Eleven battery storage projects totaling more than 1,600 megawatts are proposed across the North Country, the Mohawk Valley, and the Capital Region. 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. When the legislature gave batteries a 15-year exemption from local property taxes, it did it by adding them to the law written for “solar or wind energy systems.” When it opened industrial development agency tax breaks to batteries, it did it by defining them as “renewable energy projects.” And when Washington rewrote the federal tax credit batteries claim, it named it the “Clean Electricity Investment Credit.” It’s the argument developers bring to town boards from Sherburne to Bethlehem.
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 North Country, the Mohawk Valley, and the Capital Region, the answer, overwhelmingly, is natural gas, 85% to 90% 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 11 to 15 gigawatts of added utility-scale solar (not rooftop or community-scale), some twenty times the grid-scale fleet it has built to date, and roughly double everything waiting in NYISO’s interconnection queue, before charging windows are even half renewable. And long before that, added solar changes when batteries charge, not what they charge from.”
