Adoption of Battery Energy Storage code is on Riverhead Town Board’s agenda Tuesday

Town code revisions to regulate the siting and operation of battery energy storage facilities in the Town of Riverhead on the Riverhead Town Board’s agenda for tomorrow’s meeting. 

A principal in BFJ Planning, the consultants hired by Riverhead Town to complete an environmental assessment of the town’s proposed battery energy storage code, met with the Town Board Thursday to explain BFJ’s conclusion that no additional environmental review is needed before the Town Board adopts the code.

Sarah Yackal, who heads BFJ’s environmental review division, presented the firm’s findings to the Town Board at Thursday’s work session. The Town Board hired BFJ on Jan. 18 to complete the full environmental assessment form required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. In addition to completing the FEAF, which Yackal prepared, the firm also prepared a supplement in narrative form to expand on its findings and recommendations.

The firm concluded that the adoption of the proposed battery energy storage code will result in no significant adverse impacts on the environment and so an environmental impact statement is not required.

The next steps are for the Town Board to adopt a declaration of significance finding no significant adverse impacts to adopting the proposed code and then adopting the code itself.

Planner Matt Charters, who has led the development of the proposed regulations for Riverhead, said this morning that, to his knowledge, the resolutions adopting and implementing the code will be on tomorrow’s Town Board agenda.

The proposed code would establish battery energy storage systems (BESS) as an allowed use in Riverhead Town, with “tier-1” small-scale systems that have an energy capacity of up to 600 kWh — systems designed to serve individual homes and businesses — allowed in all zoning districts and larger “tier-2” systems that have an energy capacity of greater than 600 kWh — typically, utility-scale systems — allowed by Town Board special permit in several zoning districts in Riverhead: Industrial A, Industrial C, Planned Industrial Park, Agricultural Protection Zone and Residence A-80. The proposed code requires that all utility-scale BESS facilities on residentially zoned property must be within 1,000 feet of “an existing LIPA substation.” It also spells out minimum lot sizes, maximum lot coverage, maximum structure height and minimum setbacks, as well as screening requirements.

Following a contentious second public hearing on the proposed code in December, the Town Board in January hired BFJ Planning to complete the full environmental assessment form (FEAF) required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act before the town can adopt the proposed local law. The FEAF document is required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act to determine whether further and more in-depth environmental review is needed on any action classified as a “type I” action under the law, including the adoption of a local law.

Yackal explained the process of completing parts two and three of an FEAF, a form published by the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Part two is a list of questions spread among 18 categories of potential impacts. She told Town Board members Thursday that the firm, “given the public concern” about BESS facilities, “took a very conservative approach” in completing the FEAF for the proposed action, and anything identified as having any potential impact, even if small, was addressed in the narrative supplement BFJ prepared. 

The Yackal told the board that when an action is “generic,” as it is in the adoption of a local law, SEQRA determination of significance must consider consequences of the action at hand, because SEQRA “doesn’t really allow for speculation,” she said. She noted that the residents at the public hearing had concerns that were speculative in nature, wondering about things that might or could occur.

“We don’t know, at this stage, how many facilities you may get,  where exactly they may go,” Yackal said. “But what we can analyze are the parameters of those facilities, and what impacts may result in the future,” she said. 

The “most important thing here to keep in mind,” Yackal said, is that any future application for a utility-scale tier 2 facility will require both a Town Board special permit and a Planning Board site plan approval. As part of those approval processes, the applicant would be required to comply with SEQRA, she said. 

“So this is not supposed to be the State Environmental Quality Review Act process on all those future individual projects. You’re looking at what are the order-of-magnitude impacts that could occur from the local law,” Yackal said. 

Yackal said her research indicated that none of the other New York municipalities that have adopted local laws to regulate BESS facilities issued a positive declaration of significance, thus requiring the preparation of an environmental impact statement for the code adoption.

“There’s sort of an assumption that [BESS facilities] are overall low impact — they do have some risks and we can talk about that risk — but in general they do not generate traffic, they’re not a high demand for water or sewer — the sort of catastrophic risk aside and we’ll talk about that in a moment,” Yackal said. “They don’t generate schoolchildren, you know that as far as the use in the town, that they are relatively low impact.”

As far as risk is concerned, the main risk people worry about is the risk of battery fires, which can be catastrophic if a fire triggers what’s known as a thermal runaway, a chain reaction inside a battery cell that overheats, causing a chemical reaction inside the cell, which gets even hotter. There is the potential to involve other cells.

Yackal said she spoke with Bill Oberkehr, senior project manager for clean energy siting at the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency regarding the protections that are built into the uniform fire code, and she got a better understanding of the fire code, its history, and how New York strengthened in 2020 after the incident in Arizona. 

Now, New York has “probably one of the strictest, if not the strictest, fire code protection in the country,” she said. “So, I think in terms of how these are regulated, the state has done a very good job with the information that we currently have.”

Council Member Tim Hubbard said should a “fire and/or a meltdown” occur at a BESS facility, there may be potential adverse impacts to groundwater. How can the FEAF say these facilities don’t have potential adverse impacts to groundwater, he asked.

Yackal said the narrative supplement includes a discussion ot the potential impacts to groundwater. She said about 85% of the town is in a special groundwater protection area, which takes in a lot of existing agricultural uses and existing industrial uses too. “This is something that you are looking at and dealing with on all of your projects,” she said. “Now, there’s a distinction here to be made, that the BESS facility itself does not require any use of water in its day-to-day operation,” she said. “That’s not to say there was a fire, you wouldn’t need it for that.”

The narrative discusses impacts on groundwater in a section labeled “Impact on Critical Environmental Areas.” The critical environmental areas were designated by the county to protect groundwater, the narrative states.

“The proposed action and any future BESS development will not result in a reduction in the quantity or quality of groundwater in the area,” the document states, adding, “The design of any proposed Tier 2 BESS equipment would be evaluated as part of the special permit process by the Town Board and site plan review by the Planning Board. Both the special permit and site plan approval are discretionary actions that require site specific compliance with SEQRA,” the narrative states. “Therefore, no significant adverse impacts to the CEA will occur as a result of the [adoption of the code].”

Council Member Ken Rothwell raised concerns expressed by residents about why the BESS code is being done prior to the comprehensive plan update, instead of making it a subject of the update, which is now underway. “We want to make sure that it’s part of our overall comprehensive plan,” Rothwell said.

It will be incorporated into the comprehensive plan, Yackal said. The comprehensive plan update is looking at “solar and other things and looking at potential revisions or amendments to the underlying industrial zones,” Yackal said. “And that may have an impact on how this law ultimately is adopted. If there are changes in those underlying zones, it may affect this as well.”

Yackal noted that the FEAF asks whether the action complies with adopted land use plans. Since BESS technology didn’t really exist in 2003, when the town’s current plan was adopted, BFJ looked at the policy language in the existing plan and determined that it is “certainly supportive of this type of technology and advancements.” She read from the “vision statement” for the “Utility Service Element” of the 2003 plan, which references the need to “continue to expand utilities to meet Riverhead’s growing needs.” BESS is “certainly a technology that will help the town better do that,” Yackal said, so  the proposed BESS code is “certainly consistent with the comprehensive plan that you have, as well as the state goals.”

Jamesport resident Barbara Blass, in a six-page commentary on BFJ’s recommendation to issue a determination of nonsignificance for the proposed BESS code, said too many questions remain unanswered, including: the number of acres involved in the rezoning; the location and extent of the special groundwater protection areas; the location and extent of acreage in the Central Pine Barrens Compatible Growth Area; the location and extent of area not served by the Riverhead Water District; the acreage wholly or partially within an agricultural district as certified by the State Department of Agriculture and Markets; the location and extent of the environmental justice area within the boundaries of this rezoning; the location and extent of LIPA-owned property in the subject area the location of NYS-owned property in the subject area. And since the legislation would permit BESS as an accessory on a parcel already improved with another industrial use, Blass asked, how many additional potential parcels in the industrial zones fit this criterion? 

Residents of an environmental justice area are supposed to receive special outreach when a proposal such as a local law affects their community, Blass noted.

Blass also took issue with a number of BFJ’s conclusions, beginning with potential impacts to groundwater. She said she also communicated with NYSERDA’s Oberkehr, who said in an email to Blass, a copy of which she provided to RiverheadLOCAL, that it would be “perfectly reasonable for a municipality to create mitigation requirements or completely avoid BESS development” in special groundwater protection areas. “Though lithium-ion systems do not release chemicals during normal charging and discharging operations, the relatively rare event of a BESS fire could potentially present a chemical release hazard. This is primarily due to the runoff of the water used to contain the BESS fire,” Oberkehr wrote.

Among the other conclusions Blass challenged was the consistency of the proposed local law with the existing comprehensive plan. 

“This intense industrial use is contrary to the purpose and intent sections of the APZ [Agricultural Protection] and RA-80 Zoning Use Districts in our Town Code,” wrote Blass, who was chairperson of the Planning Board while the current comprehensive plan was being written and a member of the Town Board when the plan was adopted and implemented. Tier 2 utility-scale BESS facilities would be allowed by special permit of the Town Board in both the APZ and RA-80 districts. The proposed use in those districts would cause” an irreversible change in the character of the community,” because a BESS facility is “such a sharp contrast in the rural landscape,” Blass wrote. “The introduction of an industrial use in those districts is precedent-setting.” 

Blass also faulted BFJ’s analysis because the FEAF and the narrative “fail to provide information on full buildout. 

“The Code Amendment provides only a distinction between a Tier 1 and Tier 2 BESS based on capacity of energy storage. However it places no limit on the Tier 2 capacities. The SEQRA documentation offered no assessment with respect to the quantity of Tier 2 facilities actually needed, or an evaluation of the number of megawatts stored by any single or any multiple of BESS facilities,” Blass wrote.

Also, she said, the code’s limiting the distance of BESS facilities to solar facilities is “not a limiting factor at all,” because there is no assessment of the potential development of new solar facilities. New commercial solar facilities can build substations to connect them to the electric grid, she said. And the code would also allow BESS as an accessory to an existing SOLAR facility. The “review fails to adequately address growth-inducing impacts potentials generated by adding more solar farms, substations and connections in support of BESS facilities,” Blass wrote.

“The proposed action is a Type 1 action with at least 11 identified potential impacts of varying magnitudes over an expansive area and warrants a Pos Dec and thorough analysis in a GEIS,” Blass said. 

So far, two companies have made public proposals to build utility-scale battery energy storage systems in Riverhead Town.

A 60 megawatt battery energy storage facility is proposed on Edwards Avenue on land zoned Industrial A, which is one of the districts where the use would be allowed by special permit if the proposed code is adopted. The facility, proposed by New York City-based Rhynland Energy in partnership with London-based global commodities trading firm Trafigura, would be built on a 1.7-acre on the east side of Edwards Avenue along the LIRR track, adjacent to a LIPA substation— a facility that has attracted the development of more than 600 acres of utility-scale solar power development in the vicinity.

A 100 MW BESS facility for a site on Mill Road just north of West Main Street has been proposed by Virginia-based Hexagon Energy. The a 3.6-acre site is in the Residence B-40 zoning use district, though there are pre-existing commercial uses at the site that do not conform to the current zoning. Residence B-40 is not one of the zoning districts where the BESS use would be allowed under the proposed code, though the developer could seek a special exception use from the Zoning Board of Appeals or even a change of zone. The site adjoins the railroad track and has the U.S. Post Office to its south and a self-storage facility to its north. The Glenwood manufactured home park abuts the site on the west.