Around a dozen residents and fire department officials gathered at a Manorville firehouse Tuesday to discuss a planned battery energy storage plant in the hamlet that would be 30 times larger than Long Island’s two existing utility batteries.

The facility, being developed by Key Capture Energy of Houston, was one of two that received a contract award from New York State last month, part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to install some 6,000 megawatts of batteries across the state by 2030. The Manorville plant, planned for 150 megawatts, would dwarf two existing Long Island batteries that are 5 megawatts each. The other facility that received a contract was a 110-megawatt plant planned for Holtsville.

Manorville Fire District officials at the meeting said the department has hired a risk analysis company to investigate the company’s assertions that the facility would be safe. A report is expected in the coming months.

The facility previously received Brookhaven Town approval, with construction due to start in 2028, KCE said.

“We haven’t taken a stance either way,” said Charlie Steuerwald, a Manorville Fire District commissioner. “We want to learn everything. … We all have the same concerns.”

New York State announced the award for KCE’s Manorville plant around the same time the Town of Islip approved new restrictions on Tier 3 batteries that would preclude a separate 79-megawatt KCE battery from being built in Hauppauge.

The award came as the state announced preliminary findings from a toxic plume probe around a battery in East Hampton that experienced a 2023 thermal runaway fire. The state blamed a fire suppression system for creating the forever-chemical plume, but no public agency, company or utility has released any information on the cause of the fire. The East Hampton battery and a second NextEra/National Grid-owned battery in Montauk were shut down earlier this month.

A KCE website about the Manorville facility does not list its address. Residents who attended the meeting said they learned about it from a recent Newsday article listing its address, at 62 Weeks Ave.

The Manorville plant will have a total of 198 containers, Chris Linsmayer, a spokesperson for KCE, said in an email, adding that the layout can be found in the gallery section of the project website.

The future plant is now home to a single-story industrial building and work yard, which on Wednesday was teeming with workers. None would speak to Newsday about the future battery plant, which sits across from several acres of farmland and just over a mile from South Street School.

Linsmayer provided the address to Newsday several weeks ago but declined to confirm the number of battery containers planned for the site. A site plan provided to Newsday by a source showed what appeared to be 96 battery containers.

Linsmayer said the Manorville battery will connect to the LIPA grid at an existing 138,000-volt transmission line, adding the battery will draw from all power sources but “typically charge during hours with higher renewable generation.”

KCE received a “local discretionary permit” from Brookhaven Town in 2022, and the company expects the project to go into commercial operation in 2030. “KCE is coordinating with the Town of Brookhaven, including the fire department, as the project continues to move forward,” Linsmayer wrote in an email.

At the meeting, Steuerwald said the department had expected Brookhaven might join with most other towns on Long Island and temporarily suspend plans for big utility batteries.

“Our original anticipation was Brookhaven Town would pass a moratorium on building any of these,” Steuerwald told residents. “They’re [among] the last town in Suffolk County not to pass one.”

Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico has expressed frustration with state efforts to publicly support and educate the public and officials about the sites. The state said it has done so.

The fire department doesn’t have a formal say in approving or blocking the plant, Steuerwald said, but it hired the risk analysis company to help determine the next steps. “We’re still in the learning phase,” he said, saying officials were “aware of other issues” concerning fires on four other occasions at the batteries.

Linsmayer said the difference between the planned Manorville plant and the East Hampton facility is “like the difference between a Model T and one of today’s modern cars with built-in safety features.”

“The East Hampton facility was an older system housed in a building and included an older battery chemistry called nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC),” he wrote. “KCE’s proposed projects will not be installed indoors and will include lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which is significantly less susceptible to fire than NMC chemistry.”

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.