Dave Bencic, left, listens to a response to his question from Alabama Town Supervisor during Tuesday’s public hearing. Photo by Brian Quinn
Story by Brian Quinn
The town of Alabama has a moratorium in place on battery energy storage systems while it reviews its regulations on the matter.
Town Supervisor Rob Crossen said the local law is in effect for six months. It ends Dec. 31.
Wendel Companies, the engineering firm working with the town, will have more time to propose changes the town would like to make.
“Which is basically taking the battery storage law out of our zoning law and putting it into town law. That has some benefits to the town,” he said.
The law approved at Tuesday’s meeting states the moratorium will allow time for town officials to review, clarify, amend and update the town’s regulations for commercial battery energy storage systems development in the town. Also, the moratorium allows the town to adopt regulations it feels are necessary to promote and preserve the health, safety and welfare of the town and its citizens. The full text of the law may be found at townofalabama.gov, the town’s website.
During the public hearing, Dave Bencic asked, in part, whether the moratorium would be any good, saying solar companies can do whatever they want, regardless of town law.
“It’s not as bad a situation as we are in with the solar law,” Crossen said. “A large solar project comes in, with a battery storage system attached to it, it goes through ORES (state Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission) and is part of the ORES project. If it comes in stand-alone, I understand it has to go through our local town law.”
Nina Ballou of Wendel Companies said Wendel recommends moving the battery storage law out of town law because of what it saw happening with solar projects.
“The way they were kind of circumventing local zoning laws was by arguing they were public utilities. If you argue you’re a public utility, you’re automatically granted a variance. To try to protect the town’s laws and best interests, we started encouraging towns to adopt solar laws outside of that so they couldn’t apply for zoning variances. So far, it’s worked well,” Ballou said. “Similarly, because we see the battery storage process following in the footsteps of the solar process, we think there is widely going to be – and we’ve seen it already – battery energy storage developers arguing that they’re public utilities, to avoid zoning laws.”
The recommendation is that Alabama adopt this law outside of its zoning laws so that someone can’t necessarily apply for a zoning variance, she said.
Also Tuesday, Crossen talked about EDP Renewables North America LLC’s proposed Alabama Solar Park, a roughly $117 million solar project in the towns of Alabama, Oakfield and Batavia. Crossen said his understanding is that EDP is going to make an application July 27 to the state.
“The three towns, along with the county, have hired one attorney (Ben Wisniewski) …” he said. “At this point, I react to whatever questions the attorney might have, so there’s really nothing new on that for us. It’s going to go to the state ORES system and we’ll see.
The town supervisor said that in January, EDP’s project manager said EDP was willing to go through a limited site plan approval.
“I’m not sure how that looked or how we could even accept a limited site plan approval,” Crossen said with a smile. “We have no way to say, ‘We’ll look at it a little.’ I did provide that information to the attorney. He was interested to know.”
Ballou said Wendel Companies helps a lot of solar projects similar to what it’s doing for Alabama.
“We have seen … out of nowhere, the solar companies are reaching out to the local municipalities to … have some sort of limited site plan review. I think it’s coming from the state urging the companies to become more community-oriented,” she said. “We’ll see.”
Also Tuesday, the board voted to accept the resignation of Town Historian Dawn Fisher, effective June 30, only to reappoint her, effective July 6. Fisher will be retiring as a teacher at Oakfield-Alabama.
Crossen explained that the resignation was necessary due to the state retirement system.
“You cannot be a part of the retirement system, be an employee of the government … and retire, so she has to resign from her historian position while she retires and then we reappoint her,” he said.