The debate over battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Ulster County is stuck in the mud of official proceedings, all parties to the issue having aired their thoughts pro and con and now spinning their wheels pending the emergence of new facts (unlikely) and the pace of the regulatory process (uncertain).

Two such systems are proposed to be built in Ulster County, a 100MW facility in the Town of Saugerties and a 250MW facility in the Town of Ulster. Neither will manufacture batteries. What they will do is host a collection of industrial-scale structures, each containing hundreds of lithium-ion batteries storing renewable energy drawn from the grid when demand is low and fed back into the grid when demand is high. The environmental payoff is less use of fossil fuels and less of the greenhouse gases they produce.

On the other hand, such facilities have a history of “failure incidents” — chemical fires that are difficult to extinguish and laden with toxic gases and heavy metals. The rate of such incidents has dropped as the technology has matured. Still, news of the projects has spread swiftly and public discussion of the technology, its benefits, hazards and safety record has proliferated at official meetings and on social media.

The Town of Ulster project's developer is Alcazar ESS, LLC, a subsidiary of Terra-Gen, LLC, which itself is jointly owned by Masdar, an Abu Dhabi state-owned renewable energy company, and Igneo Infrastructure Partners, which invests in energy projects worldwide. The Saugerties project's owner is Key Energy Capture LLC, a subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate SK Group.

The month of February saw 1) the Town of Ulster hold several meetings featuring public comment on the BESS proposed there, 2) the neighboring Town of Hurley meet and object to the Town of Ulster project and agree to hold a March 10 hearing on a BESS moratorium in its own boundaries, 3) the BESS supporters and environmental coalition New Yorkers for Clean Energy (NYCE) hold lengthy public forums in Saugerties and Kingston and 4) the Town of Rochester working toward a moratorium.

The trench warfare has given both sides time to assemble, organize, map out strategies and recruit for their cause. The grassroots opposition has given a good account of itself against the efforts of business interests and environmentalists (strange bedfellows) who support the technology.

Ulster resident Jillian Fried, a key figure in local BESS opposition, told Kingston Wire she and her colleagues evolved from scattershot objections and a fledgling Facebook group to “a kind of synthesis ... We talked about the issues and divvied up the topics to research...” She said her group “were given some tips from [veteran activists] about how to attack a scoping document,” that is, the initial step in the state environmental review of the Town of Ulster project.

Fried also credited Town of Ulster Supervisor James Quigley with a supportive attitude. “He told me it's important that you address all the items in the draft scope, go through it and talk about anything you need to.”

Fried colleague Tim Kelly, also a Town of Hurley resident, reflected the opposition's discipline and self-education, calmly and readily naming the flash points of concern that others tackled individually at the recent Town of Ulster meetings and the Kingston NYCE function.

“[Terra-Gen] needs to listen to the residents and complete all the studies that are being asked, everything from noise, fire and evacuation. … Maybe they need to build a road in order to provide safety to those residents. There's the amount of water they'll need and what system they'll tie into. I don't know what all the answers all are, but I do know they need to study a lot of stuff.”

A minor point at the Town of Ulster Feb. 24 hearing on Terra-Gen's scoping document — a sort of draft version of the environmental impact state required in the state's SEQRA (State Environmental Quality Review Act) process — but one indicative of the citizen opposition's discipline was the diligence with which each speaker recited the legal formula, “My comments are taken from the comprehensive written scoping submission, and I request both my oral remarks and the full document be included in the SEQRA record.”

Quigley, in a phone interview, confirmed Jillian's Fried's remarks about his respect for her and other activist's thoughtful work. “There were certain statements that were made that in a legal context set the stage for future actions if the requested item is not appropriately accepted.” Specifically, he noted, an Article 78 action, in which citizens can challenge in state Supreme Court the legality of government agencies' administrative actions.

The NYCE presentations in Saugerties and Kingston emphasized the technology's safety record, the technical details covered by Paul Rogers, a former New York City Fire Department lieutenant and co-founder of industry consultant Energy Safety Response Group, which he said studies safety exclusively.

Rogers' key points were that 1) the evolution of safety standards has seen the frequency of BESS fires plummet, 2) New York's new standards are the most rigorous yet, and 3) BESS construction now involves batteries grouped so that fire contagion from one array to another is prevented.

Regarding a recent fire at a BESS in Warwick, Rogers said “the facility was out of compliance ... a derelict system that shouldn't even be operating. It was shut down under the worst possible circumstances, yet the fire was contained within the cabinet. It never went beyond the bounds of the cabinet. The ambient air testing that the town did for several days revealed no hazardous substances. So if that's the worst we can expect, I guess I don't know what everyone's worried about.”

A broader view of the situation came from another citizen activist, Professor Jeffrey Seidman, who teaches philosophy at Vassar, took up the cause in response to a BESS moratorium in Poughkeepsie and spoke in Kingston as part of the NYCE team. “I have respect for the [opposing] advocates,” he told Kingston Wire after that meeting. “Everyone is right to be concerned about the health and safety of their community and their family.”

But, he said, driven by concern about climate change, “I worked over 18 months to overturn the moratorium. But it's not because I felt like people should take on risk for the greater good. It's just that I felt that people were mistaken about what the risks are.”

“I do not believe that the risk is higher than the risk of having a restaurant in your neighborhood or a house in your neighborhood that can catch fire. The danger if one of these [BESS] catches fire, the danger in terms of smoke, in terms of pollutants released is comparable to a house fire or a restaurant fire, the same chemicals, the chemicals people will tell you the names of, very scary chemicals, cyanide, sodium cyanide ... There's nothing unique about battery smoke.”

As an example, Seidman said, “Cars are 60 times more likely to catch fire than battery cars. But we don't learn about car fires, right? Because they're the background, whereas batteries are new. And so part of what it tells us about public psychology is new things are scary. … So if it is a choice in terms of risk the choice is not between a pristine, risk-free and clean status quo, and then some new, scary risk is coming in. The choice is between a status quo in which we are lighting stuff on fire every day and putting it into our air routinely and batteries which enable us not to do that.”

In the Town of Ulster proceedings, where the scoping process ends April 6, written comments may be submitted any time prior to March 10 at 5 p.m. to the supervisor or town clerk via email or in person to the supervisor at Town Hall.