CAMBRIA — Plans for a new battery storage facility in Cambria have already drawn opposition from local residents and county planners.
RIC Development LLC, a company with solar panels, battery storage, and green hydrogen projects either built or developed in eight states, is looking to install a Tier 3 5MW AC battery storage system on land leased at 5147 Lockport Road, an 18-acre lot near an intersection with Campbell Boulevard zoned for general business.
Its preliminary plans consist of six Tesla Megapack 2XL battery cabinets, taking up between 7,000 and 8,000 square feet at the rear of the site, installing a new driveway, connecting existing transmission lines, and putting in new landscaping surrounding it.
“The concept of these projects is that they basically charge when the cost and the need for power is low, typically in the overnight hours,” said RIC Development Director of Development for North America Andrew Welch during a recent Niagara County Planning Board meeting. “This shores up the local distribution system. We hook into the distribution system, so all that power becomes local.”
They are looking for a use variance because Cambria does not currently allow standalone battery projects. The local law passed in 2022 regulating battery storage does not allow Tier 3 stand-alone systems over 1 MW; those over that size are only allowed with Tier 3 or 4 solar energy systems and are limited to industrially-zoned areas.
The batteries would be lithium iron phosphate batteries, ones Welch argued are safer and more stable than standard lithium-ion batteries. Each cabinet would be nine feet tall, six feet wide, and 30 feet long, surrounded by a seven-foot fence.
Citing the batteries’ safety, Welch pointed out that everyone has some form of lithium battery in their phones, smartwatches, or headphones without it being considered a risk.
“If you take something with a good safety record and you put it away from people, you put it in the middle of a field, you put fence around it, you have a battery management system that will monitor the condition of every single one of those little cells, … then you have communication back that’s provided around the clock to an operations center, and then everything enclosed in cabinets, I would argue that is much less a risk, of a personal danger than all these batteries we deal with on a daily basis,” Welch said during the Cambria Zoning Board of Appeals meeting Monday night.
It would be RIC Development’s first battery storage system in Western New York, with two other battery storage projects in the Westchester County towns of Bedford and Yorktown in development. Some of their other projects in development in the region include the 3MW Lockport City Solar, the 4 MW Brant Solar, the 5 MW Concord Solar, the 1 MW Dunkirk Solar, the 5 MW Clymer Solar, and the 2 MW Machias Solar.
The County Planners unanimously voted against supporting its use variance request. County Planner Walter Garrow said he still had reservations about the safety of the batteries, bringing up the Moss Landing fire in California from January.
The Cambria ZBA’s meeting on Monday had a public hearing about the battery storage system, which they left open for a future meeting. While the planning board is the lead agency in the SEQR process and would need to approve a detailed site plan, it is ultimately the ZBA’s determination whether to grant the necessary approvals or not.
Welch and Eric Wood, a senior consultant for the Energy Safety Response Group, which tests batteries before they are ready for commercial use and trains firefighters on how to deal with battery fires, made a presentation before the ZBA about the safety measures taken for these batteries. In the event a fire does occur, it is recommended to let it burn itself out due to the possibility of dangerous reactions and the cells being so far inside the cabinets.
Despite that, Cambria residents in attendance were still against the project, citing the possibility of a battery fire and trying to keep their town rural.
“We had fought to keep the rural aspect of our community for the past six-and-a-half years,” said Sharon Tasner, the VP of Cambria Residents Against Industrial Solar, who had fought against the Bear Ridge Solar Project. “We don’t want it, nor do we want the additional battery storage coming with it.”