As the grid goes green and electrifies, residents fret over safety of battery storage

As reported on MassLive: Mar. 24, 2025, 1:02 p.m.|Published: Mar. 23, 2025, 5:57 a.m.

18–23 minutes

WESTFIELD — For years, Kristen L. Mello has been advocating against so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS, which seeped into the ground decades ago from firefighting foam at Barnes Air National Guard Base and tainted Westfield’s drinking water.

As the city continues to grapple with that pollution, Mello and other residents are rallying against what they see as a new environmental threat: A large-scale lithium-ion battery storage project.

It’s a battery storage project similar to ones being considered in communities up and down the Pioneer Valley.

“NO Lithium Battery Storage Over Our Aquifer,” say the hundreds of signs that Dan Allie, a Westfield at-large city councilor, has distributed.

They are a hot commodity. “One-hundred signs come in and they last about three days,” Allie said.

Mello, a Westfield at-large councilor, fears the batteries will cause fires. “The fires that nobody knows how to put out that constantly reignite,” she said.

She says that Westfield is shaped like a bowl surrounded by mountains. Any fumes from a fire would settle in a populated neighborhood where there are schools and farms nearby.

The 200-megawatt battery would connect to Eversource’s existing Buck Pond substation on Medeiros Way.

“It is uniquely the only project I’ve seen in my 40 years of public service that the residents are 100% against,” said Westfield Mayor Michael A. McCabe, who was a police captain before being elected mayor in 2021.

A sign expressing opposition to a battery electric storage project in Westfield displayed Wednesday, March 19 on Western Avenue. (Jim Kinney/ The Republican)The Republican

Battery storage projects are designed to take power off the grid when it’s cheap and sell it back to utilities at the “peak” times of high demand, supplementing and storing intermittent green generation from solar, wind and hydroelectric.

Nearly half — 46% as of January — of the capacity developers want to add to New England’s electrical grid would be in the form of battery storage, according to data from ISO New England. The most popular type is a lithium-ion battery.

Clean energy experts say more battery storage is key, what with the state’s goal of becoming net-zero by 2050 and electricity demand expected to skyrocket as fossil fuels are phased out.

Officials in Holyoke have been talking about battery storage as a way to increase the city’s climate resiliency. It could act as backup power after a storm or natural disaster.

The state also set a target to adopt 1,000 megawatt-hours of energy storage by 2025. That’s a million kilowatts of electricity generated per hour. For comparison, the average American home used about 10,000 kilowatt-hours in 2023.

Battery storage proposals have cropped up in other area communities such as West Springfield, Westfield, Agawam and rural outposts like Wendell.

Already, there are battery systems up and running, like in Easthampton, Amherst, Blandford and Palmer. In Holyoke, solar panels charge the Mount Tom Energy Storage System along the Connecticut River, and power is also stored in the Martin J. Dunn Energy Center on Water Street.

The city of Springfield has had some inquiries about battery storage but no proposals, said Philip Dromey, the deputy director of planning.

There was, according to Springfield city records, battery storage installed in 2023 as part of the solar energy system for the Elias Brookings School.

Martin J. Dunn Energy Center on Water Street in Holyoke. (Hoang 'Leon' Nguyen / The Republican)

A number of recent battery proposals have hit resistance. Some residents are wary of placing the batteries in their neighborhoods or near sensitive areas like bodies of water and forests.

In January, Worcester-based developer Zero-Point Development sued the town of Hadley after it was denied permission to put battery storage on a five-acre parcel on Breckinridge Road that used to be a sand pit.

In court papers, Zero-Point alleges that town officials' concerns for the safety of nearby homes and playgrounds are not backed up by facts and that its opposition is unreasonable.

Zero-Point also sued the town of Orange on similar grounds, court records show. The town and the developer reached a settlement last year, but the project is still in limbo, according to the property owner. Zero-Point has an ongoing suit in the town of Bellingham.

Concerned citizens point to fires at battery storage facilities, like a blaze that erupted earlier this year at a plant in northern California. Residents filed a lawsuit against the owner of the project, and environmental activist Erin Brockovich — whose work exposing groundwater contamination in California in the 1990s was made into an Oscar-nominated film — has gotten involved.

Local control meets state law

In Westfield, residents' ire is also because Jupiter’s proposed project location is above the aquifer where the city draws its drinking water. And the water is already contaminated with PFAS, forcing new and expensive filtration equipment.

“People are very protective of the aquifer,” McCabe said.

At a City Council Committee meeting Monday Nicholas J. Morganelli, Jr. an at large councilor, Dan Allie, at-large city councilor and committee chair Karen Fanion, Ward 1 city councilor discuss changes to the city's zoning rules that would address battery storage projects. (Patrick Johnson/ The Republican)The Republican

The debate in the city isn’t whether to act against battery storage, but how to craft regulations that won’t lead developers to make an end-around with the state or courts.

The City Council has been trying to hash out zoning meant to regulate all battery projects, banning them from land atop the aquifer and requiring a 150-foot setback from property lines. After a debate Thursday, those changes were sent back to committee for reconsideration and are due to re-emerge this summer.

Karen Fanion, the councilor who represents the area of the proposed battery site on Medeiros Way, opposes the battery facility and supports new zoning restrictions. “But it might not matter,” she said in an interview.

That’s because cities and towns are limited in their ability to stop battery projects. State law says towns can’t “unreasonably regulate” solar systems or associated buildings, which the court has decided includes battery energy storage systems, the Attorney General’s office has said.

New changes to state law included in the state’s 2024 climate act allow project developers to request zoning exemptions, though the projects might still need other state and local approvals.

Westfield Planner Jay Vinskey and Kristen L. Mello, at large city councilor, watch the committee debate the zoning changes that would regulate battery storage systems. (Patrick Johnson/ The Republican)The Republican

If a project receives a zoning exemption from the state but the city or town will not issue required permits and approvals, developers can then request a special certificate from the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board. That approval would serve as all the state and local permits, rendering the city or town powerless.

Starting in July 2026, battery projects can apply to the Energy Facilities Siting Board for an approval process that includes all required permits to start building.

The state is working to draft regulations that the public will be able to weigh in on, according to a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Utilities.

With developers able to take their case to state regulators, Westfield might not be able to say no, Mello said. “What local control is there?” she said.

A lack of local authority is at the heart of a long-simmering conflict in Franklin County. Several years ago when Lowell-based New Leaf Energy proposed a battery storage project in Wendell, the 900-person town balked. New Leaf wanted to site a 105-megawatt lithium-ion battery project at 68 Wendell Depot Rd., a rural area.

Concerned residents formed an opposition group called “No Assault and Batteries” that raised issues about wildlife, noise and the possibility of a fire that would be difficult for the town’s volunteer fire department to control.

“I do appreciate the government’s intention to be net zero by 2050, however, how you get there is just as important as the intention to get there,” said Court Dorsey, a member of No Assault and Batteries who has lived in Wendell for about 40 years. He sees lithium-ion batteries as unstable and dangerous, and his group points to fires in places like California and New York.

“It’s not about stay out off my land,“ he said. ”We’re trying to protect this place so something beautiful and unspoiled can be a wildlife corridor that can sustain a diversity of plant and animal species."

The town’s Conservation Commission denied New Leaf a permit, and the company applied for state permission instead. Residents voted overwhelmingly in May 2024 to pass a bylaw that aimed to limit battery energy storage systems, allowing smaller ones with town approval and banning any 10 megawatts or larger.

The Attorney General’s Office struck it down late last year, writing a 13-page letter that said the bylaw acted like zoning regulation which state law says can’t “unreasonably regulate the installation of solar energy systems or the building of structures that facilitate the collection of solar energy, except where necessary to protect the public health, safety or welfare.” Energy storage systems are protected under that law through court decisions, the AG’s office said.

Though New Leaf withdrew its Wendell project, residents are still fighting to regulate the battery systems. The town is raising money to pay for legal fees to appeal the Attorney General’s decision to strike down its bylaw. As of Friday, a GoFundMe had raised about $5,800 of a $6,000 goal.

This image from video shows flames rising after a major fire erupted Thursday afternoon at the Moss Landing Power Plant, located about 77 miles (about 124 kilometers) south of San Francisco, Thursday, Jan.16, 2025. The facility was one of the world's largest battery storage plants. (KSBW via AP)AP

A smaller battery storage project from the same company appears to be receiving a warmer reception in Agawam.

New Leaf Energy proposed a 5-megawatt battery on Silver Street and the city signed off a site plan last year. The battery will be lithium-iron-phosphorous, which New Leaf told The Republican last month, is safer than the lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries that recently set fire in northern California. New Leaf will also train the city’s firefighters, the company said.

Mayor Christopher Johnson drafted an ordinance on battery energy storage facilities that’s under City Council consideration. Among other rules, it would allow systems with a capacity of more than 50-megawatt-hours by right in industrial areas and with a special permit in agricultural areas.

Systems would need to have to meet National Fire Protection Association standards and be equipped with fire suppression systems, Johnson said.

“If they’re going to come knocking on any community’s door, we should have rules,” he said.

Managing risk

There’s been about two dozen battery system failures in the U.S. going back to 2011, according to a database of incidents maintained by the Electric Research Power Institute, an independent nonprofit research group.

The database tracks “failure incidents,” like explosions and fires, at utility-scale battery energy storage systems around the world.

Incidents closest to Western Massachusetts are fires in New York, like a 2023 fire at a solar farm in Jefferson County, which sits on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, where a lithium-ion battery burned for days.

While the number of grid-scale battery storage systems has increased since 2018, the amount of fires and explosion accidents have decreased, according to the institute. Last year, there were eight failures recorded in the database and more than 300 gigawatts-hours of battery storage in use worldwide. In 2018, there were 16 failures per about 20 gigawatt-hours of storage.

“Rates of failure are dropping precipitously,” said Stephanie Shaw, a technical executive at EPRI. “We know that storage can and have been managed safely for long periods of time.”

One reason for the drop: the shift toward a container design, keeping a battery in a module so if it catches fire, it can be contained, said Lakshmi Srinivasan, principal team lead of EPRI’s Energy Storage and Distributed Generation.

How safe a system is depends on the design, said Ali Rangwala, a professor of fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

If designed carefully and safety measures are taken, “then it’s perfectly safe,” Rangwala said. “There is a hazard associated with pretty much anything. If you go down to the gas station and you fill up your car with gasoline, you’re dealing with a highly combustible volatile fuel.”

It’s all about risk management, he said.

Typically, overheating cells are the cause of a battery fire, Rangwala said.

That’s called a “thermal runaway,” when an overheated battery cell can, in a chain reaction, heat the cells around it and lead to a fire or explosion, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

The batteries are usually inside of a casing.

“These layers of protection help prevent damage to the system but can also block water from accessing the seat of the fire,” the National Fire Protection Association says on its website.

It can take a lot of water to cool it down, the association says. After extinguished, the fire can reignite days or weeks later.

From peaker plant to battery

Owners of on the former former West Springfield Power Staton Connecticut River have he go ahead from ISO New England to move ahead on a $70 million in a battery storage project. Now the project goes to West Springfield authorities. The plant is seen here March 14, 2025.(Patrick Johnson/ Special to The Republican)The Republican

For Rosemary Wessel, program director for No Fracked Gas in Mass and the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, battery storage is a cleaner energy opportunity. “If we can store the excess energy that’s being created when demand is low, then we don’t have to fire up all those fossil fuel peaker plants,” she said, referring to power plants that are used during times of high energy demand.

Because they are on standby and typically only used for short periods, peaker plants tend to be dirtier, Wessel said.

She understands why opponents of the systems have concerns. “We want the best, the cleanest energy,” she said. “All of this takes a back seat to make sure we do proper demand response so that there is less demand for energy.”

Wessel is working with Cogentrix Energy Power Management, owner of the shuttered West Springfield Power Station, on a $70 million battery storage project.

Cogentrix plans a 45-megawatt battery storage facility at the former plant, which closed in 2022 and still towers over Memorial Avenue and the Connecticut River.

Owners of on the former former West Springfield Power Staton Connecticut River have he go ahead from ISO New England to move ahead on a $70 million in a battery storage project. Now the project goes to West Springfield authorities. The plant is seen here March 14, 2025.(Patrick Johnson/ Special to The Republican)The Republican

The company hopes to start commercial operations in 2026.

As of last month, Cogentrix secured an agreement that would allow it to withdraw and inject energy onto the regional network, said Chris Sherman, senior vice president of corporate development.

But before securing project financing, Cogentrix needs more certainty on the federal Inflation Reduction Act incentives, he said. President Donald Trump has tried to freeze funds from that law, including those for climate-related projects.

The company has not yet filed paperwork with the city of West Springfield, but Mayor William Reichelt is supportive of the idea.

“The power plant is a great site for battery storage. There is solar over there already,” Reichelt said in a phone interview. “It used to be a power plant. So it’s able to handle the interconnection.”

And the battery fits what the city needs to see at a fallow industrial site, Reichelt said.

“That site needs to be redeveloped,” Reichelt said. “We need more tax revenue.”

Cogentrix will retain a safety engineer to develop a safety plan consistent with industry standards, Sherman said. Any application will be reviewed by the city’s fire department.

Mike Dickson, West Springfield’s assistant fire chief, said firefighters make visits and train at many industrial locations around the city as a precaution. The battery plant would be no exception.

Firefighters need to know how to respond and how to turn off and secure the operations. It’s not unlike how the department works with rail company CSX at the rail yard, for instance.

Energy transition

As Massachusetts moves toward its net-zero emissions goal, the demand for electricity in the state is expected to double as people switch to electric cars and trade gas heat for heat pumps, among other clean-energy swaps, said Dwayne Breger, director of the University of Massachusetts Clean Energy Extension. The grid needs to adapt to that increased demand and to power generated from intermittent sources like wind and solar energy — power that batteries can store when it’s plentiful to give back to the grid when it isn’t.

“Energy storage is going to be particularly key to make the system work,” he said. “Currently, there is very little energy storage on the electricity grid. ... We need a lot of energy storage on the system to run the grid reliably with largely based on intermittent resources.”

UMass Amherst has a battery that works with the power plant to store energy and lessen the need for drawing from the grid during peak demand, Breger said. Town firefighters were trained, he said. He sees it as low risk.

“We deal with risky issues all the time in our society,” he said. “Not to belittle it at all. But there’s no such thing as a risk-free installation. That being said, you try to do your best.”

When solar panels first started to be installed, there weren’t very many and it didn’t seem controversial, Breger said. But as the technology has scaled, public interest has grown, and conflicts over where panels are located and battery storage have arisen.

“We are beginning to really confront the trade-offs that we need to think about as a society with regard to confronting our climate emergency, if you will, with this renewable and clean energy transition,” he said.