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1. Suffolk County, New York – Rarely do I get to say battery fire fears can be quelched but we have a very good example brewing in the Empire State.
- On September 11, New York state regulators did a Friday News Dump: The Department of Environmental Conservation confirmed a large PFAS pollution site in East Hampton was explicitly tied to fighting a battery storage site fire. The investigation began after PFAS chemicals, known as “forever chemicals,” were detected in drinking water wells.
- Investigators will still have to produce a final report, but in their bulletin confirming the pollution source, the agency said it is now working with state energy and fire officials to avoid a specific chemical fire suppression system identified as a potential culprit known as Novec 1230. “The investigation points to the fire suppression system, not battery storage, as a [PFAS] source,” the bulletin states, adding this system wasn’t used in other recent fires at BESS facilities.This defuses what was poised to be a new PR problem for the battery storage sector in a state where local moratoria and restrictive ordinances have become increasingly common.
2. Loudon County, Virginia – I can’t believe it: Data Center Alley is going to enact a moratorium.
- The county Board of Supervisors voted on Wednesday to draft a resolution putting a 12-month pause on approving any new data center applications. They’re marketing the move as not technically being a “moratorium” but a “pause” (although words have definitions).
- The supervisors also unanimously voted this week to oppose a large high-voltage transmission project that would cut across the county as it made a way from West Virginia to Maryland. As I wrote earlier this year, transmission fights in Virginia could easily be the straw that breaks the techno-optimist state’s back, so to speak.
- On Friday, Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger clearly took notice of how upset even previously stalwart communities are towards this industry, issuing a sweeping executive order ending fast-track permitting for data centers and banning state employees from entering into NDAs for projects. The order did not institute any restrictions but previews further action.
3. Pulaski County, Arkansas – Entergy has dropped the lawsuit it filed against an Arkansas newspaper over the publication of a power deal with Google.
- The utility dropped the case this week after the Republican chair of the state legislature’s joint economic committee peppered the company’s head of public affairs and vice president for regulatory affairs with questions about whether the lawsuit was appropriate.
- This means the case itself is gone for now. However the target of the lawsuit, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, says the form of dismissal leaves open the possibility for litigation to be refiled. The Democrat-Gazette has resumed reporting on the Entergy-Google deal.
4. Darlington County, South Carolina – We conclude this week’s Hotspots with a focus on a GOP-leaning county rejecting a renewables moratorium.
- Like many counties, regulators in the Palmetto State’s Darlington County are experiencing spillover from a conflict over an individual solar project, a Palladium Energy project called Stripe Solar. The issues are common ones, like prime farmland protection, land value impacts, and frustrations about visuals.
- County officials this week refused to institute a nine-month moratorium requested by those opposing the Stripe Solar project, stating they wanted to preserve landowner rights. This is a confirmation of what Heatmap Pro’s data tells us about the county: It’s relatively low risk, as more than half its acreage is not agricultural lands and very few acres are protected in any way. Politically, this county is also more purple than you might expect in the state, having voted for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
