To the Editorial Team: The old adage that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on has found a new home. Fearmongers, who may have learned their electrical engineering from Google searches, have frightened many good people into believing that lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) proposed for our area will be dangerous fire hazards — before many of us even know what BESS is or does. The Poughkeepsie city council heard such fears and passed a moratorium. Then the council heard from people who don't study at Google University, people who see the skyrocketing costs in our electric bills but don't believe we should just stand there like deer in the headlights as data centers and others demand more and more electrons. Poughkeepsie lifted its moratorium. Fear won't solve our problems.

What helped change Poughkeepsie's mind was June 24, 2025. You may not remember June 24, 2025, but your electric bill didn't soon forget. The temperature hit 100 degrees. Air conditioners blasted on overdrive. By the evening, stressed utilities were paying hospitals top dollars to turn on their diesel generators to avoid power outages. Now, much of the time our electrical system runs at half-capacity, which stabilizes prices, but on peak demand days, watch out. Typically, a utility in the Hudson Valley pays wholesale prices of, say, $26/megawatt hour. Not on June 24, 2025. Jeff Seidman, a Vassar professor and clean energy advocate, tracked the prices on this haywire day: $120/MWh by 10:30 in the morning, $1,255/MWh by 3:40 in the afternoon, $2,500/MWh by 5:57 pm. You and I, dear consumer, paid for this price spike in our utility bills.

Luckily, we don't have many 100 degree days in the Hudson Valley, not yet anyway. Not so Texas. In August 2023, they had nine price spikes of $2,000 or worse. One nearly hit $5,000. One year later only one. Two years later, 2025, nothing even remotely close to a price spike, everything chugging along at ordinary everyday wholesale prices no matter what the temperature.

What changed? Well, Texas is leading the clean energy revolution by rapidly installing wind, solar and batteries. California and Florida are in the game. China? Don't even ask. New York. Sigh. Lithium-ion batteries are like silicon chips in computers — a technology getting exponentially cheaper, better and safer by the year. Don't get carried away by the fearmongers and their fire photos. As BESS plants have been rapidly deployed in certain regions of the country, their failure rate has dropped by 98 percent from 2018 to 2024. And those that have caught fire are older systems that wouldn't meet the newest safety codes. Googling them, Seidman points out, is like googling the old Ford Pintos with exploding gas tanks and demanding a moratorium on cars.

The technology is advanced, but the principle is simple. Electricity is cheapest at night when demand is lowest. So load up your local BESS at night, then discharge it during the day for a real discount. BESS make sense for the Hudson Valley, where our alternatives are to allow more fracked gas plants like the one defeated in Newburgh several years ago or to hope and pray Governor Hochul can deliver on her dream of a new generation of nuclear power plants in a decade or so.

Last point re: fires. The fire danger for lithium-ion is very real. So have been the technological innovations driven by safety standards to reduce this risk to a minimum. We carry phones, we use laptops, we drive EVs, none of which would be with us without lithium-ion batteries. Last year, New York State set the toughest BESS safety standards in the country. The New York City Fire Department helped draft those standards. Recently, Tom Von Essen, the former commissioner of NYFD, endorsed BESS for Long Island where he lives. "I spent my career protecting New Yorkers," he wrote in Newsday. "I wouldn't put my name behind this technology if I weren't confident it's safe."

Why his support? Remember June 24, 2025. If we thought $2,500/MWh by dinnertime was a shock, Long Island hit $7,300/MWh at the same time. Who but Elon Musk can afford to keep living this way?

Will Nixon

Kingston