Eighty-five battery storage projects totaling nearly 11,500 megawatts are proposed across New York State, from Chautauqua County to Montauk. 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, that the Public Service Commission estimates will cost ratepayers $1.3 to $2 billion over 21 years. It’s the basis for a 15-year property tax exemption that was written for solar and wind; the legislature added batteries to the list in 2017 and crossed the words “solar or wind” out of the title. It’s the basis for state law that makes any battery a “renewable energy project” for industrial development agency tax breaks, and for the federal government’s “Clean Electricity Investment Credit,” which Congress ended for wind and solar in 2025 while writing an exception that keeps it for batteries. And it’s the argument developers bring to town boards from Sherburne to Staten Island.
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 New York, the answer, overwhelmingly, is natural gas. By NYISO’s own marginal-emissions data, the power on the margin when these batteries would charge is carbon-emitting 75% to 93% of the time depending on the zone, and weighted by where the proposed megawatts actually sit, gas sets the charging price in 78% of hours. 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 — and long before that, added solar changes when batteries charge, not what they charge from.
