You can't blame corporate public relations efforts for coming across slick. Just as bees make honey and mosquitoes spread disease, it's the nature of the beast. To quote “The Maltese Falcon's” wisecracking detective hero Sam Spade,” What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”

So it was that Terra-Gen LLC — which proposes to build an array of boxcar-size structures each containing hundreds of lithium-ion batteries on the site of the former Coleman High School on Hurley Avenue in the Town of Ulster — kicked off the first of a promised series of public Zoom meetings Wednesday, July 2 with a presentation as carefully structured and hermetically sealed as they claim its project will be.

Meeting host Stu Shinske, lead spokesperson for the project, set the table at Wednesday's Zoom with the usual remarks of welcome and thanks to those who had submitted questions in advance, as invited to do in the company's announcement last week of the meeting. He also extended an invitation to the call's participants to submit questions in real time. But if anyone took up that offer there was no sign of it in the course of the call.

What followed was a very sophisticated PowerPoint description of the project, an address from Terra-Gen VP and head of energy storage development Mark Turner and a Q&A (all the questions having been submitted in advance) with Anthony Natale, a former Con Ed of New York emergency management firefighter and now a director at the Fire and Risk Alliance, a specialized consulting firm.

Turner, all-business, came across crisp and precise and authoritative. Natale's rich Noo Yawk accent oozed street cred. Shinske moderated, bouncing questions off the two experts with the ease of a Hall of Fame second baseman turning a double play.

Turner's high points included a rationale for the project's location: It adjoins a Central Hudson substation with sufficient high-voltage lines to “handle a great deal of throughput and capacity.” As to alternative locations, he said, “It's economically infeasible to build miles of transmission lines through the communities to get back to the substation. And then, quite frankly it's unacceptable, from a planning perspective, to get approval to build such transmission lines, especially for a private company like ours.”

Additionally, Turner said, the Coleman site is large enough that Terra-Gen can comply with the New York State Fire Code's definition of “remote” — 100 feet or more away from residential property. Though as he noted, numerous homes and residential complexes are within much less than 1,000 feet from the project.

Turner answered in the negative as to Terra-Gen's receipt of state subsidies for the project. “No, we are not,” he said. “What we are doing is we're competing against other projects like ours for contracts with NYSERDA, and those contracts are there to cover the investment cost of a project like this.” He also denied any special relationship with Central Hudson.

Natale spoke chiefly to safety concerns, drawing distinctions between the Coleman site's type of lithium-ion batteries and those whose fires have alarmed much of the public — on the basis of their chemical constituents, the way they are utilized (battery-powered bikes “banging around”) and the fact that Terra-Gen's batteries are grouped in individual containers. These containers are temperature-controlled and round-the-clock monitored, whereas the most significant battery fires have happened in warehouse-sized facilities.

Late in the call Turner took time to address a matter which has arisen in local media: more than $600,000 in fines levied against Terra-Gen by California and federal regulators for “submitting false or misleading information” about the “physical capabilities of the wind-powered electric generation” of a Terra-Gen facility.

“It was a situation where we're trading an existing wind project and new requirements emerged,” Turner said. “We thought we were doing it right. Apparently we weren't doing it right. ... We disagreed with their approach as new where the requirements were uncertain. Rather than go to court over it, we made a business decision to settle that case, and we paid a fee pursuant to a settlement. So that's the situation. ... We settled rather than pay much more expensive legal fees over a relatively minor issue.”

All in all, and with the lack of real-time back-and-forth between the company and its critics, nothing emerged that would immediately undermine Terra-Gen's claims for the Coleman project's benefits and safety.

In an email to Kingston Wire, Stu Shinske said that “live Q's were submitted — several on same topics. We addressed what we could, given the volume of questions also submitted in advance.”

As the company said in announcing the Zoom call, however, “This presentation was the first of several that will be planned; the public also will have in-person opportunities to provide feedback through the municipal review process.”

Odds are the proceedings at the “municipal reviews” will feature more spontaneity and, given the temper of the times, a lot more emotion than emerged via Wednesday's call.