KINGSTON, NY: Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha and Senator Michelle Hinchey, who represent the Town of Ulster, the Town of Hurley, and the City of Kingston, provide the following comment and answers to some of the commonly asked questions regarding the proposed 250MW Terra-Gen energy storage project.
“It’s increasingly common for the fossil fuel industry to use isolated, unrelated incidents to evoke people’s worst fears about energy storage projects,” said Shrestha. “Our office has received a lot of questions in the past several months about the proposed 250MW project in the Town of Ulster, specifically whether it poses the kind of safety risks people should be worried about—and we’ve done our due diligence to provide the short answer, which is no. Our office is never a cheerleader for for-profit corporations, but the reality is that until we invest in public goods, some of the critical services we need will need to be provided by for-profit companies—and our job at this time is to make sure that the state has strong guardrails to protect people’s best interests. In this case, what’s important is that New York has fairly advanced fire codes and standards these types of projects must follow, which means we’re not talking about the kind of scenarios that would result in warehouse fires such as the ones we’ve seen in California that were caused by outdated fire safety standards. It’s normal, of course, for people to have questions, and they’re right to want answers, since the state is still in its early stages of building up energy storage capacity, so people aren’t very familiar with them yet.
