Town of Ulster Supervisor James Quigley III is a key figure in the fate of the application by Terra-Gen to establish a 250-megawatt-capacity battery energy storage system (BESS) at the site of the former Coleman High School on Hurley Avenue in Ulster.
With the support of the other members of Ulster’s town board, Quigley will be negotiating with a developer whose most visible United States holding is the ownership and operation of seven BESS projects throughout California—enough to power 1.4 million homes for approximately four hours. According to its website, Terra-Gen is owned by an Abu Dhabi “clean energy powerhouse” called Masdar and by Igneo Infrastructure Partners, an investment manager with $19.5 billion in direct infrastructure assets. Quigley will be sitting across the table from a sophisticated, deep-pocketed developer eager to get this project—which would provide about a third of the off-peak storage power presently scattered among dozens of small projects around the state—approved.
This is not a situation where Terra-Gen can credibly threaten to go away to another location. The BESS site is directly across Hurley Avenue from a substantial 7.8-acre Central Hudson substation, one of 22 connected to the utility’s main line.
“In addition to BESS alleviating stress on the electricity grid, they can delay or eliminate the need for new transmission lines, substations or power plants, saving billions in infrastructure costs that would otherwise be paid by consumers,” state energy officials have written.
Some $19 million in improvements at the Central Hudson Hurley Avenue substation were approved in 2019. “In order to relieve that congestion, we’re installing a series compensation device as part of the expansion,” said Ivan Hojsak of Central Hudson at that time. “Essentially, what the series compensation device is, is it acts as almost opening up more lanes on a highway. It’s going to allow us to maximize the utilization of the existing infrastructure in the area.” Ulster’s town board gave site-plan approval to those improvements.
Quigley said the town was in the process of hiring an engineering firm to assess the environmental impacts of the Terra-Gen project. How long would that study take? As long as it takes, he responded. There was no deadline. There might be design changes.
Were other professional services going to be required?
“Psychologists,” Quigley responded tartly. “I’m not kidding.”
The Ulster supervisor denied the town board was on the brink of making a declaration of no environmental impacts for the project, “though we might end up there eventually.”
There will be about 300 containers of batteries on twelve of the 14 acres of the former Coleman School site. Quigley emphasized that with this technology and design, a fire in one container—unlikely as that might be—would not spread. Large-scale fire testing (LSFT) is used to demonstrate conclusively that fire (“thermal runaway” in the lingo) will not spread beyond a container.
New York state has the most stringent fire code in the country.
Among the possible impacts to be studied, Quigley said, were fire, stormwater, lighting and noise.
Two weeks ago, state sen. Michelle Hinchey and Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha issued a statement emphasizing two points: that the project would be safe from the danger of fire and that the state needed more electricity. Energy storage, wrote Shrestha, “is a critical part of the renewable ecosystem we need to build.”
They explained the key role battery-powered storage facilities could play.
“New York state has a goal to install six gigawatts of energy storage by 2030, and in order to meet this goal, storage facilities of this size (around 250 MW) will have to increasingly exist across the state,” they wrote. “As a region that is not particularly fruitful for solar or wind, the Hudson Valley can play a strategic role by hosting storage facilities because it is located between the more rural parts of the state where energy is generated and the more downstate areas where most energy is consumed. In this particular case, proximity to a Central Hudson substation would allow the energy to easily connect to the grid.”
New York state’s goal of providing 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 requires a massive increase in transmission capacity over what is available today.
The two legislators took strong exception to the subhead of the story in the September 10 edition of HV1 mischaracterizing their statements as urging quick approval of the project. They wanted it known that they strongly favored thorough local review of the Terra-Gen project.
“With full respect for approval processes and local control, I believe we must look to the future and embrace safe technologies for the sake of our energy security and the greater public good,” wrote Hinchey. “I will work with my colleagues in the state government to guarantee transparent, effective oversight and have faith that our local leaders will do the same.”
We regret the error on our part.
Thorough local review rests on the shoulders of James Quigley III as much as on anyone else—if not more so.
“This is not a done deal,” Quigley cautions.
If the final deal does come together, however, one can be assured of one thing: The community benefits package for the Town of Ulster negotiated in it will be quite substantial.
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