The latest proposal for the former John A. Coleman Catholic High School in the Town of Ulster would see the building demolished and the property developed into a 250-megawatt lithium-ion battery storage facility.
Last month, the Ulster Town Board declared itself lead agency for the project, proposed by Terra-Gen, a San Diego-based renewable energy power producer with 3.8GW of wind, solar and battery storage projects primarily located in California and Texas. Terra-Gen is co-owned by Abu Dhabi-based clean energy company Masdar, and Igneo Infrastructure Partners, a global company with offices in New York, London and Sydney.
At present, a comprehensive proposal has yet to be shared with the town board, but some details are known. The draft plan includes a substation that’s 22 feet from a neighboring residential property. The facility would include three water storage tanks, one 30,000 gallons with a fire command center, one 10,000 gallons, and one 5,000-gallon underground tank. 12 of the property’s 15 acres would hold around 300 14-foot-high lithium-ion battery containers.
Town Supervisor James E. Quigley, III said he believed the Hurley Avenue site was selected by Terra-Gen for its proximity to a nearby substation recently rebuilt by Central Hudson and sits at the terminus of a high voltage transmission line.
“The Town of Ulster has four substations,” Quigley said. “The only one that is up-to-date and ready to accept energy to put back into a system from a battery storage facility is the one on Hurley Avenue.”
Location is critical to this kind of project, Quigley said.
“You can’t put a battery plant in the middle of nowhere and run $100 million transmission line because the economics don’t work,” he said.
But the location may come with potential hurdles as well. The property is split between two municipal zoning districts, R-30 (residential) and OM (office and manufacturing), each requiring the project to secure a special use permit. Quigley said the developer has indicated a willingness to use landscaping to minimize the impact on the surrounding community, but area residents have already raised other concerns.
“They’re concerned about the traffic,” Quigley said. “They’re concerned about the visual impact. They’re concerned about the wetlands. They’re concerned about endangered species. And most of all, they’re concerned about fire safety.”
The latter is a real concern. A Terra-Gen battery storage facility in California similar to the one proposed in the Town of Ulster had two fires as recently as April 2022 and September 2023. According to a September 21, 2023 article in the Valley Roadrunner newspaper, a battery unit caught fire and burned for several hours. The article claimed that a built-in fire suppression system worked as intended, with firefighters from the Valley Center Fire Protection District remaining on site to ensure the fire didn’t spread.
In that incident, residents within a quarter mile of the facility were ordered to evacuate, and those within a half mile were instructed to shelter in place due to concerns about toxic elements in the smoke.
The Terra-Gen proposal is not the first lithium-ion battery or other grid support project to pop up in the Town of Ulster, but it hopes to be the first to come to fruition. Quigley said a lot had changed since GlidePath came to town in 2019.
“This was at the beginning of battery storage,” Quigley said. “Their initial concept was to put a building up and put the racks of the batteries in the building. But as the industry has evolved, these developers and the manufacturers of the battery storage components themselves have realized that the smaller the package, the better ability to control possible fire situations.”
A building full of batteries requires an extensive fire suppression system that could impact a vast swathe of the facility if used. But what Terra-Gen is proposing, what they’ve used in other battery facilities, including Valley Center, California, is a cluster of modules, each equipped with its own fire suppression system that can prevent spread.
The Terra-Gen proposal will also have to meet approval by the state, as it comes in response to a request for proposals to meet New York’s battery storage goals of a collective 3,000 MW of facilities by 2030. This proposal is part of the first, 1,000 MW round and is in direct competition with other proposals across the state.
Quigley said the Town of Ulster has received three other preliminary inquiries for similar projects, which could speak to the area as meeting some of the state’s most critical criteria.
“I think the decisions are going to be made based upon the areas of the state that have needs,” Quigley said. “Upstate New York has hydro, has nuclear, has wind farms, has large solar farms, and the big issue is moving all that energy from where it’s generated to the southern part of the state, New York City and its suburbs and the Hudson Valley where it’s used.”
The state is likely to see battery storage facilities as a way to meet those needs.
John A. Coleman Catholic High School was opened in 1966 by the Archdiocese of New York, reaching peak attendance of nearly 600 students in the mid-‘70s. But a steady decline beginning in the ‘80s eventually led to the school’s closure in 2019 when it had just 82 students enrolled.
Ulster Land Development, LLC purchased the property in 2023 for $2.75 million, and since the Coleman closure proposals including office space, short-term rentals, housing and commercial amenities have all been touted, with none coming to pass.
Terra-Gen did not respond to interview requests.
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