Surry County’s full Planning Commission received its first look on Dec. 16 at a proposed zoning ordinance text amendment that would allow battery storage facilities.

The commission’s zoning committee, which consists of Planning Commission Chairman Eddie Brock and Commissioners Stephen Berryman, Dianne Cheek and Earl Newby, previously discussed the ordinance on Nov. 25.

The draft language comes at the request of Idaho-based Clenera, which is proposing to build a 20-acre facility capable of storing up to 320 megawatt hours of electricity off White Marsh Road. The language would add “battery energy storage system” as a defined “civic use” allowed in agricultural-rural or industrial-zoned parcels by conditional use permit.

In early 2024 Surry supervisors approved a new “emerging technologies” zoning district and rezoned roughly 600 acres for Middleburg-based Green Energy Partners’ proposed first-in-the-nation combination hydrogen fuel hub and data center. That zoning district already allows battery storage but doesn’t impose local regulations specific to the arrays of shipping container-sized batteries that have become controversial for their fire risk.

According to a Federal Emergency Management Agency report, lithium ion battery fires can release flammable, toxic gases capable of causing an explosion such as one that occurred in 2019 at a battery energy storage facility in Arizona that injured eight firefighters. The city of Escondido, California, issued an air quality report showing low concentrations of hydrogen cyanide following a fire in September this year at a lithium-ion battery bank that took 13 hours to extinguish.

Surry isn’t the only Virginia locality contending with the controversy. In 2023, Chesapeake’s City Council voted 5-2 to approve a siting agreement with Crossroads Energy Storage LLC, which had submitted plans that year for a 7-acre battery storage campus in the Deep Creek area, according to Virginian Pilot reporting. The Sussex Surry Dispatch reported in June that Sussex County, which borders Surry, voted 5-2 against a siting agreement for Blackwater Solar LLC, which, according to the company’s website, had proposed a 4,800-acre solar farm that would have included on-site batteries capable of storing 1,200 megawatt hours.

 

The benefits and risks

“Everyone has a lithium ion battery in their pocket right now in the form of a pouch in their phone,” said Derek Post, a fire protection engineer and firefighter whose company, Fire and Risk Alliance, is working with Clenera. “There’s different geometries. You can have a cylinder, which is what you would have in a lot of your micro mobility devices and your electric vehicles, and you can have a prismatic style, which kind of looks like a car battery for lack of a better term. And those cells are each individual batteries just like your AA batteries.”

Those individual battery cells get placed into what’s known as a module, which is then put into racks similar to the server towers at data centers.

Those racks, and a battery management system programmed to keep the units at an acceptable temperature, then get placed into the final outdoor unit.

“Ever put your phone on the dashboard of your car and it turned off because it got too hot? That’s a battery management system and this facility’s equipment will have one of those systems that is very, very  rigorous and robust compared to the ones on our phones,” Post said.

According to Scott Foster, an attorney representing Clenera, the battery arrays work by pulling energy off the grid at times of low demand, such as when a solar farm is able to generate excess power on a sunny day, and then stores and puts that energy back out into the grid at times of peak demand. In addition to boosting the reliability of Virginia’s electrical grid, Clenera estimates its Surry site would generate $4.9 million in tax revenue for the county over 20 years.

Clenera’s draft ordinance, Post said, is taken nearly verbatim from the National Fire Protection Association’s industry standard for stationary battery storage systems, known as the NFPA 855 standard.

“The cells, modules, racks, battery management system, all have to be tested to an underwriter laboratory standard and they have to be in compliance with those, so battery energy storage systems are not necessarily new but the standards for them didn’t come about until the late teens and early 2020s,” Post said.

“Our approach is not going to be much different than it is with the solar farms,” Surry Emergency Management Chief Ray Phelps said. “We try not to spray water directly on the unit that is having an issue. We mainly contain the fire.”

 

Surry’s proposed standards

According to the draft ordinance, battery storage facilities on agricultural-rural parcels would be required to be set back at least 200 feet from any adjacent parcel not zoned industrial, and be at least 500 feet from all residential and commercial structures. Battery arrays on industrial-zoned parcels would be required to be located at least 75 feet from all property lines. The ordinance would also mandate a 20-foot buffer on each side of the battery storage facility be cleared of combustible vegetation, a minimum 8-foot-tall fence surrounding the project and a 100-foot vegetative buffer to screen the project from ground-level view.

The Planning Commission voted to postpone action on a recommendation to Surry’s Board of Supervisors after no one spoke at a public hearing on the draft ordinance. Commissioner David Coggin suggested adding a gravel buffer outside the required fence to further mitigate the chance of a forest fire.

Cheek also raised concerns over language that would set a limit of 72 decibels at the property line, which Clenera’s representatives contend is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

“A vacuum cleaner running all the time, that’s loud,” Cheek said.

Foster said 72 decibels is a limit Clenera can guarantee it can stay below. If Surry sets a lower limit, a sound wall may be necessary, he said.

Post said he couldn’t specify exactly how many battery units would be at the Surry site. To store 200 megawatts, it would take roughly 100 units on about 30 acres if using Tesla technology, he said.

“It generally depends on what battery is selected,” Post said.