Posted on 12/31/2025 7:03:18 AM PST by MtnClimber
The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.
Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work, they soldier forth building large grid-scale battery storage facilities. The battery building program is under way, at least to some degree, and a few such facilities are actually complete and operating out in the rural parts of the state. Meanwhile, there are plans for some much larger such facilities in New York City, including right in some of its most densely-populated sections. Is there any problem with this that we ought to know about?
In a post back in March 2024, I reported on the progress of our two “climate leader” states with developing grid-scale battery storage. It turned out that the big problem was that these facilities were subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis. In some cases the same facility would catch fire multiple times. That post reported on major fires in California at a site called Valley Center in San Diego County in September 2023, and at another one called Moss Landing south of San Francisco in September 2022. In January 2025, the Moss Landing facility had another major fire. From the EPA website:
On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire.
- The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries.
- About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by the fire.
There were prior fires at the Moss Landing facility in September 2021 and February 2022.
Back here in New York, my March 2024 post reported on no fewer than three major fires at grid battery storage facilities in this state that had taken place during 2023. The following quote came from a piece at Canary Media from August 2023:
New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
Might you have the idea that these fires are becoming less frequent over time? If so, that’s only because these fires are one of those things — like the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota — that the liberal media just don’t choose to report. It turns out that the Convergent Energy facility in Warwick, New York had another big fire just last week. From Etica AG, December 22:
Late on the evening of December 19, 2025, a fire occurred at the Church Street Battery Storage Facility in Warwick, New York, operated by Convergent Energy & Power. While no injuries were reported and the fire was confined to a single container, the incident remained active into the following day and prompted a multi-agency response, air quality monitoring, and renewed scrutiny of battery energy storage system (BESS) safety in the community. For Warwick residents and local leaders, the fire carried added weight. The town has experienced multiple battery storage incidents in recent years, and each new event raises difficult questions about risk, emergency response, and whether existing BESS designs are suitable for locations near homes, schools, and small businesses.
I can’t find any mention of this battery fire at the New York Times or at major media sites like CNN or the major television networks.
The Convergent Energy Warwick energy storage facility has a capacity of 12 MW and 57 MWh. Meanwhile, back here in New York City, there are plans, well advanced (although not quite yet under construction), to build a much larger grid battery storage facility in Ravenswood, Queens. That would be right on the East River, directly across from East Midtown and the Upper East Side of Manhattan:
You can see on the map how close much of Manhattan is to this facility. To be fair, the wind usually blows the other way, but the parts of Queens near this facility are also very densely populated. Something called Queensbridge Houses — the largest public housing project in the country — is immediately adjacent.
The planned capacity of the battery storage facility in Ravenswood is 316 MW/2528 MWh — some 25 or more times the size of the facility in Warwick that has now caught fire at least twice.
A New York agency going by the name NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is leading the charge to build these energy storage facilities, including in densely populated areas like Queens. On their website, they have a page touting the new battery storage project at the Ravenswood location. Believe it or not, their sales pitch is that the new battery facility is cleaner and greener than the prior natural gas power plants on the site. Here is a quote they take from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards:
“The days of environmental and economic injustice in Western Queens, especially for our historically marginalized public housing families, are coming to an end. As we prepare to transform the Ravenswood Generating Station into a clean energy producer, it’s critical that the surrounding community reaps the benefits of that transition,” said Borough President Richards.
Somehow, both NYSERDA and Donovan omit to mention the issue of the fires.
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What could go wrong?
It’s not that the math is hard. It’s that they don’t want to see the results.
However, I do see a realistic use of some battery storage to provide seconds or a minute of power if the grid was to switch sources. I.e. Think of a solar farm providing power during a sunny day, but a sudden rain shower means having to quickly scale up a natural gas plant, and battery storage for the grid providing uninterrupted power for those seconds during the switch.
My decentralized/home solar does this. My inverters are set to pull power from the grid only if there's not enough solar coming in, and only if my battery stack's charge (SOC for strength of charge) is at or below 30%. So if my battery stack gets that low, my inverters start pulling from the grid, yet my inverters show pulling a hair more power than they "wanted" to from the batteries until the transition to the grid is complete. The same thing the next morning when the sun comes up and there's a gradual shifting of depending on the solar power. (My inverters might accidentally charge the batteries a little with grid power, even though they're set to not do it, because the battery power is the kind of slush fund to help the inverters with a little bit of the over and under on how much they can depend on solar in the early hours.)
But none of this is for people not willing to do their homework. Unfortunately, with the left it's more about their doomsday warmageddon cult than about practical engineering.
“It’s not that the math is hard. It’s that they don’t want to see the results.”
Because math is ________________ (insert whichever leftist pejorative, ad hominem phrase you wish)
Not much. All modern solar batteries that I'm aware of (mine included) have built-in fire extinguishing systems. They are required by law. And, before long, lithium ion solar batteries will be a thing of the past. The next battery technology on the horizon is aluminum ion technology. Elon Musk is due to start using them in Teslas in 2026. They are virtually fireproof on their own. This article is little more than clickbait.
“I’m having trouble processing in my mind the need or the feasibility of grid battery storage, at least for the purported reasons (i.e. powering the grid through the night for hours until the sun comes back up).”
It’s not that hard to understand. The choke point for solar power is in the evening when people are home, awake, and busy, but the sun is next to useless. Getting through that bump requires either new powerplants or batteries. An average home runs on about 1 kW excluding AC, Electric Heating, and Tesla Charging, so 8 kWh of battery is plenty and, these days, is small and relatively cheap (maybe $3k for batteries and associated hardware, plus labor).
The question then becomes - do you require, or even want, people who don’t know how to stop a smoke alarm from beeping to have 8 kWh and associated electronics in their homes, or do you put it all in large, battery farms. Well, ‘investors’ have decided to put it in battery farms.
By the way - do you know why they always seem to locate the battery farms in highly populated areas, when they could be in the middle of farms or deserts and do perfectly fine supporting the grid there? Question for our audience - let’s see if anyone gets it right.
“Not much. All modern solar batteries that I’m aware of (mine included) have built-in fire extinguishing systems.”
Interesting, first I’ve heard of that - might you have a link to one of these “fire extinguishing systems”.
Right!?
Stache D has some interesting coverage on car battery fires. He probably addresses the utility scale ones in California.
https://www.youtube.com/@stachedtraining
It works great on the homeowner scale. I have a 1500 sq ft home in East Texas. My 13KW system utilizes 662 sq ft of panels, and a 2x2x4 ft battery rack that will definitely go way beyond nighttime hours if it had to. It's actually gone over 3 days when it was very darkly overcast. I've been on it more than a year now, air conditioning and all. It went back on the grid for about an hour last November. But, I could have redirected it to pull from the generator instead. You are correct that the average Joe won't keep up with the technology and run the numbers.
I think the issue is that if the power companies can't control it and be the only one profiting from it, then they don't want you to have it, either. That's why they are so reluctant to buy back power from residential solar owners, and even go as far as trying to convince local municipalities that solar is a bad idea, unless THEY are the only ones doing it. As far as fires go, new solar batteries have built-in fire extinguishing systems, and this article is little more than clickbait.
“ Not much. All modern solar batteries that I’m aware of (mine included) have built-in fire extinguishing systems”
So all the batteries out now are obsolete. They have the technology to generate power just not store the power, safely.
Big flaw there….
316 MW/2528 MWh
______________
Math
It will provided, if fully charged, 316MW for 8 hours.
Average customer consumes 886kWh per month.
So this facility can power like 3000 customers for month or 2 million customers for an hour.
The cost was never disclosed (?) but similar projects cost $312 per kWh, that will mean like 788 million $ (or close to Billion $)!!!
“DC power doesn’t transmit across long distances well. My solar array, inverters, and battery stack have to be somewhat close to each other. I’m sure the same is for grid battery storage.”
Agree on (battery) DC power not doing well at long distances, but grid-scale battery power ALWAYS gets inverted to 60 Hz, somewhere close, and then tied into the grid, and there are high voltage power lines running all over the country where it could tie-in. So why not invert the power near the batteries and tie-in next to a power line in the middle of Nevada, or wherever there are few people around?
Mine are built-in to the batteries. There is a UL standard for it (UL 9540A). It stops the thermal runaway that causes the battery to continually burn. And, when a certain temperature is detected by the built-in battery management system (BMS) the battery shuts down. Without the thermal runaway between cells, they don't burn. And, the battery itself is designed not to burn in the first place. In addition to this, they may also have a built-in aerosol fire extinguishing system.
But a one-time conversion from DC to AC can happen if the battery storage is in the urban area near the solar panels (again, assuming the solar is on the urban rooftops like in the link I provided). In that situation, solar power comes in as DC, stays DC to be stored in the nearby storage facility, then goes through a conversion from DC to AC only once.
“Mine are built-in to the batteries.”
Thanks, that’s the BMS (battery management system), and it is good at stopping external factors from starting a fire, like shorts, overloads, overcharging, extreme temperatures, etc - by shutting down the battery. It’s actually a great improvement, as the original batteries depended on people who didn’t even understand battery limitations to prevent conditions that caused fires to start. I have no doubt that all of the batteries used in the huge battery farms have BMS, probably at several levels.
“It stops the thermal runaway that causes the battery to continually burn.”
By definition thermal runaway cannot be stopped, or it wouldn’t be called “runaway”. But there certainly are design measures that can minimize the odds of it spreading. But, since the constituents of the cells are what actually is burning, at least initially, there is no way to extinguish it. Later on, as the fire spreads outside of the cells, then conventional methods (oxygen removal, water saturation, etc. can work) can work, providing they stop the runaway, meaning they can keep adjacent cells from reaching their self-ignition temperature, around 400F.
Yet the fires keep happening...so there’s more to it. As to what that is, I can only speculate, but my guess is that when you have, literally, many millions of small cells comprising a battery farm, some might be defective, and set off a runaway condition. The fact that these battery farms, like the original nuclear plants, are basically exempt from liability in these types of failures (I assume, as they wouldn’t be built otherwise) leads me to believe that the builders of these farms don’t mind taking ‘shortcuts’ once in a while.
So, on a much smaller scale, do any of you take precautions for power tool batteries?
We have stopped leaving them in their chargers or in tools. Last year I started putting in lithium ion storage bags individually and store them in a rolling cabinet that I can push out of the garage in case of fire. A friend of ours had his house burn down due to a faulty dewalt battery so, just trying to be careful
“But a one-time conversion from DC to AC can happen if the battery storage is in the urban area near the solar panels (again, assuming the solar is on the urban rooftops like in the link I provided).”
The problem with Grid Scale DC transmission is the need to overlay a new power grid to connect up the dispersed DC sources, hundreds or thousands. In NYC, for example, it would cost a fortune to run new power lines underground, given what’s down there, and I don’t think running power lines overhead, between buildings (as is done in cities in many other countries) would go over very well. Obviously, it would be similarly costly to overlay a DC grid in non-urban areas.
But even ignoring that, at least in my experience, the huge solar farms that I’ve seen have been in less-populated areas, like deserts and farmland (for obvious reasons) without battery farms (since they weren’t needed until solar went big-time).
Where I live, in a suburban area, there isn’t a solar farm in sight, nor any large buildings, and obviously residential and smaller commercial buildings with solar only have AC hookups, yet there’s a huge battery farm a mile (upwind) from where I live. Thankfully, there’s people who live far closer, so they’ll care of hanging our councilmen when the place blows up.
So, back to my question, why are the battery farms being built in the urban areas, rather than far away, perhaps near the big solar farms?
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