People don’t take electricity for granted in Raquette Lake, New York, in the remote high peaks of the Adirondacks. In winter, when ice and wind often down the power line into the hamlet, the 100 or so year-round residents stay warm by cranking up diesel generators. Prep for the busy summer tourist season begins in February, when they gather on the lake to saw out 250-pound blocks of ice. The meltwater will cool beers at the taproom all season long. Steve Viscelli, a part-time resident of 16 years, chalks it up to a mix of century-old tradition and precaution. “Let’s talk about green energy,” he says. “That’s green energy.”
Earlier this year, National Grid, the local utility, presented the village with a new solution: a microgrid anchored by 12 trailer-sized containers filled with lithium-ion batteries. Raquette Lake experiences 12 times more outages than less remote customers, the utility says. The 20-megawatt battery bank would put an end to that. It would also contribute to New York’s goal of installing 6 gigawatts of energy storage by 2030, a crucial part of keeping the grid stable as the state rapidly retires fossil fuels.
Locals were skeptical. Viscelli worried about the battery’s location, a few hundred feet from the lake and surrounded by state-protected forests. Aris Bird, one of the village’s only year-round emergency medical technicians, wondered what would happen if someone got hurt. She had read about lithium-ion battery fires in the news. Her husband Mark, born and raised in Raquette Lake, is chief of a tiny, all-volunteer fire department. The nearest hospital is 75 miles away.
Bird could see the need to contribute to the climate fight, but “we’re feeling that this is being thrown at us,” she says. The local benefit—about four hours of power during an outage—wasn’t enough to feel secure in a severe winter storm, she believed. Worried whispers gathered into a movement. A handful of residents gathered in the bar to make signs and rallied on TikTok. In late May, about 100 people, many in neon yellow T-shirts reading “No! No! No! Lithium Battery farm,” crowded into a town meeting that included utility officials, the project developers, and a fire safety expert from New York City. Shocked officials were repeatedly drowned out by chants and boos. “Why are you trying to ravage our community?” one resident demanded.
Scenes like that are growing more common around the US, where grid battery storage is poised to double this year to more than 18 gigawatts, according to the US Energy Information Agency. As the industry has grown, so have local concerns about where exactly the truck-sized, 40-ton battery containers are being placed. In California, proposals that once sailed through have been mired in opposition campaigns and lawsuits. In New York, public meetings meant to hear proposals have instead given rise to battery storage moratoriums or bans.
The immense need for grid batteries are clear: In addition to backstopping on-and-off wind and solar energy and preventing blackouts, they can directly replace dirty parts of the grid, such as natural-gas-fired “peaker plants” that fire up when demand exceeds supply. For neighbors, installing a battery can allow the removal of toxic fossil fuel infrastructure.
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