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Borough President Vito Fossella, State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton and Assemblyman Charles Fall united in a bipartisan, state-level effort to fight the siting of Battery Vitality Storage Methods (BESS) services in residential neighborhoods and to announce the introduction of laws to cease their development on Staten Island.
“It looks like these cries have been falling on deaf ears to this point, so we’re going to take one other arrow out of the quiver and method it from a state stage,” stated Borough President Fossella at a press convention on the website. “There are different elements of the nation the place there’s a minimal distance between a house or a enterprise. We simply preserve banging that drum as loudly as attainable to say that we don’t need these items close to individuals’s properties or companies. We consider they’re unsafe.”
The elected officers additionally pointed to large-scale fires close to BESS services throughout the nation, together with one in Warwick, N.Y., which ignited final month and took 24 hours to extinguish. It was the third fireplace on the website since 2023.
To fight the development of web sites on Staten Island, Senator Scarcella-Spanton is introducing laws which might require Group Boards are notified when a battery storage system is deliberate for a close-by neighborhood. The laws would additionally require annual security inspections for the BESS websites.
“We see how shortly they’ll go up in flames and we need to guarantee that they aren’t by your properties, by your companies and collectively, we’re all working along with our group companions to ensure we go this laws,” stated Senator Scarcella-Spanton.
They stood outdoors the development website of a BESS facility at 2166 Forest Ave. within the coronary heart of Mariners Harbor, a dense residential neighborhood that sits between a strip mall and a deli, and throughout the road from Lowe’s and Kohl’s, in addition to two fuel stations.
Borough President Fossella stated they’ve been calling on town to say, “we don’t need them right here.”
“It looks like these cries have been falling on deaf ears to this point, so we’re going to take one other arrow out of the quiver and method it from a state stage,” stated Borough President Fossella at a press convention on the website. “There are different elements of the nation the place there’s a minimal distance between a house or a enterprise. We simply preserve banging that drum as loudly as attainable to say that we don’t need these items close to individuals’s properties or companies. We consider they’re unsafe.”
The elected officers additionally pointed to large-scale fires close to BESS services throughout the nation, together with one in Warwick, N.Y., which ignited final month and took 24 hours to extinguish. It was the third fireplace on the website since 2023.
To fight the development of web sites on Staten Island, Senator Scarcella-Spanton is introducing laws which might require Group Boards are notified when a battery storage system is deliberate for a close-by neighborhood. The laws would additionally require annual security inspections for the BESS websites.
“We see how shortly they’ll go up in flames and we need to guarantee that they aren’t by your properties, by your companies and collectively, we’re all working along with our group companions to ensure we go this laws,” stated Senator Scarcella-Spanton.