Henderson Municipal Power & Light will reapply to the city of Henderson’s Board of Zoning Adjustments to obtain a conditional use permit to build a battery energy storage system on South Green Street.
And in a new addition to HMP&L’s attempts to get the BESS built at 2230 S. Green St., the utility has made an offer to buy the three closest residences to where the BESS will be located within five years after it’s operational.
The re-application and offer to buy was introduced at the Henderson City Commission’s Tuesday meeting when HMP&L General Manager Brad Bickett and counsel Randall Redding of King, Deep & Branaman submitted a letter that Mayor Brad Staton read into the record.
In the letter, Bickett wrote that the utility will pay for appraisals and offer to buy three residences closest to the battery energy storage facility. He wrote the utility would offer to purchase the properties at their appraised value plus 15 percent upon the request of the homeowner at any time during the five-year period immediately after the facility becomes operational.
Bickett also wrote that HMP&L will accept the financial responsibility for any mutual aid requested as the result of a thermal runaway event at the BESS. The dangers posed by BESS, specifically large fires called thermal runaway events, were a main point of contention when HMP&L attempted to get a conditional use permit from the Henderson Board of Zoning Adjustments in November.
HMP&L has already obtained the needed zoning—heavy industrial—for the property on which the BESS will be placed. But for the BESS to be built there, HMP&L would need to get approved for a conditional use from BOZA.
HMP&L representatives, as well as those from the company that proposed to be in charge of the construction and later the operations of the BESS, NextEra Energy, pleaded their case to BOZA in late November. But after a nearly three-hour meeting, BOZA denied HMP&L’s request.
Much of the discussion—and argument—that evening centered around the safety of the BESS. Eight community members spoke against the facility, each worried that thermal runaway events and their effects that have occurred at other BESS facilities in this country and in other places in the world could occur here.
Bickett and a representative of NextEra repeatedly told the audience that the battery energy storage systems with new technology—and of which is planned at the South Green Street site—is safe. But they couldn’t prove it—at least not to the liking of the crowd or a majority of BOZA members.
After that meeting, Bickett said the lack of studies documenting the new BESS technology’s safety was a determining factor in not getting the conditional use permit. He said at the time the project hadn’t progressed far enough for NextEra to take on the studies, which include site and plume studies.
Because the studies are expensive to take on, companies most often don’t initiate them until the project has progressed to a point in which its completion is more assured, Bickett said.
One BOZA member, Heather Knight, said after the November meeting that the lack of documentation or studies at the presented by HMP&L and NextEra kept her from voting for approval.
“I felt like I didn’t have enough information,” Knight said then.
Bickett said Tuesday that HMP&L and NextEra will need to come to an agreement about how to fund those studies before HMP&L presents again to BOZA.
Bickett has said that getting the BESS at the South Green Street location is crucial to some HMP&L plans and could save HMP&L ratepayers $1 million.
Additionally, HMP&L will need to prove to Henderson Fire Department officials and a fire department consultant that the BESS system is safe. The letter also stated that the utility “understands that the city’s support for the project is conditioned upon HMP&L’s ability to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the fire department’s consultant the safety measures that will be implemented to lower the risk of a runaway fire event, and the low risk to the health of nearby residents in the unlikely event that a thermal runaway incident should occur.”
At the time of the November meeting, the city had hired consultant, Summit Fire Consulting of Wakefield, Rhode Island, to help them prepare for coming BESS. The consulting group provided an 18-point checklist intended for HFD to use to determine a BESS is safe. That same checklist was attached to the letter provided to the city commission Tuesday.
The city commission Tuesday approved a motion for Staton to sign the letter, which the mayor had characterized as giving HMP&L a blessing to continue the process of re-applying for the conditional use permit, though not necessarily an endorsement of the BESS itself.
Bickett said after the meeting he didn’t know when HMP&L would appear in front of BOZA again, but it is likely to occur before the end of the year.
