Battery storage feeds into affordability

Battery energy storage is critical infrastructure — which in turn means jobs and investment. When Long Island builds a utility-scale battery project, electricians, operating engineers, laborers, ironworkers and Teamsters go to work. Apprentices earn while they learn. Families get health coverage and a pension. Private money flows in, and young people get a reason to build their futures here instead of leaving.

The Islip Town Board is now weighing a change to their energy storage code that would effectively prohibit community-scale and grid-scale storage projects, therefore shutting the door on the grid, economic and jobs benefits of these projects. The town’s battery storage moratorium expires Sept. 30.

I represent 65,000 tradeswomen and tradesmen across Nassau and Suffolk. They live here. They pay Long Island’s utility bills, property taxes, rents and mortgages, and they know how hard it has gotten to afford to stay. Battery storage sits on both sides of that affordability equation. It gives ratepayers a more efficient grid, and it creates union careers that let families remain where they are.

Long Islanders already pay some of the highest power prices in the country. Storage is one of the few tools that pushes that cost down, and it does it by making the grid we already have work efficiently. It stores power when demand is low and the system has room to spare, then feeds it back when demand peaks. Batteries make the most of the existing lines and substations instead of building costly new ones, and provide a backstop for when the weather turns or a plant trips offline.

The Island’s electricity system is already stretched. Without near-term solutions like energy storage and transmission upgrades, there is serious risk that Long Island will see increased power shortages and blackouts. The state’s grid operator forecasts an extremely thin reliability margin, meaning this risk is real and urgent.

Other states like Texas have demonstrated what battery storage does to prices and reliability. Summer evenings are when power gets expensive. Three summers ago in Texas, on one of those nights, the price of power spiked toward $5,000 per megawatt-hour. This summer, on the same Monday in August at that same hour, it stayed low at just around $125. Same stretch of summer, same hour of the evening, but lower cost. The difference was batteries. Texas now runs one of the largest battery fleets in the country. They soak up cheap power midday and deliver it back at night, so the expensive hours stop being expensive, and the grid is more reliable.

None of this asks anyone to trade away safety. New York State’s updated fire code, which took effect Jan. 1, requires setbacks, emergency planning, fire department coordination and independent peer review. It was built in collaboration with FDNY and national fire safety experts, and we support every bit of it. Safety should decide how these projects get built, by trained professionals, to the strongest standards in the country. That’s exactly what New York has delivered.

Islip should revise its approval structure so appropriately sited projects can be judged on their merits. By banning them, Long Island gets more expensive and less competitive. That is the opposite of what working families need.

This guest essay reflects the views of Matthew Aracich, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties.