It might not have been on the agenda, but a proposed 100-megawatt lithium-ion battery storage facility was on the minds of attendees at last week’s Saugerties Town Board meeting.
Proposed by Key Capture Energy, the plans indicate that the facility would include 110 containers on 11 acres of a 59.8-acre plot off Tomsons Road owned by KMP Holdings. The property is adjacent to a Central Hudson substation, with proximity critical to similar projects proposed elsewhere, including in the Town of Ulster. The site off of Tomsons Road has a corner that abuts the village line on the west side of the railroad tracks and would be about 0.3 miles from Cantine Field.
More information about the project is expected to be revealed during a developer-led presentation at the Saugerties United Methodist Church at 67 Washington Avenue at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 5. Town officials have said further presentations are also in the works, particularly after the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which will have the final say on approving the project, chimes in.
In the meantime, opponents and supporters of the proposal are already speaking their minds before the Saugerties Town Board, including last Wednesday, January 21.
Martin Steingesser, who opposes the plan, read a poem with references to a tsunami, and nuclear disasters in Fukushima, Japan and Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union.
“It may sound at first that I’m out to lunch,” Stingesser said. “But bear with me, because there is a very strong point about the credibility of large corporations who have a very heavy financial investment in property here.”
Deborah Sanchez also spoke out against the proposal.
“The repercussions of such a facility being built here in our town, nobody wants it,” she said. “There are rumors that it might happen anyway, we hope not.”
Michael Corvin questioned whether a battery storage plant was congruous with the Saugerties community.
“Do we really need to be here?” he said. “I think that we deserve to be here instead of that plant. I would ask that please take it somewhere elsewhere you have plenty of open space. And I don’t believe that there’s enough open space here.”
While comments at the town board meeting heavily favored opponents of the battery project, there are also supporters in the community as well. As for town officials, they’re awaiting more information.
“There’s a parallel between this battery storage conversation and the conversation we were having eight or nine years ago about solar fields,” said supervisor Fred Costello in an interview after the town board meeting. “The state prioritized those at certain megawatts and developers responded by putting in applications along the power line that connects Greene County to Hurley. And that goes right through Saugerties. So the priority now for NYSERDA is developing energy storage capacity for efficiency and balancing in the grid.”
Costello added a further analogy homeowners might relate to.
“If you have a generator at your home and you’re building a shed, the generator may run all day,” he said. “But you’re only going to use a power saw or the drill, a percentage of that time. If there was a battery there, it could capture that energy that was being generated and not consumed, and then that energy could be used more efficiently. And that’s kind of a loose conceptual analogy of what these battery storage facilities are trying to achieve.”
There are other rationales for the statewide push for battery storage facilities.
“The natural gas and diesel generation facilities that we have do a good job at anticipating the demand,” Costello said. “But we want to get away from fossil fuels as a generator.”
There is also the potential for battery storage to address energy costs currently covered by peaker facilities, low-use, high-emitting power plants that energy providers call upon during high demand. Costello said that battery units, which recharge at times when there’s surplus energy, can respond instantly when the need arises, and should comparatively lessen consumer costs.
Costello said he looked forward to hearing about how new state fire codes adopted late last year by following a review by NYSERDA and the New York City Fire Department can address safety concerns for new battery storage facilities.
“(For example) they’ve created more robust separation between the batteries,” Costello said. “There’s more isolation that they could turn them off. And if there was a catastrophic event, it would be isolated to a single bank of cells, not the entire facility.”
Costello said he looked forward to the February 5 presentation by Key Capture Energy, but understood that as the developer, their position might be different than that of the town and NYSERDA, and that wherever town officials ultimately land on the proposal, it’s unlikely to happen until a thorough review process is undertaken. He added that the Town of Saugerties website will add any information provided by NYSERDA as it becomes available.
For more information on Key Capture Energy’s plan, visit: https://keycaptureenergy.com/kceny34/
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