The first battery energy storage facility in Rochester could be coming to Brighton.
Ithaca-based Grid Connected Infrastructure, or GCI Energy, is proposing a 100 megawatt facility off Brighton Henrietta Town Line Road. That's roughly the energy required by 100,000 houses.
A public hearing on the project resumes Tuesday before the town board.
“This is a large one,” Brighton town Supervisor Bill Moehle said of the proposed facility. “And the location is particularly well suited ... from an infrastructure perspective, because there are two significant transmission lines that go right through that area right at the end of Mortimer Avenue.”
The city of Syracuse has pushed its consideration of a 10-megawatt facility into next year, as neighbors and city officials have raised questions about potential fires. A battery facility in Warwick, Orange County, caught fire last week. Warwick instituted a moratorium on any new installations after the same facility caught fire in 2023. Such projects are raising concerns in dozens communities statewide leading some to table or halt development, also citing environmental concerns.
The 18-acre site in west Brighton is near Lynch Woods Nature Park and the Lehigh Valley Trail. The battery cells would be sealed inside 66 tractor-trailer-sized, fan-cooled containers and surrounded by a security fence topped with barbed wire.
In its proposal, GCI officials wrote that the facility would look like a small extension of the nearby substation. It would connect to the power grid, and batteries would charge overnight when people use less electricity, then GCI would sell the stored power back to the grid during the day.
GCI would need about five acres. The company — which also lists offices in Rochester and North Carolina — is offering to let the town use the remaining, mostly wooded acreage, and to make in-lieu-of-tax payments, and a one-time $250,000 cash payment.
“Nothing is final yet,” Moehle said, “but we've told them it needs to be more than that, $250,000. And it will be. And we've told them that we want the fee title to the rest of the land. And that's the beauty of incentive zoning. It allows you to really customize a project to meet specific needs in various ways.”
If the project is approved, the town would use that money for park and trail projects in the West Brighton area.
These battery storage facilities are becoming more common across the country, often tied to solar or wind farms but also some are stand alone, like what is being proposed in Brighton. New York state has set a goal of 6 gigawatts of installed energy storage by 2030, aiming to boost grid reliability and renewable integration.
Concerns have been raised about noise from cooling fans. Elsewhere, the issue has been about risk of fires. A series of battery facility fires elsewhere in the state – some of which burned for days – has prompted a number of state fire code changes that take effect in 2026.
Moehle said GCI also would provide training for firefighters and ambulance workers. The research thus far, though, indicates it is best to let a battery fire burn, and does not point to any clear risk to either health or ground water, officials said.
“These fires are extremely rare, but they do happen,” said Martin Plass, director of energy storage testing at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Most often, though, it is not the batteries — which GCI says it can monitor and control remotely — but other external factors, Plass said, like a water leak or a fan overheating and triggering the sprinkler system that leads to short circuiting and arcing.
“The current technology is really lithium ion,” Plass said, with nearly all of the battery cells coming from China. “The U.S. is trying to build up some manufacturing infrastructure for that. But essentially that's where these cells are coming from. And they build so many, there's a lot of experience by now with these cells to make them fairly safe.”
If such a facility were to be built at the end of his street, Plass said he would ask two things:
“I would want to know, how loud is it? I would want to know, has that supplier done a large-scale fire test on these containers? And I would want to see that report on that, essentially, to make sure that if a container burns, it doesn't spread.
"Otherwise I would not be concerned, really.”
