The sale of nearly 12 acres of vacant land in Ellicott for battery storage likely won’t see any development for a few years as required studies are completed.

And that’s a good thing, because a rash of fires at three such facilities in New York last year alone raises some questions about how local fire departments will handle such storage facilities. Within a two-month period from late May to late July 2023, a battery at a substation on Long Island caught fire, followed by a fire in one of two battery units in Orange County and then another fire in a battery on a solar farm near Lyme in Jefferson County that burned for four days.

During the final fire residents raised concerns about air quality after the lengthy firefighting effort. Residents within a 1-square-mile radius of the scene were told to shelter in place for several hours during the fire and a public Community Days event was canceled as a precaution.

State officials convened a working group in the wake of last year’s fires. Recommendations were released earlier this year with public comment accepted until Sept. 24. Recommendations include requiring qualified personnel or representatives with knowledge of the facility to be available for dispatch within 15 minutes and able to arrive on scene within four hours to provide support to local emergency responders in the event of a fire; extending safety sign requirements beyond the battery unit itself to include perimeter fences or security barriers and include a map of the site, enclosures, and associated equipment; removing the Fire Code exemption for battery storage projects owned or operated by electrical utilities to ensure that all projects comply with the Fire Code; requiring every battery storage facility to be equipped with an emergency response plan and require site-specific training to be offered for local fire departments; and require all battery storage installations have monitoring of fire detection systems by a central station service alarm system.

When everything goes perfectly, battery storage sites are low impact projects. That changes if something goes wrong – as residents of Lyme and two other townships discovered last year. It’s clear that the sale of the IDA-owned property in Ellicott to Granite Source Power isn’t the end of the county’s work with the company – it should be only the beginning.