the proposed location for this project is the headwaters of the Black Creek, which is an estuary to the Hudson River.

 

“We want to know what that looks like if we were to cite something there and what would happen if that failed,” he said. “It’s serious enough that we have to take a good conscious look at it to make sure we make the right decision.”