Change the Subject

If a community wants to truly lead, wants to set an example for the nation and show that embracing innovation is a noble, American thing to do, it has to accept the complications that come with the territory. A healthy community stays on top of the details and gets in front of the controversies.

Both Southampton and East Hampton towns are front-runners when it comes to green energy. With South Fork Wind, the region is actively demonstrating a workable future that includes offshore wind energy. It was a long debate, but the turbines are now making electricity and sending it ashore — the obstacles have all been cleared so far, and it makes it that much more likely that more communities will embrace the technology without fear.

In that spirit, both towns now have to demonstrate leadership in a new area: battery energy storage systems, which are necessary for any green energy to be successful. They are elemental and not optional. They are part of the infrastructure of a future that is no longer dependent on fossil fuels.

BESS facilities, as they’re known, are still new technology: The oldest are less than a decade old. They have risks, include a risk of fire, something that’s already happened at an existing East Hampton BESS facility — it must be noted, without much real-world impact, in part because it’s smaller than what’s proposed in Hampton Bays. Other, more high-profile incidents are more worrisome, but the technology will get safer, and communities can take precautions in the meantime.

What they can’t do is bury their heads in sand and say, “Nope — no BESS facilities here.” That’s like pretending electric substations don’t exist in our midst, delivering service to our homes and businesses, or natural gas compressor stations aren’t in our midst, too. There are risks in the modern world — we cannot simply say, as some Hampton Bays residents have said, “Build it somewhere else and we’ll stop protesting.”

Instead, Southampton Town in particular must use its current moratorium on new BESS sites not as a stalling tactic but to allow time to prepare for the inevitable. BESS sites are coming — it’s time to acknowledge that and plan for them.

Adrienne Esposito of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment wrote a letter this week, voicing a similar message: “It’s important to ensure that projects are developed safely and responsibly; it’s also important to make progress toward solutions, rather than kicking the can down the road repeatedly.”

Too much of the BESS conversation so far has focused on fear, and on the notion that neighborhoods can just decide not to allow BESS facilities anywhere near them. That’s just not realistic. It’s time for the discussion to turn to how, exactly, the towns must manage this new challenge, and what neighbors should expect to keep them safe. And time is running out to find those answers.