The town of Wendell spent four years loudly fighting a lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS). By contrast, the city of Greenfield has quietly approved three large solar installations, coupled with battery storage systems. The difference? Lack of local government transparency.

The three Greenfield solar proposals are located at 340 Leyden Road, 1245 Bernardston Road, and 1417 Bernardston Road. The 1245 Bernardston Road project, with 4,300 solar panels (1.9 megawatts), was approved on June 15, 2023. The chair of the Planning Board asked about safety controls for the battery storage. The developer, Blue Wave, dodged: “We do not know yet what type of battery system we will be using as the technology is constantly changing.”

Asked about fire suppression for the batteries, Blue Wave replied: “The technology for a fire suppression system for the batteries hasn’t yet been developed. There is an alarm system for the batteries that will notify [the developer] in the event of a fire. They then contact the local fire department.” As part of their approval, the Planning Board required the developer to “search for an economically feasible fire suppression system for the battery storage system,” and give the board “specs for the chosen battery storage system.” The Blue Wave project has not yet been constructed.

A thermal runaway at this site would have environmental consequences. The site is in a Zone 3 Water Supply Protection District. The project was approved, with eight concerned neighbors from Log Plain Road watching. One neighbor “expressed concerns about leakage from the battery storage system.”

At a Conservation Commission meeting on Sept. 26, 2023, a public hearing was held for the solar project submitted by a California developer for 340 Leyden Road, located within the buffer zone of the Green River Riverfront Area. It will be a 2.5-megawatt ground-mounted dual-use solar array on a 54-acre parcel coupled with a battery energy storage system. The minutes note that “a member of the public stated their concern for the wetlands and the stream and the project’s impacts on them.”

Based only on agenda and minutes, a citizen would find no details on the size, location, or fuel cell type of batteries. This project has not yet filed for a special permit before the Greenfield Zoning Board of Appeals.

The Pacifico Energy project at 1417 Bernardston Road is the only one that has been built. The solar panels are all on Kittredge Industries land in Bernardston, because “solar arrays in Greenfield were not financially viable … the initially planned sites were determined to be too small and irregular to be viably used.”

Our Conservation Commission and Planning Board have the right to retain a “peer reviewer,” at the expense of the developer, to look at highly technical issues like the type of battery storage system. Our boards rarely use this power. In two decades, these lithium-ion batteries will have to be decommissioned, creating waste management challenges. Only 42% of the materials used for them currently are recycled.

Few citizens have any inkling of the superficial nature of our review process, and the risks these projects entail. On July 3, 2024, I emailed a request to the Greenfield Conservation Commission: “Would you consider, for transparency purposes, posting the ‘full agenda documents’ for each meeting of the commission?” At their July 23, 2024 meeting, the Commission demurred: “This would take time and the postings would need to be compliant with Open Meeting Law standards.”

At an Aug. 1, 2024 meeting on zoning housing amendments, I told the Planning Board: “I don’t really know what you’re talking about tonight because it’s not published anywhere online. If you want to get people to care about what’s happening in this town we have to be more transparent.”

Planning Board Clerk Victor Moschella responded: “Al brought up an interesting thing about public access to documents … I would be glad to be the person who would send what you sent to me and post it where it needs to go.”

Battery storage safety is not just a Wendell issue. It’s metastasizing across the state. Other safer technologies are coming like carbon-dioxide batteries, iron-air, sodium-ion, zinc-based, etc. Industrial-scale solar “fields” that displace farmland or forests do not solve decarbonization. Smaller “virtual power plant” micro grid networks of home-to-home solar with batteries are a better ecological option, and could be municipally aggregated.

We citizens must be empowered with as much information as public board members making siting decisions. We should be allowed to pose questions to developers through the chair — and be persistent, until we get real answers from those in charge.

Al Norman’s Pushback column appears the first and third Wednesday of every month in The Recorder.