BY Erica Shwartz
Town of Oyster Bay residents raised alarms at a July 23 town board meeting when Calpine Corporation requested an exemption from the town’s Battery Energy Storage System Moratorium.
Suiryan Sukduang, Calpine’s vice president of origination, presented on behalf of Calpine Corporation at the July 23 town board meeting. He said that Calpine is looking to “improve upon”’ its power plant located in Bethpage with its battery storage project.
“We want to provide more reliability to the transmission grid,” he said. “We also want to be able to offer more products to our customers and battery storage provides them with a more reliable source of energy.”
The Town of Oyster Bay passed a six-month BESS moratorium in April, a decision that Calpine Corporation requested be tabled until May at the April 9 town board meeting. They requested the decision be tabled until the next town meeting as they had two site permit applications in review with the Planning Department and the Department of Environmental Resources—the only two such proposed sites in Oyster Bay.
Garrett Gray, a lawyer with the Weber Group, spoke with Sukduang on behalf of Calpine. He said that Sukduang’s presentation had sufficiently demonstrated the necessary elements the town required to consider granting exemption status from the moratorium.
“The moratorium statute as codified by the town sets forth five factors that the town board shall consider in determining whether to grant an application for exemption,” he said. “As we’ve shown, every single one of those factors tips strongly in our favor.”
Calpine cites “financial hardship” as their reason for asking for an exemption from the moratorium. Sukduang explained that paying for the industrial property while waiting for the moratorium to end would pose a significant financial burden to the company.
Many residents were opposed to Calpine’s request for an exemption, citing safety concerns and potential environmental risks that the moratorium was put in place to account for. Glen Head resident Christine Kanzuca said that long-term residential health studies should be conducted before these BESS facilities are built in Oyster Bay.
“Moratoriums are in place to prevent a rush to development and hasty decisions that put the public’s health and safety at risk,” she said. “It is disingenuous for any company to try and circumvent it.”
Glen Head resident Stephen Grapstein said he felt there was a sense of “defensiveness” in the presenters from Calpine when discussing the safety of their battery plants. He drew upon his experience as former chairman of Tesoro Corporation, a petroleum refinery company, to say that he had lingering safety concerns.
“During that time, we had a very good safety record, but nothing is imperforable—we had some of our own safety concerns,” he said. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when an issue will happen.”
Long Beach resident Christina Kramer, founder of Protect Our Coast Long Island, said that the financial hardships Calpine will face are not the public’s problem to be concerned about.
“We are team Long Island,” she said. “We want the health, safety, and well-being of the residents to be the priority—not their clients, not their profits.”
