City Council - Regular Meeting

Technology Committee.

Thank you, Council President. Calling to order the Science and Technology Committee meeting at 5.30 p.m. on 7.13. Council Member Struber is present. Council Member DiLorenzo?

Present.

Council Member Spain-McClaren? Present. Council Member McKee? Council Member Favreau? Present. Council Member Campbell-Cohen?

Present.

Council President Steele? Present. Thank you. And thank you to our friends at NYSERDA for being here today. I'm just going to have you all go into your presentation so that we can get started learning about the battery energy storage systems. Do they have a mic?

They're going to use the podium. Yep. There's a little button on the bottom there. There we go. You're on. All right. Hello.

I'm Jen Minear. No, you're good. I am the director of clean energy siting at NYSERDA. It's perhaps a little bit of a misnomer. When you think of siting, you might think that we're out there choosing where clean energy projects go. But what the clean energy siting team really does is... work with local government officials and all across the state, cities, towns, villages, counties, and help them prepare for and deal with perhaps the ramifications of where projects are being cited in their communities. So it's a very all encompassing term. We're basically free consultants, if you will, for local governments that have clean energy projects sort of coming into their communities. And Eva over here is a consultant that we have on board to sort of be an extension of our team so we can have a little bit more, some more boots on the ground, if you will. There's never going to be enough of us, but we're trying here. So that's what the clean energy siting team is all about. I mentioned that we're basically free technical consultants. What this slide is showing you are just some of the services, if you will, that our team offers. Of course, it's all free. We're state employees. We have written guidebooks. You've probably gotten links to them at some point already. We do trainings. in meetings sort of like this, but sometimes it'll be a more formal training with a bigger group of folks, deep dives for like two hours into like our model zoning law or something like that. But whatever you need, we'll do it. You can call us, you can email us. We have recorded, you know, trainings and webinars on our website. What else am I forgetting? And of course, the Clean Energy Advisors, like I mentioned, Eva, there's more people available to help and write it down. If you don't have it written down already, our email address is cleanenergyhelp at nyserda.ny.gov. We actually do monitor that. So if you're ever not able to get in touch with Eva or I directly, or if we're taking too long, right, you can always go to cleanenergyhelp at nyserda.ny.gov and we'll find someone who's available to help you out, answer your question, whatever it is you may need. So we're going to be talking about energy storage today. I'm going to try to go real quick. We could spend multiple hours just on this one topic here. So I think we're just going to give you a little taste of what's out there, have some discussion, and I'm sure there will be some follow-up after the fact. So this slide is showing you the contents that are in our energy storage guidebook for local governments. It's on our webpage. So, of course, you're not going to probably have time to read every single thing that's in it. And we're certainly not going to be able to cover every single thing that's in it tonight. But I want you to know what is in there so that you know you can go back and reference that if need be. So we have some fact sheets available that you can print out there. One of those energy storage fact sheets should be in front of you right now. There's one for folks like yourselves. And then there's another one that has similar information but is geared more toward a general public audience. And you're welcome to print them out and use them as you see fit. If you'd like to, there's links to the New York State Fire Code in there as well. I know that's something that's of interest with energy storage as a topic, right? Our guidebook was recently updated to include an FAQ section that I think is wonderful. If there's a question you have that doesn't have an answer in there, let us know and we'll try to update it. But I think it addresses most of the common questions that we get surrounding energy storage. So really great resource there. Know that the FAQ is in there. We also have a model zoning law and a model permit for smaller systems. Just sort of starting places for you. Nothing is required. It's word documents, edit as you see fit, but just sort of a place to start. Fire safety working group deliverables, copies of all of the stuff that came out of the governor's interagency fire safety working group. that resulted from some fires we had in New York in 2023. All of the stuff that came out of that is also posted there for you to peruse if you'd like. We'll talk more about that stuff later too, but just know it's in the guidebook. And then also all of the guidance that outlines how NYSERDA's incentive program does their peer review process for all of the energy storage projects that we incentivize. The detailed guidelines for everything that goes into that review process is in there as well, because I think that's something folks might want to understand better, right? Who's looking at this stuff and what are they looking for before they're approved? So all that stuff is out there for you. I'm gonna try to go real quick. And if someone wants to give me a five minute warning, just to keep me honest while we're going here, I would welcome that. But we're gonna do a quick intro to energy storage. I don't like to assume that folks even know what we're talking about. So just in case a quick intro, a little bit of planning and zoning, that's another topic. We could spend like two hours deep diving into the model law, but just touch on that a little. And then fire safety considerations, Everyone's favorite topic, I think. So that's what we're going to do. Starts a little hard, not knowing what my slides are. So intro to energy storage. Why are we even talking about batteries, right? Questions we might ask ourselves are, do we have enough energy in general in the state, you know, here, wherever? Do we have enough energy where we need it? and when we need it. And those are just sort of overarching energy questions that like we think about at NYSERDA and energy storage can help address and answer some of those questions in a bunch of different ways. The chart that you're seeing up here is just showing some of the high level benefits for like different like sectors of the grid, if you will, going from residential on the right, and then all the way up to utilities and grid operators on the left. So I guess I'll start over on the left hand side. I'll sort of lump the utilities and grid operators together as far as the benefits go. So first of all, the grid is very old, right? And it's expensive to maintain and certainly expensive to upgrade. You know, if you look at your utility bill, a big chunk of what we're paying for every month is the infrastructure that just delivers it. And if it's old and outdated and we need more of it, that's certainly not going to help our bills go down anymore in the future, right? So one benefit of energy storage is that you can kind of take these large batteries, which is what we're talking about, and plug them strategically into the grid in certain places to defer some of those more costly grid upgrades so they can do that the job of the grid, make it more reliable without necessarily having to go a more expensive, more traditional route. You can plug them in strategically and solve some of those problems. So that's a benefit across the two, the two green piggy banks on the bottom there, like avoiding costly system upgrades, sort of lumping them together. On the top left for utilities, we often hear folks saying, like, the only reason we're talking about batteries is because we're doing all of this solar and we're doing all of this wind. And the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. And so that's the only reason we need batteries is to make up for when they're not performing, right? there's some truth to that, right? Batteries can provide backup for, you know, they're taking the solar energy off the grid when there's more than we need, same is true for wind, and then putting that energy back onto the grid when we do need it. So that is a benefit, but it's certainly not the only reason we're doing it. You'll see it's just one up in the top left-hand corner there, increasing renewable generation, but it is an important benefit. Also for grid operators, balancing supply and demand and just generally keeping the grid in harmony. It likes to be very balanced at all times. The amount of electricity going in needs to equal the amount of electricity going out. And that's true for like any little point in the grid. And batteries are very good at putting little bits in or taking little bits out. instantaneously almost to keep the grid balanced and in harmony and maybe we don't have so many blackouts, right? Power quality and reliability there. Going over to commercial consumers, of course they can serve as backup power just like a traditional generator might. You can use batteries instead. So that is one thing. Another perk for some of the larger commercial buildings or like industrial users, those folks will sometimes pay what's called a peak demand charge. So if they're one of those users that pulls large amounts of energy off the grid at a single point in time, they have to sort of pay for the privilege of pulling those large amounts of energy off the grid during those peak hours when we also need that energy, like to run our air conditioners on a day like today between the hours of four and six. So if they're gonna be pulling that energy when everyone else is demanding it at the same time, they have to pay a peak demand charge for the privilege to do that, because it's expensive to supply peak power. If they can turn their batteries on in the building and pull from them instead of from the grid, it leaves more for the rest of us and they can also maybe not pay so much in those peak demand charges, right? So there can be a financial benefit for certain large energy users in that way. And then finally, Going over to residential consumers, again, it could be backup power, just like a typical generator might be. But there's also programs now where the utilities are enrolling residential batteries into, you might hear it referred to as a virtual power plant. picture, you know, a hundred or maybe a couple hundred or thousands even of individual home batteries that can be called on by the utility at the same time. Again, during those times of high peak demand, like right now when it's very hot out and we're trying to blast the air conditioning to stay cool. And those users can get paid for providing that service as well. So there can be some financial savings there for residents too. Lots of stuff. So this slide here is just showing you sort of an illustration of the different parts of the grid where batteries can go. And you'll notice they kind of go everywhere. You might see it paired or co-located with a large wind or a large solar project doing those services that we talked about before. You might see it, you know, at a factory and they're trying to reduce their peak demand charges or have reliability concerns, something like that. You might see it paired with a community solar project on the smaller ones that sort of feeds your more local distribution grid. Small businesses, backup power, maybe they have some peak demand charges too that they're looking to lower. You might just have it on your house. And then finally, just... General grid services sort of acting like any other power plant might will have some very large energy storage systems that just plug directly into the grid, right? They don't necessarily need to be co-located with an end user. Another we often hear from folks is that up here in upstate, I call everything, everything above like a straight line here and up is what I'm referring to as upstate. We hear folks say, we're doing all of this stuff just to feed this large, energy demand down in the city and downstate, right? And of course, electrons will flow where they will flow. It's like water and pipes, right? And New York City does have a large energy demand, but the point of this chart is showing how much more we might anticipate in the future. Even upstate, we have a lot of anticipated load growth in the future. This is showing the interconnection queue data for the New York Independent System Operator. They're basically responsible for managing the flow of electrons on the state grid as a whole. So not your national grid, not your NYSEG, but the whole grid, they're sort of directing traffic there. And so before any new large load, like a new chip fab or something like that can plug into the grid. They have to get into an interconnection queue to make sure that the grid is going to be able to handle what they're going to be demanding from it. And so that's what this interconnection queue is. The New York ISO will sort of study those and make sure that they're going to be able to connect in. And you'll notice that a lot of the megawatts that are summed up in the circles here in different areas are, they're up here. So not all of these things are necessarily going to get built just because they're in the queue. It's not a guarantee, but it's just sort of an indication of, where growth is anticipated to happen. And a lot of it is up here, if you will. And not just up here, but this chart is showing anticipated energy growth into the future. Also from the New York ISO, it's their power trends report. So you can go like, you know, look up all the big backup data for this chart. But the one in the middle is the baseline forecast for our energy growth into the future. Could it be lower? Sure. Could it also be much higher? Yes. But the point is. We're generally trending up, so we're going to be using more electricity as time goes on, not less, and significantly more even, not just a little bit. And if you can't see the numbers, it starts in 2025 on the left and goes to 2040 on the right for the predictions. So these are just some visual examples of the types of systems that I was talking about before. We have a residential system over on the left, an onsite retail moving toward the right, offsite retail moving even farther to the right. So maybe like a smaller energy storage system that's not paired with a building, but it's just plugged into perhaps the local distribution grid. And then finally, uh one of the the larger ones possibly uh plugged into you know transmission lines here or something like that i think and the the bars at the bottom there are just showing how nyserta puts them into buckets for our incentive programs all three of the you know smaller ones on the left are in our retail and residential incentive program and then on the right hand side we have our bulk program which is a competitive solicitation versus the smaller ones are more plug and play, install X number of kilowatt hours, get Y incentive, whatever, the bigger stuff, they go through a more rigorous competitive selection process before getting funding. Just to show you that this is not hypothetical. It feels new to a lot of us because the conversation has picked up a lot, I think, the last few years, and a lot more systems are being proposed and being installed. They're becoming more popular. And some high-profile incidents also got people talking as well. But they're already out there. You know, they're in our communities. This chart is just showing installations to date in New York State. over 8,000 of them. Most of those are gonna be on the smaller side. So like the left-hand side of the screen we were just on, of course, we're seeing a lot more of the larger ones start to come in, but there's tons of them out there already now. The darker the blue, the county, the more megawatts are installed there. So just, you know, they're here. And here are some images of some of the larger systems that are already installed in New York State. On the top left, we got a system in Westchester County at a train station. That one is actually paired with solar on site. So they got solar and battery there at the train station. On the top right, that's actually not battery energy storage, but it is energy storage, and that's in Rensselaer County. And it's flywheel technology. I forget what year that was installed. It was a long time ago. I think I was still an intern back then when this project happened. But it's another type of energy storage technology that we have in New York State. So it's not necessarily something new. We're just going to do a lot more of it now because of the increased demand, right? And then on the bottom there, is a 20 megawatt project in Saratoga County. And these are all here and they're operating. Just another sort of look at, I've been saying you're going to see a lot more of the bigger stuff, more of this is happening, right? This chart is just showing battery installations around the world compared to the US. I think the general take home here is that it's going up over time. Right. On the on the far right hand side, it's a forecast in that like darker shaded box. But still, generally speaking, it's going up. I want to say almost exponentially. Right. The dark blue at the bottom is the United States. The light blue is China. And then purple is the rest of the world. I guess it also goes to show that it's not just here. Right. This is happening everywhere. In fact, a lot of it is happening everywhere. Looking at China. Why batteries in particular? And I think lithium ion batteries is typically what we're seeing at the top here. You're seeing some of the reasons for that, like they're cheaper, they have a high energy density. You can put a lot of energy in a very small space, which is one of the reasons you like find them in your cell phone and in your watches, right? They're really good at being small and powerful. They can last a long time. They don't take up a lot of space. They're commercially available. These are all sort of the reasons that we're talking about batteries and the picture on the bottom there. It's also kind of fun to think about the world around them and like different jobs and things like that that come with this like new industry, I guess you could say. So the New Energy New York Coalition in Binghamton, led by Binghamton University, got a National Science Foundation grant. They're one of like 10 in the country that are, you know, like studying and researching and test labs and stuff like that. So we have cool stuff going on here in New York, like around this battery industry. industry, I guess. Rochester Institute of Technology is doing a lot of that pretty cool stuff too. I actually got to build a battery from scratch in their lab there during a training thing once. It was pretty cool. So lots of neat things anyway. This is a little bit of a repeat. I kind of already went through some of the stuff that's on the top here, like why are we talking batteries specifically now and lithium ion in particular. The images at the bottom just show you all the other common devices that you might find this exact same technology in. So the same technology that's in our watches is the same stuff that's going in and plugging into the grid. It's just the individual cells might be bigger and there's more of them and they have perhaps more sophisticated monitoring and control equipment. But the basic chemistry, it's the same stuff, right? So speaking of, when we're talking about a battery energy storage system, we're talking about a bunch of cells, like I was just describing, right? Like your typical, what you might see in your remote control or whatever, string a bunch of them together, that's a module, string a bunch of modules together, it's a rack of batteries, add a battery management system to that, and then sort of all of the other balance of systems stuff, like HVAC equipment, fire extinguishing equipment, all of that kind of thing, All of that together is what we're referring to as a battery energy storage system. I don't want to skim over the battery management system. That's probably the most important part of it. It's the eyes, it's the ears, it's the brain. It knows if one of those little cells is starting to overheat and can isolate it and shut it down if it needs to. Call maintenance, let's come swap it out, see what's going on. If things are getting a little hot, it'll turn the air conditioning up or down in the wintertime, right? Maybe the heat needs to come on a little. It will send an alarm to a central station if something's going wrong. These things are being monitored 24-7 by people in remote operation centers. So the battery management system is very important. It's not just a stack of batteries in a field doing what they will. There's a lot that goes into it. All right, so a little planning and zoning. We don't have time to, and it might be kind of boring for everyone, right, to spend two hours walking through our model law. And you might've already done that on your own anyway. But I think the most important thing to remember is that safety obviously is most people's concern. And I like to remind everyone to try to separate some of the fire safety stuff from the zoning stuff and just like remember which regulations go where right because we have the new york state fire code and it applies across the state without you having to do anything i'll talk about some of the cool stuff that we got into the more recently updated fire code that went into effect in january of this year but it's already in effect here in the city of troy there's no need to redo any of the things that are in there in your own permitting process or zoning. In fact, if you want to adopt a fire code that's more stringent than the state fire code, there's a process to go through with Department of State. So I just like to remind everyone of that because I've seen a lot of crazy things getting inserted into local laws. So just remembering that that's out there already for you. All right. There we go. Permitting. Okay. There's a lot of stuff on here, but the take-home message is in the bottom right that all sizes of standalone energy storage systems are going to be permitted at the local level. If there is a system that is paired with a solar or wind project that's being permitted at the state level, that storage system will get permitted along with that renewable project that's being permitted at the state level. But any standalone system, regardless of how big it is, right now is being permitted locally. So you have a lot of power. All right. Fire safety. Before we get into, I promise, some fun stuff that we got into the fire code. But before we get into that, I also like to sort of level set a little bit. We've seen, I'm guessing, some scary headlines out there over the last few years, particularly in 2023 in New York. When I see them, I think they look scary, too. But when you take a step back and look at what the real risk is. it's perhaps a little bit sensational, right? Like scary headlines sell. It doesn't necessarily mean that that's the thing that is likely to happen or that is happening at like an alarming rate necessarily. It makes a good headline, not to discount safety at all. It's of the utmost importance and what we focus on more than anything when we're talking about energy storage, but perspective is also important. So what this chart is showing is from EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, all this data, is available online. So if you want to dig into it more, you can find this chart, you know, read their reports. It's freely available. We just stole it from them because it's a nice graph. It shows Failure incidents from 2018 on the left-hand side all the way up through 2025 on the right, and those dark blue bars are representing the failure incidents associated with those larger systems that we're talking about. At first glance, you might not think that that tells a good story because some of the bars are still about as tall as they were back in 2018. But when you look at the light blue line that's going up, again, almost exponentially, that's the installed gigawatt hours. So the amount of batteries that have been installed across the world in that same period of time wildly going up, right? And then that orange line is showing the relationship between those two data points. And as you can see on the left side, it takes a deep plunge from 2018 to 2020, which coincidentally is around the time we first started getting serious about the fire code for energy storage. In 2020, New York State adopted an emergency code after there was an incident in another state in 2019. We were like, we don't want that here. Like, let's update our fire code even before we're supposed to update it and do all this good stuff for energy storage. I'm not saying that affected the rate of incidents around the world, but that is around the time folks started getting more serious about it, if you will. It dropped down a ton. And over time, now it's approaching zero. I think if you do the math, it's something like the rate of incidents has dropped like 99% since then, which is Pretty crazy. We still hear about them. They do happen. I will never say nothing will happen because again, we've seen it here in New York, but five minute warning. Cool. But the rate is going down. So, and just to don't like, you don't have to read all of this. There are a lot of safety standards and certifications that these larger systems and residential systems to have to pass an order, you know, to be legal to install here. This is a list of all the stuff that applies to them, all the UL standards and certifications. The point of this is that there are a lot, not that you have to memorize all of the different UL numbers. Right. So I mentioned that we had some fires in New York in 2023. Three different large-scale energy storage locations in New York experienced fires within two months of each other in the summer of 2023. It was not great. Nobody got hurt, so... That's a good thing. It didn't look good, right? We don't like to see that happen. It's a little scary. So the governor immediately, you know, after the third one said, we're going to put together an interagency fire safety working group, look at what happened, why it happened. Is there anything we can do to prevent it from happening again in the future? And if it does happen, are we going to be prepared to respond adequately? to another fire should it occur. All the agencies on the left-hand side of the screen were involved, NYSERDA, DEC, Department of Environmental Conservation, Department of State for the code stuff, Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, Office of Fire Prevention and Control, some other folks, and then we brought in subject matter experts, national labs, folks like that, and just try to get all the brains in the room to figure this out, right? What can we do to prevent this or be better prepared in the future? All of those different data entities working together, if you can believe it, actually got some stuff done. So I promise those deliverables are on our energy storage guidebook. This is what I was talking about when I brought that up earlier. All of the air, soil, and water quality testing that was done at those sites after the fire, those reports are available on our webpage. The summary is that we didn't find any harmful levels of contaminants. there nobody got hurt nobody was hospitalized so in the end that was a good thing right that came out in that report we also spent excruciating hours and months and many months with all those folks pouring through the fire code trying to figure out if there were any loopholes or, you know, something missing from the fire code or places where it could be made stronger, came up with 11 recommendations, all of which were pretty much included in the update to the fire code in their entirety, which is wonderful. We also went out and reinspected all of the existing larger systems in New York State. 57 of the projects that were in service then had someone go out physically on site, make sure that there were no missed fire safety hazards, tree branches, hanging to the HVAC or whatever it may be, go out and re-inspect all of those. And the results of that helped inform our peer review program for projects going forward. And then we put on a webinar for local government officials that's also posted on our webpage explaining the different fire code updates. And some of the stuff we're talking about today, some of the cool stuff that we got into the fire code. I'm going to have to keep peeking. So I don't forget something. Okay. So a lot of the stuff that was in there previously was discretionary for authorities having jurisdiction. And now it's mandatory. The reason we did that is not to make your lives harder is actually to make your lives easier because a lot of folks, I think, didn't know. about the discretionary authority they had in the FHIR code, like the ability to require peer review for your projects paid for by the developer, and a couple other things as well. So now they're mandatory, so they have to be done, right? And it's for your protection. So peer reviews is one of those things. Like I said, it was optional, now it's mandatory. And you're not paying for it, but you get to pick who does it. uh they're also pre-incident plans you might hear them referred to as emergency response plans that was not a requirement in the code and when i'm talking about these i'm talking about the larger system 600 kilowatt hours and above think like a refrigerator or bigger not we don't have to do an emergency response plan for the one you're going to put in your house right so these are site-specific pre-incident plans and the local they have to be developed in consultation with the local fire department so it's not a surprise to them and they make sure that they are actually able to do the things that the plan says they need to be doing and the developer or project owner has to offer them annual on-site training which helps for i mean you guys probably don't a lot of A lot of towns in New York have volunteer fire departments, right? Or there's turnover. So annual site-specific training has to at least be offered to them by the developer, which is also huge, I think. First responders are who we're thinking about most when we're thinking about safety for these systems. And then finally, hazard support personnel. These are folks... This is another one that was... optional but is now mandatory now, the project owner has to be able to provide someone on the phone within 15 minutes to guide the first responders should an incident occur. Ideally, they will be answering the phone within zero minutes, but 15 is the minimum amount of time they have. to pick up the phone and provide guidance. Again, these folks will have already been trained, but it's still someone there like, hey, what are you seeing on your computer screen for the battery management system? I don't see anything here. They'll be like, oh, you know, that one's heating up or we don't see anything. Maybe it's a false alarm. Someone to walk them through the response. And then they also have to be able to show up on site within four hours to be doing sort of the same thing. Guidance, right? They wouldn't... be actually doing the first responders jobs, but they're there as a subject matter expert who has access to all of the computer, you know, computers and information about the system and how it's operating in real time. And then finally with batteries, you can have reignition. If there's still stranded energy in the battery that caught fire, it has the potential to reignite again, even after the flames had gone down once, because there's still energy in there and you don't want your, your fire department sitting around waiting to see if that happens before they can go back in service to deal with other stuff so this hazard support personnel they can be the ones to sit there and babysit the batteries until they're decommissioned call back the fire department if they need to but get them back in service right so lots of good stuff there this slide is just showing Basically explaining how NYSERDA went about adopting its new peer review process for all the stuff that we incentivize. We have three different expert organizations on board that will provide very thorough review of any of the systems that we're going to be incentivizing. And this is in addition to the peer review that's required in the code. Now, could you, if you wanted to, just defer to NYSERDA's peer review process and take the report that comes out of that and have it meet the requirement that's in the code for peer review? Yes. Could you also do both if you wanted to? Maybe the timing doesn't line up for your needs or something. So this is above and beyond the requirement that's in the code that we're doing. And that's it. Other than to make you aware of some of these important resources that are also linked on our website, I will say, but I like to point them out because not everyone has time to scour every single, you know, page. The code books, like I said, are on there. We have a storage training for code officials. We just released it like a few weeks ago, maybe. And so for any code officials who want to get trained up, it's free. They will get Department of State credits for it. So we're all credited to do this training for them. And we'll walk through every excruciating detail of the fire code over a two hour period. And they get their credit. So they like that. And it's free. There's actually one tomorrow. If you know anyone who's interested, you're also welcome to attend it if you want to. If you are super interested, you can sign up on our website. They're all virtual for now. So there's that. And then the Office of Fire Prevention and Control, State Fire Office, also has sort of a little fact sheet for emergency responders. Do this, don't do that, do this, don't do that, like super high-level stuff for responding to this. And they also have a free training that is offered for first responders across the state in how to deal with battery emergencies. It's not just battery energy storage systems. It's also EV fires or what if your laptop catches on fire in your house, how do you respond to these things? these different things and that's like a two-hour training uh as well so i think that is all i had for now well i probably took a little too long sorry no you were excellent i'm happy to take questions if you have time for them hey jen uh just a quick question about the uh

training for code officials. How frequently did you say that occurred?

The code official training, we've currently scheduled it for like every two weeks. There's an afternoon and an evening session. Tomorrow it's from one to three. The evening sessions are typically six to eight. We have them scheduled out for maybe another month or two. We'll probably add more, but that's just what we have scheduled for now. And if anyone knows about, you know, instances where neither of those times are going to work for folks, let us know. We can add more. Yeah. And the, the dishes trainings that the state fire office trainings, they, last I looked, they didn't have any currently scheduled, but fire departments can request to host one if they want. So they'll do them as, as needed.

Okay.

Fantastic. Yeah.

Can we get a copy of this presentation? Sure. Yeah. And the only other question that I had is early on, you mentioned strategically placing these units where the infrastructure Needs help. Is that a service that you provide folks who are looking to build these systems? I'm just thinking in Troy, we don't have as much room, like the examples you showed look like there was a lot of green space around that. So I didn't know if that was a service that you provided to help.

We do not actually help anyone cite projects. Typically, these are cited by private developers in the same way that wind and solar projects would. They scope out available real estate that make strategic sense for what they need to do. And they know where there's like room on the grid or where there's not on the grid. There's like maps that you can look at that show you which lines are congested and which ones aren't. So these guys know better than I wouldn't be able to do it. That's not my area of expertise, but they kind of know where they go and they find the spots. on their own what we could help you do is try to anticipate perhaps where they might go so if you have any substations they like to be located as close to substations as possible typically we've seen that doesn't mean they can only be located there, but substations are a hot spot, so think about that. And Eva's actually really great at, did you already make them a map or no? Okay, so I think Eva made you a nice map probably that shows you where your substations are and how you might go about thinking where they may go. Thank you.

The fires that occurred in 2023. Can you describe a major cause of that was a problem with controls and management or.

I can't necessarily because we do not have a root cause analysis for them, which is proprietary to the developers. I think perhaps that may have changed in our going forward incentive program. I can't be sure. I don't actually work on that. But it's a bit of an issue that we don't legally have access to the root cause analysis. What I have heard out there is that there were a lot of heavy rains, During those days, there may have been water infiltration that caused something to like short or something along those lines. But I don't have an official root cause analysis to share. Even though I would like one.

Even with that, I wanted to verify that I was reading the graph correctly. There were only 24 incidents in 2025 globally.

Right. Yep. Okay. Now could they have missed a couple possibly, but yeah. Okay. And in 2023, we had 33 of those were ours. Got more than our fair share of that year for sure.

When you talk about something like water infiltration, is that something that is then addressed in the code? Like there needs to be a better system in place or did that come out of that work group?

That is part of the code. The containers need to be like they're tested.

Sealed.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

potentially something was not working properly or installed properly. I really, I don't want to speculate too much.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

And none of those fires were in people's homes, right? They were all the systems like that. And I heard you say a refrigerator, anything larger than a refrigerator is considered. I mean, just for a point of reference, I didn't, I don't think I had heard that before. So that's considered a large thing. Maybe a couple of refrigerators, but 600 kilowatt hours. Okay.

I don't know if we, I'm trying to see if maybe one of the images I had were remotely close to that size. I can't remember. No, I don't want to see. Maybe the second one there. I don't know exactly how big that one is, but that's a rough ballpark perhaps.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's hard to say exactly. They can design them so many different ways, but it's not going to be this, but you also don't have to wait until it's as big as this room for those more strict code requirements to kick in.

For the offsite one to five megawatt hour facilities that were in that previous slide, do you have like a ballpark sense of what setbacks typically look like in local codes?

You know, we do track them, but I don't have that number off the top of my head. I really don't. And I think Even if I knew what it typically looked like now, I know that a lot of communities, because we've been tracking it, have been perhaps intentionally making larger setbacks than you might expect them to because they don't want the projects, right? So even if I said what was typically out there, I don't know if it's something I would recommend or not.

The proposal that was originally put in front of us is a blanket 500-foot setback for facilities including those. Would you say that that's on the far end?

I think that would probably be prohibitive to some systems that were necessary, depending on where they're looking to locate, right?

Right. If you ask, like, John Elway to throw a football. How many times would you have to throw the football to cover that distance? Is that 13?

Now you're making me do math.

So you wouldn't say 500 feet is normal? Maybe 100 or 50?

I mean, it depends on the zone. And it depends on what's around there, right? Like if you have a substation and it's already electrical infrastructure that has safety concerns of its own, Maybe, maybe you don't need the setback to be so far, right? You want it to be able to locate closer to that and not be more expensive and have to build it farther out, but that same system next to a home. you'd probably want a slightly larger setback, right? It just, yeah, it really depends.

Okay. Thank you.

And as you, I don't know how, I don't think we've worked too, too closely yet, but as you guys, you know, go through the process, we can talk in more detail and with more nuance about these things, like looking at specific zones or whatever, provide feedback to the extent that you would like feedback on drafts or anything like that.

I'll send that over. I have one.

Yeah. I'm always hesitant with a microphone and a camera to like make definitive statement.

The other thing that we've heard a decent amount is because of a lot of our industrial zoning also lies within floodplains. these facilities are not well suited to the few areas that sort of would be most natural, I think, or at least least conspicuous. Is there any work around there, or are floodplains just universally unacceptable for these kinds of facilities?

It's really up to the developer, I think, to weigh the risks and design perhaps an elevated system if they need to. If it's that worth it to build that one there, it could be worth the extra infrastructure cost for them to do something like that. Again, it would be really a case-by-case basis. Generally speaking, probably not the best spot for them, right? But there could be exceptions. If that's where the need is, perhaps they can make it work like anything else.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Anybody else?

I'm sure I will have more. I'll put everybody on an email.

Just a taste.

Really, really appreciate it. Very helpful.

Enjoy it, usually. Thank you so much.

Entertaining a motion to adjourn.

Motion. Second.