Fears of massive battery fires spark local opposition to energy storage projects

More and more, big arrays of lithium-ion batteries are being hooked up to electrical grids around the U.S. to store power that can be discharged in times of high demand.

But as more energy storage is added, residents in some places are pushing back due to fears that the systems will go up in flames, as a massive facility in California did earlier this year.

Proponents maintain that state-of-the-art battery energy storage systems are safe, but more localities are enacting moratoriums.

“We’re not guinea pigs for anybody ... we are not going to experiment, we’re not going to take risk,” said Michael McGinty, the mayor of Island Park, New York, which passed a moratorium in July after a storage system was proposed near the village line.

At least a few dozen localities around the United States have moved to temporarily block development of big battery systems in recent years.

Long Island, where the power grid could get a boost in the next few years as offshore wind farms come online, has been a hotbed of activism, even drawing attention recently from the Trump administration. Opponents there got a boost in August when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin visited New York to complain that the state was rushing approvals of sites in order to meet “delusional” green power goals — a claim state officials deny.

Battery energy storage systems that suck up cheap power during periods of low demand, then discharge it at a profit during periods of high demand, are considered critical with the rise of intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar.

Known by the acronym BESS, the systems can make grids more reliable and have been credited with reducing blackouts. A large battery system might consist of rows of shipping containers in a fenced lot, with the containers holding hundreds of thousands of cells.

China and the United States lead the world in rapidly adding battery storage energy systems. However, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Australia, Netherlands, Chile, Canada and the U.K. have commissioned or started construction on large projects since 2024, too, according to research from BloombergNEF.

In the U.S., California and Texas have been leaders in battery storage. But other states are moving quickly, often with privately developed systems. While the Trump administration has been unsupportive or even hostile to renewable energy, key tax credits for energy storage projects were maintained in the recently approved federal budget for qualified projects that begin construction in the next eight years.

Developers added 4,908 megawatts of battery storage capacity in the second quarter of 2025, with Arizona, California and Texas accounting for about three-quarters of that new capacity, according to a report from American Clean Power Association, an industry group. That’s enough to power nearly 1.7 million households.

New York has an ambitious goal to add 6,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030, half of it large-scale systems.

Opposition to the storage systems usually focuses on the possibility of thermal runaway, a chain reaction of uncontrolled heating that can lead to fire or an explosion. Opponents point to past fires and ask: What if that happens in my neighborhood?

A battery storage system in Moss Landing, California caught fire in January, sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere and forcing the evacuation of about 1,500 people..

Experts in the field say battery systems have become safer over the years. Ofodike Ezekoye, a combustion expert and professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, notes that failures are relatively infrequent, but also that no engineered system is 100% foolproof.

“This is a relatively immature technology that is maturing quickly, so I think that there are a lot of really thoughtful researchers and other stakeholders who are trying to improve the overall safety of these systems,” Ezekoye said.

Battery storage proponents say a facility like Moss Landing, where batteries were stored indoors, would not be allowed in New York, which has adopted fire codes that require modular enclosure design with required minimum spacing to keep fires from spreading.

People who live near proposed sites are not always assured.

In Washington state, the city of Maple Valley approved a six-month moratorium in July as a way “to protect us until we know more,” said city manager Laura Philpot.

Voters in Halstead, Kansas, which has a moratorium, will be asked this Election Day whether they want to prohibit larger battery storage systems inside the city limits, according to Mayor Dennis Travis. He hopes the city can one day host a safely designed storage system, and said local opponents wrongly fixate on the California fire.

The number of localities passing moratoriums began rising in 2023 and 2024, mirroring trends in battery storage deployment, with a notable cluster in New York, according to a presentation last year by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Winnie Sokolowski is among area residents against a proposed 250-megawatt lithium-ion storage system in the Town of Ulster, New York, contending it is too close to schools and homes.

“They’re banking on nothing happening, but I don’t think you can place it where they’re proposing and assume nothing’s going to happen,” Sokolowski said. “It’s just too risky if it does.”

The developer, Terra-Gen, said the design will keep a fire from spreading and that the system “poses no credible, scientific-based threat to neighbors, the public or the environment.”

New York State Energy Research and Development Authority President Doreen Harris said she's confident the state has the right safety rules in place, and that scaling up the use of battery storage systems will “strengthen and modernize our grid.”

She noted there also were local concerns in the early stages of siting solar farms, which have since proven their benefits.

Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.

A large lithium battery energy storage system operated by Key Capture Energy that can power 15,000 homes for two hours during outages or high demand is shown in Blasdell, N.Y., Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

A large lithium battery energy storage system, center lower left, operated by Key Capture Energy is shown in Blasdell, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Chris Linsmayer, Key Capture Energy Public Affairs Manager, talks about the company's large lithium battery energy storage system, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025 in Blasdell, N.Y., which can power 15,000 homes for two hours during outages or high demand. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

A large lithium battery energy storage system operated by Key Capture Energy that can power 15,000 homes for two hours during outages or high demand is shown in Blasdell, N.Y., Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

A large lithium battery energy storage system operated by Key Capture Energy that can power 15,000 homes for two hours during outages or high demand sits surrounded by a fence in Blasdell, N.Y., Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The forecasts are eye-popping: utilities saying they'll need two or three times more electricity within a few years to power massive new data centers that are feeding a fast-growing AI economy.

But the challenges — some say the impossibility — of building new power plants to meet that demand so quickly has set off alarm bells for lawmakers, policymakers and regulators who wonder if those utility forecasts can be trusted.

One burning question is whether the forecasts are based on data center projects that may never get built — eliciting concern that regular ratepayers could be stuck with the bill to build unnecessary power plants and grid infrastructure at a cost of billions of dollars.

The scrutiny comes as analysts warn of the risk of an artificial intelligence investment bubble that's ballooned tech stock prices and could burst.

Meanwhile, consumer advocates are finding that ratepayers in some areas — such as the mid-Atlantic electricity grid, which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already underwriting the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.

“There’s speculation in there,” said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid territory. “Nobody really knows. Nobody has been looking carefully enough at the forecast to know what’s speculative, what’s double-counting, what’s real, what’s not.”

There is no standard practice across grids or for utilities to vet such massive projects, and figuring out a solution has become a hot topic, utilities and grid operators say.

Uncertainty around forecasts is typically traced to a couple of things.

One concerns developers seeking a grid connection, but whose plans aren't set in stone or lack the heft — clients, financing or otherwise — to bring the project to completion, industry and regulatory officials say.

Another is data center developers submitting grid connection requests in various separate utility territories, PJM Interconnection, which operates the mid-Atlantic grid, and Texas lawmakers have found.

Often, developers, for competitive reasons, won't tell utilities if or where they've submitted other requests for electricity, PJM said. That means a single project could inflate the energy forecasts of multiple utilities.

The effort to improve forecasts got a high-profile boost in September, when a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member asked the nation’s grid operators for information on how they determine that a project is not only viable, but will use the electricity it says it needs.

“Better data, better decision-making, better and faster decisions mean we can get all these projects, all this infrastructure built,” the commissioner, David Rosner, said in an interview.

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit electric utilities, said it welcomed efforts to improve demand forecasting.

The Data Center Coalition, which represents tech giants like Google and Meta and data center developers, has urged regulators to request more information from utilities on their forecasts and to develop a set of best practices to determine the commercial viability of a data center project.

The coalition's vice president of energy, Aaron Tinjum, said improving the accuracy and transparency of forecasts is a “fundamental first step of really meeting this moment” of energy growth.

“Wherever we go, the question is, ‘Is the (energy) growth real? How can we be so sure?’” Tinjum said. “And we really view commercial readiness verification as one of those important kind of low-hanging opportunities for us to be adopting at this moment.”

Igal Feibush, the CEO of Pennsylvania Data Center Partners, a data center developer, said utilities are in a “fire drill” as they try to vet a deluge of data center projects all seeking electricity.

The vast majority, he said, will fall off because many project backers are new to the concept and don't know what it takes to get a data center built.

States also are trying to do more to find out what’s in utility forecasts and weed out speculative or duplicative projects.

In Texas, which is attracting large data center projects, lawmakers still haunted by a blackout during a deadly 2021 winter storm were shocked when told in 2024 by the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that its peak demand could nearly double by 2030.

They found that state utility regulators lacked the tools to determine whether that was realistic.

Texas state Sen. Phil King told a hearing earlier this year that the grid operator, utility regulators and utilities weren’t sure if the power requests “are real or just speculative or somewhere in between.”

Lawmakers passed legislation sponsored by King, now law, that requires data center developers to disclose whether they have requests for electricity elsewhere in Texas and to set standards for developers to show that they have a substantial financial commitment to a site.

PPL Electric Utilities, which delivers power to 1.5 million customers across central and eastern Pennsylvania, projects that data centers will more than triple its peak electricity demand by 2030.

Vincent Sorgi, president and CEO of PPL Corp., told analysts on an earnings call this month that the data center projects “are real, they are coming fast and furious” and that the “near-term risk of overbuilding generation simply does not exist.”

The data center projects counted in the forecast are backed by contracts with financial commitments often reaching tens of millions of dollars, PPL said.

Still, PPL's projections helped spur a state lawmaker, Rep. Danilo Burgos, to introduce a bill to bolster the authority of state utility regulators to inspect how utilities assemble their energy demand forecasts.

Ratepayers in Burgos' Philadelphia district just absorbed an increase in their electricity bills — attributed by the utility, PECO, to the rising cost of wholesale electricity in the mid-Atlantic grid driven primarily by data center demand.

That's why ratepayers need more protection to ensure they are benefiting from the higher cost, Burgos said.

“Once they make their buck, whatever company,” Burgos said, “you don’t see no empathy towards the ratepayers.”

Follow Marc Levy at http://twitter.com/timelywriter.

FILE- An entrance to the Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex in Abilene, Texas on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O'Brien, File)