The Economic Development Committee of the Syracuse Common Council met to discuss a proposed battery energy storage system (BESS) at 426 East Brighton Avenue. The meeting featured presentations by the developer, New Leaf Energy, fire safety experts, and the Syracuse Fire Chief. Key topics included project benefits, fire safety, code compliance, and the need for a citywide framework for such facilities. The chair decided to hold the item without a vote on Monday and indicated a future public hearing will be scheduled.
Uh, sat with your uh technology here or okay. Why don't you come up here? Can you do that from here? Or I don't have quicker uh so you want to do it from over there? Is that the idea? I guess so, yeah. Okay, I'd like to welcome everybody, the economic development committee meeting. I'm joined here by Councillor The President Hudson, Councilman Majak, Councilman, and uh Councillor Panagua. And we're here to discuss the uh battery energy storage project at four twenty-sex East East Brighton Avenue. Before we get started, I know we have members of the public here. This is a public meeting. This isn't a public hearing. So this is um the reason for this meeting is for the council in its deliberations to find out if we'll pass a special permit for this. So uh for this meeting, anyways, we'll just entertain questions from the common counselors here that we'll go to the uh person who's proposed the proposal, and we have our fire chief here too, and the codes directors are here as I believe, too. Um, Jake is here. Okay. So why don't you start, Mr. North. Council, my colleague said he will he will click along. So why don't you come over here and sit right next to our fire chief here? We're based in Troy, New York, just due uh east of here. Um we are here to talk about a proposal for a battery energy storage system on four twenty-six East Brighton. Uh we have our subject, all of our subject matter experts, including our fire safety uh personnel. Um I could ask those folks just to introduce themselves, beginning with my colleague Mike Schauford. Mike Schaffer, uh project. I'm Jack Bowski. I'm a team along with energy response group. Uh okay, thank you. Thank you. Um that team consists of uh multidisciplinary civil engineering, and as you heard, um uh fire safety, which I think is the principal concern people ask questions about with respect to the project. We'll obviously uh talk about that, but I also want to have an opportunity to speak about the benefits of the project, why the project. Um so I'll just ask my colleague to hit the next slide. Um you can keep going until we get to the first, there we go. We've yeah, very quickly on us. We've been permitting batteries in New York State for almost 10 years now. We've actually been in New York City where uh we've permitted multiple batteries. We have three batteries that have um come online in in Westchester. Umta recently uh uh uh incentivized uh retail storage batteries for upstate New York, and we'll talk for a minute about why they're important for the grid. Thanks. So the the quick the quick uh overview of what these batteries are doing and why we believe the city of Syracuse, a city of this size would uh needs them, is essentially what they're doing is they're charging right now, uh electricity use is essentially uh as you go. When you need to turn something on, you hope that there's a generation source that can provide that supply of energy. This is a mechanism to actually store energy so that in in times of peak demand um when uh when for example in the middle of August when air conditions are blaring and offices are going and area industry is up and running, there's actually a residual or storage source of energy that can come online and provide additional generation to in this case the area's uh a significant section of Syracuse. Next slide. Um and what they're doing is they're offsetting uh the need for these types of plants to come online to provide that energy. So this is a known as this is a peaker plant that is located on Bell Island Road. Uh it is only operational uh for 26 hours per year, uh, and that is because uh it only turns on when Syracuse needs that energy uh for those time periods. Now we're not gonna be able to eliminate the reliance on that plant, uh, but we can reduce the reliance of on that plant uh by 400 megawatt hours with the two projects that we're proposing. And the idea here, and the reason that these are incentivized by NICERTA is that ratepayers are covering the cost of maintaining these old plants, these peaker plants. They're generally dirtier, um, more expensive to maintain, and only made available for those times, those peak demands. This is a way to provide a microgrid grid more locally in Syracuse and hopefully um put that type of a plant out of business.