| No, we’re not talking about a character in an old Broadway show. BESS stands for Battery Energy-Storage Systems, and they’re a crucial step in our global progress towards a renewable, non-carbon-fueled energy-based economy.
Imagine a community powered by “green” electricity, generated by huge arrays or solar panels and rows of wind turbines, happily running on a sunny breezy day. Now, imagine the sun setting and the wind falling to calm. For the community to keep its lights, WiFi, and A/C on, the energy has to come from somewhere else. In our electric distribution system, there had better be a power source—somewhere—feeding energy into the “grid,” supplementing those renewable sources that produce energy only when the sun is shining, wind blowing, or river flowing. We can’t control these natural processes, so we rely on carbon-fueled power plants, which still provide the vast majority of our utility-delivered electricity.
Big power plants can’t be quickly throttled up and down as the sun and wind wax and wane, and as our communities’ energy usage peaks in the evening hours, so energy suppliers rely on “peaker” plants to ride the waves of demand. These relatively small power sources are fueled by diesel oil or natural gas, are costly to run (per unit of energy) and have much higher emissions than large plants. This is where BESS can come to the rescue to lower our greenhouse-gas emissions. A BESS has hundreds of battery banks, each one much like the battery in an electric car, that charge up when power is plentiful (and greener and cheaper), and later feed that energy into the grid when demand rises, avoiding running so many dirty, expensive peakers.
A BESS is a business as well as a service. The business model relies on the fact that electricity is bought and sold in an open market, with the price rising and falling minute-by-minute. A BESS operator buys and stores electricity when it’s cheap and plentiful, and sells it back at a profit when alternatives become more expensive.
What does all this have to do with Tarrytown? For one, a BESS is a very special type of business that carries both benefits—to the electricity rate-payer and to the environment—and risks. The primary risk comes from the fact that the dense battery banks of lithium-based cells hold a huge amount of energy—the equivalent of what hundreds of homes use every day. It’s well and good as long as that energy is released slowly to feed the power grid, as it’s designed to do. But it’s theoretically possible for something to go wrong: a catastrophic failure that releases all the stored energy in a short time, causing an internal fire of the type that you’ve all seen in the “exploding lithium battery” news reports. So, it’s incumbent on any community that may host a BESS to have in place laws covering zoning and building rules, as well as training for first-responders, addressing the specific needs and potential hazards of BESS, and creating a “permitted use.”
In 2019, NYSERDA (New York State’s Energy Research and Development Agency) released a guidebook for municipalities to prepare for BESS build-out, including a model law that covers all the known needs and safety issues surrounding this new technology. The proposed Tarrytown regulation is based on an recent update of this model.
Tarrytown has a BESS applicant, so the village needs to act. The first public hearing to consider a resolution for a local law covering BESS was last Monday, June 2nd. The applicant wants to build their BESS in a section of a parking lot behind some businesses at 120 White Plains Rd, and in proximity to the NY Thruway. They presented some details about their project, and responded to a litany of questions from the mayor and trustees, who were learning about this technology and concerned about the risks and benefits to the village. Several local Tarrytown Fire Department staff also expressed concerns, especially since lithium-battery fires cannot be extinguished in the usual way by flooding with water (lithium reacts explosively when water is applied), so must be managed and allowed to burn out within their enclosures.
With these concerns, the public hearing was continued to the next public trustees meeting, at 7pm on June 16th. If you want to read the proposed BESS Zoning regulation, CLICK HERE. We encourage concerned residents to attend the meeting (or join via Zoom), to comment or ask questions, and let your voice be heard. Thanks in advance for your engagement! |
