From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

It’s another day, another green energy disaster in the making—this time featuring the very people who demand Net Zero, now backpedaling furiously to avoid living next to the technology that’s supposed to save the planet. Welcome to New York, where residents are suddenly realizing that lithium battery storage facilities are just a tad more dangerous than the windmills and solar panels, they imagined would lead them to climate utopia.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ambitious plan to turn New York into a renewable energy powerhouse is colliding with reality as towns and cities push back against massive Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) facilities. These behemoth battery plants are necessary to store the sporadic energy generated by wind and solar—because, surprise, the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow.

But here’s the catch: These lithium-ion storage facilities have a nasty little habit of catching fire, spewing toxic fumes, and being nearly impossible to extinguish. As Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella put it,

“They are being placed literally right next door to people’s homes, and even next to a gas station”

“The city is playing with fire by allowing this type of reckless policy to continue”​.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/03/us-news/ny-residents-rebel-against-battery-storage-plants-for-wind-solar-power-as-going-green-goes-south-playing-with-fire/

In Duanesburg—where, hilariously, New York’s top energy bureaucrat Doreen Harris lives—the town voted to ban these facilities altogether, citing

“a threat to public health, safety, and welfare”​

It seems that even the climate policy elite don’t want to live next to their own grand ideas.

Now, let’s talk about irony. Remember the Indian Point nuclear plant? It was shut down in 2020 because environmentalists claimed it was a safety risk. Fast forward to 2025, and the same activists are now screaming about the dangers of the giant lithium battery facility set to replace it.

“Indian Point was the safest thing since apple pie,”

said Roland Ciafone, a former maintenance supervisor at the plant​. Who could’ve guessed that a nuclear plant designed with multiple safety redundancies might be safer than a lithium-ion fire trap?

The pushback in New York isn’t just some isolated NIMBYism. A similar lithium battery storage plant in Monterey County, California, recently erupted in flames, leading to the evacuation of 1,500 residents. Scientists later discovered high concentrations of heavy metals in the soil around the site. Glenn Church, a Monterey County official, described the fire as “the Three Mile Island event for this industry”​. In other words, the green energy revolution is starting to resemble a bad rerun of history.

According to Church,

“This technology is ahead of government’s ability to regulate it and industry’s ability to control it”​.

Translation: We are guinea pigs in an experiment where nobody actually knows what they’re doing.

Yet, despite mounting evidence of the dangers, New York continues pushing its 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which aims to cut emissions by 40% by 2030 and achieve 100% “zero-carbon” electricity by 2040​. But without stable nuclear power and with communities rejecting battery storage, it’s unclear how exactly this miracle is supposed to happen. Magic, perhaps?

For years, environmentalists have insisted that wind and solar—propped up by giant lithium-ion batteries—are the only way forward. Now, as these battery facilities start going up in smoke (literally), even the most die-hard climate warriors are having second thoughts. When climate policy meets cold, hard reality, the results are often spectacularly disastrous.

New York residents who once chanted for Green New Deal policies are quickly learning that “going green” comes with a very real, very flammable downside. The only question left is: How many more battery fires will it take before policymakers admit that their grand plan is a spectacular failure?