East Hampton, Montauk battery plants to temporarily close under Suffolk pact

The owners of two contested battery energy storage plants on the East End agreed to temporarily suspend operations starting Friday night following behind-the-scenes negotiations with Suffolk County.

The plants, on Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton and another in Montauk, were scheduled to be shut down by 7 p.m. Friday, said Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine in an interview.

The agreement with the county doesn’t include specifics on a remediation plan, which will be conducted by the state, county officials said. The plants won’t restart operations until the remediation work is complete, they said.

Romaine said he expected the fire suppression systems in the plants to be removed over the next few weeks. The system at the Cove Hollow Road plant is suspected to be the cause of groundwater contamination directly around the facility and at now-shuttered drinking water wells up to 2,500 feet away.

"We considered litigation, but we’d rather have a negotiated settlement that accomplished what I called for in July," Romaine said, referring to his call for the plant to cease operations this summer. "My biggest concern was to get these shut down" to prevent further potential contamination, he said.

The East Hampton plant experienced a thermal runaway fire in 2023 that required up to 2.2 million gallons of water to extinguish and the use of a gas-based suppression system the state says led to a forever chemical contaminating Suffolk County Water Authority drinking-water wells. The authority is suing the battery plant owners in federal court.

The 5-megawatt battery plants are jointly owned by NextEra and National Grid, which also owns the site on which the East Hampton battery facility is located. LIPA has $110 million in contracts to buy energy from the plants, which have operated since 2018.

Chris Curtland, a spokesperson for NextEra, in a statement to Newsday late Friday, said: “We are temporarily ceasing operations at our East Hampton and Montauk battery facilities. We remain committed to working with local and state officials.”

LIPA, also in a statement late Friday, said it was "closely monitoring the situation and will continue coordinating with the appropriate parties." A LIPA spokesperson, Michelle Livingston, said, "Regardless of the operating status of these facilities, LIPA will be prepared to provide reliable electric service to customers on the South Fork."

Romaine and East Hampton Mayor Jerry Larsen had been calling for the shutdown of the East Hampton plant since the summer. They were joined by the Town of East Hampton, which sent a letter demanding an Oct. 2 shutdown of the plant earlier this week.

The Town of East Hampton had also been negotiating with NextEra through Friday afternoon and also reached a similar agreement in principle to suspend plant operations on Friday night, according to a source familiar with it, but the pact won’t be enacted until a board resolution is voted on next Tuesday.

Romaine on Friday said the state should conduct or demand a full investigation of what caused the 2023 fire — its origins have never been revealed or even discussed. He also demanded that the state release a remediation plan for the East Hampton site. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has said it will be released in early fall, following a probe of the toxic plume. 

Suffolk County Attorney Christopher Clayton said the agreement reached Friday won't limit Suffolk's right to sue in the future nor impact any statute of limitations on filing suit. "We think a dollar spent on remediation is better than a dollar spent on litigation," said Clayton.

Clayton said the county had been talking with inside and outside counsel for the plant and that negotiations on a settlement intensified this week. 

Gerald Turza Jr., an administrator for the East Hampton Village Fire Department who battled the 2023 battery blaze, called the county's Friday agreement "a very good thing. There are still a lot of unanswered questions and uncertainty" about the facility, so "taking a pause like this is a mature, responsible thing to do."

The agreement comes as the county is reviewing new results from recent tests of wells around the East Hampton plant that Suffolk County Deputy Executive Jennifer Juengst said showed "alarmingly high levels" of the forever chemical PFPrA. Past tests have shown levels of the chemical at more than 10,000 parts per billion, well above a state screening level of 3 parts per billion. 

On Thursday, East Hampton’s town board voted unanimously to authorize legal action against the owners until the fire suppression system was removed and a safer one is installed.

In a Thursday letter to East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, Gary Morris, vice president of the two companies that operate the plants, wrote that they "intend to continue to safely operate the facilities consistent with their existing permits, all of which the town approved."

Morris’ letter noted that the owners have "agreed to disable" the fire suppression system in both battery plants, but said they needed to do so safely and hire an engineer to file a report to "independently confirm" how to do it. The companies said the process, including a review by the town fire marshal, would take additional time and approvals, but said the system would be removed five days after the approvals are secured.

Morris noted that New York State's finding that the fire suppression system was responsible for the PFPrA contamination in local groundwater and drinking water was "preliminary," and the owners' agreement to remove the system "should not be construed as an admission of liability, fault or wrongdoing," nor an "endorsement" of the state’s findings or even that the suppression system contributed to groundwater contamination.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.