Nineteen battery storage projects totaling nearly 2,400 megawatts are proposed across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. 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 modeled on renewable energy credits and collected from every electric bill in the state, with nearly a third of the money steered to projects in New York City. In the city itself, batteries share a property tax abatement with rooftop solar, administered under a single “solar electric generating system and electric energy storage equipment” program. And every one of them can claim the federal government’s “Clean Electricity Investment Credit.” It’s the language borough presidents and council members repeat when these projects are announced.
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 City, the answer, overwhelmingly, is natural gas, 92% of the time (according to NYISO’s own marginal-emissions data), the highest share in the state. 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.
