Eighteen battery storage projects totaling more than 2,800 megawatts are proposed across the Hudson Valley and Catskills, more capacity than any other region of the state. 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 statewide subsidy program, modeled on renewable energy credits, whose costs are collected from customers through the same line items that fund actual renewables; on a Central Hudson bill, it’s literally called the “Clean Energy Standard Surcharge.” It’s the basis for property tax exemptions written for solar and wind, and for the federal government’s “Clean Electricity Investment Credit.” And it’s the argument developers bring to town boards from Ulster to Dover.
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 the Hudson Valley and Catskills, the answer, overwhelmingly, is natural gas, 87% to 92% of the time depending on the zone (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.
