Ten battery storage projects totaling more than 1,500 megawatts are proposed across Central New York and the Southern Tier. They’ve been proposed to help meet New York State’s six-gigawatt energy storage goal, a program the state says will store renewable generation “for the times it is needed most,” firming intermittent solar and wind into steady power.
That belief that batteries store renewable energy is the basis for nearly everything that follows. It’s the basis for a subsidy program collected from every electric bill in the state, deliberately modeled on renewable energy credits. It’s the basis for a 15-year property tax exemption that was written for solar and wind. It’s the basis for the federal government’s “Clean Electricity Investment Credit.” And it’s the argument developers bring to town boards from Lansing to Cohocton.
None of those benefits, state or federal, is conditioned on where the electricity actually comes from. So it’s worth asking the question the incentives never ask: when these batteries charge, what generates the power going into them?
In Central New York, the Finger Lakes and the Southern Tier, the answer, overwhelmingly, is natural gas, 86% of the time (according to NYISO’s own marginal-emissions data). Not just now, but likely for the lifetime of these projects: our modeling finds New York would need five to nine times all the solar it has ever built before charging windows are even half renewable.
