Riverhead Town’s first utility-scale battery energy storage system is moving forward

Riverhead Town’s first utility-scale battery energy storage system, proposed for a site on Edwards Avenue in Calverton in early 2022 but caught up in the Calverton industrial moratorium, is moving forward.

Representatives of developer Rhynland Energy, which is seeking a special permit to build a 60 MW/120 MW kWh battery storage facility on a 1.7-acre parcel of land on the east side of Edwards Avenue just north of the railroad tracks, met with both the Town Board and Planning Board Thursday. The property is located within the Calverton Industrial zoning district, where “tier-2” battery energy storage systems are allowed by special permit of the Town Board.

In addition to approval of the special permit by the Town Board, the developer needs approval of its proposed site plan from the Planning Board.

The Town Board is seeking lead agency status for the purpose of environmental review of the project under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The proposed action is classified as an unlisted action for SEQRA purposes, Riverhead Senior Planner Matt Charters said at Thursday morning’s work session. 

The Town Board has elected to circulate the application  to involved agencies for review and comment, and has already received comments from the Suffolk County Planning Commission, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the New York State Historic Preservation Office, and the Riverhead Fire District, Charters said. The application was also referred to the Riverhead Planning Board for review and comment. 

The applicant’s representatives and Charters presented the application to the Planning Board Thursday evening. 

The proposal fully complies with nearly all  standards of the town code, though additional detail is needed concerning the proposed landscaped buffer along the boundaries of the site with neighboring properties, Charters said.  The planning staff would like to see a 10-foot buffer on the boundaries rather than the 5-foot buffer depicted on the site plan.

The developer will also need to submit additional or more detailed information for some other items, including a fire safety compliance plan, which will need approval by the Riverhead Fire Marshal as a condition of the special permit approval. 

Riverhead Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard said while past incidents at BESS facilities — including three in New York State — get a lot of attention, “from what I’ve read … those were older systems where the systems today are working. By the time this is ever built, it will be the top of what’s out there and the safest of what’s out there. And some of the incidents out in East Hampton and upstate were with older models, and they were with switch problems, which I think has been corrected.”

Rhynland’s attorney, Steven Losquadro agreed. “We know it’s something that’s always on everyone’s mind: what’s being done from a fire safety perspective? The technology has evolved, and it’s ever-evolving,” he said. 

New technology is designed so that the batteries are within separate cabinets inside the BESS building(s), which greatly reduces the chances of a “thermal runaway”— an incident in which a fire in one battery heats up nearby batteries, causing them to also catch fire. New designs effectively prevent that, he said.

“Much has been done with respect to training and safety,” LoSquadro said. 

“We’ve had a very good collaboration with Andrew Smith, your fire marshal, and also with the fire commissioners.”  Training will be made available to all the members of the Riverhead Fire Department and other nearby fire departments, he said. 

Rhynland also made a commitment to the Riverhead Fire District to give the district $100,000 to purchase a hazmat response vehicle, Losquadro said. The fire commissioners said such a vehicle will cost an estimated $80,000, but the developer committed to the higher amount to account for potential fluctuations in price.

The commissioners also requested a staging area “outside the fence

with a paved parking area which would allow the Riverhead Fire Department to stage equipment in the event of an emergency.” They also requested that “the staging area have a cabinet with a shutoff and emergency

information to assist in mitigating an incident.”

The fire marshal, in his comments on the application, also requested a paved staging area outside the perimeter fence adequate to stage fire department apparatus, with a lock box to house relevant documents related to emergency response.

Charters said the Edwards Avenue site, the current location of the Long Island Farm Bureau’s offices, is a “good location” because it is near the large commercial solar facilities developed in the area and is adjacent to the LIPA substation. 

The property is also adjacent to a fuel storage facility, located immediately to the north. The Riverhead Fire District’s board of commissioners is “concerned about the close proximity of the proposed Battery Energy Storage System to existing propane and fuel storage on an adjacent property,” the district wrote in its comments submitted to the Planning Department. The comments were included in Charters’ staff report.

Planning Board Chairperson Ed Densieski asked about that at the Planning Board meeting Thursday evening.

Rhynland’s consultant Paul Rogers, who has extensive experience with BESS facilities, said the Riverhead fire marshal asked the applicant to conduct a heat flux analysis for that purpose. The analysis will use an Underwriters Laboratory test method developed specifically to meet stringent fire safety and building code requirements for battery energy storage systems. The applicant is preparing that, Rogers said. 

Rogers is a member of the governor’s fire safety group — created after fires at three facilities in New York State in 2023 and tasked with ensuring the safety of battery energy storage systems across New York.

Incident management involves having a designated subject matter expert available within 15 minutes, Rogers said. “The goal of the subject matter expert is to get on a dashboard and start looking at the battery management system…to see whether the heat is transferring from one to the other and if it’s staying within the box itself,” he said. 

Water is used to keep surrounding units cool, while the fire in one unit  burns itself out, observed Council Member Ken Rothwell, a volunteer firefighter. 

Putting water on the fire itself may actually prolong the incident, Rogers said.

The Suffolk County Planning Commission approved the special permit and site plan at its Feb. 18 meeting. It conditioned its approval on the provision of enhanced, site-specific hazmat training for first responders and full containment of stormwater on site. The commission recommended that the applicant be encouraged to establish a berm between the project site and property located directly to its north, where Riverhead Oil Products Inc. is located.

“Everybody knows or speaks to a lot of the renewable energy benefits, because this is designed to sustain and promote the deployment of renewable energy sources, which presumably will make the environment cleaner and improve quality of life,” Losquadro said. “But there’s also another aspect that’s not talked about as much, but clearly it’s equally as important, and that is that a lot of life is infrastructure is very antiquated, and this is designed to strengthen part of that, and we all know increasingly so it seems that we’re susceptible to storms, and this will be really critical to deploy in anticipation of those type of events,” Losquadro said. 

Hubbard said “there are residents that are going to be very concerned about this and have fears” about these systems. “I would just recommend to those residents, number one, try to educate yourself. There’s a lot of information available on BESS systems, and locally, you can call our planning appointment, talk to Matt Charters, you can talk to Andrew Smith, our head fire marshal. They’d be more than willing to answer any questions and concerns that residents might have,” Hubbard said. 

The systems are coming, Hubbard said. “We’re not going to stop them. We can’t stop them from coming. It’s just a matter of the way that that energy is being developed and tried to be stored and make sure we have enough for everybody to use. And there’s so many factors involved in it,” he said. 

“So it’s not a matter of, are you coming, or aren’t you coming. We know you’re coming, but we want to make sure it’s done absolutely the safest way it can, and with the guidelines from the state and everybody else, and people like yourself, Mr. Rogers, making sure that it’s going to be the safest it absolutely can be, I think we can lessen some of those concerns of the residents,” Hubbard said.

The Planning Board is expected to consent to the Town Board acting as lead agency in the review of the special permit application and communicate that via a memorandum to the Town Board. 

The developer will make the necessary changes and submit updated plans to the town.