Massachusetts is making a big push for batteries — not the kind you put in a flashlight, but powerful, tractor trailer-sized batteries that store energy for the electric grid.
State officials say more of these batteries will bring down utility bills, make the grid more reliable and enable the region to use more renewable energy. But this vision for a battery boom has met increasing opposition from residents who don’t want energy storage facilities in their city or town.
Oakham is one example. This quiet, rural town of about 1,900 residents in Worcester county has become a hot spot of the anti-battery movement. The streets are lined with signs objecting to a proposed lithium-ion battery project on the site of a former auto junkyard. And a popular Facebook page, Unrestricted Oakham, reads at times like a rallying cry against the technology, as people post images of out-of-state battery facilities engulfed in flames.
If built, the Oakham battery energy storage system would consist of 296 Tesla Megapack 2 XL units. They’d be placed near an existing high voltage transmission line, more than a quarter mile from the nearest home.
With a capacity of 180 megawatts, the facility could store enough electricity to power 140,000 homes for four hours, making it a prime example of the sort of large-scale battery project Massachusetts officials hope to see built throughout the state.
But to many residents, the plan is unacceptable. And they’ve vowed to fight it.
This resistance was on full display in October, when 200 people packed into a school gymnasium to share their concerns about the project with members of the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board.
Over the course of three hours, residents took turns at the microphone. They said they were concerned the project will be loud and change the feel of their town. Many were angry that the developer is trying to get around a local bylaw that explicitly prohibits projects like this. Others said they worried the facility could make their energy bills more expensive. But by far, people said their biggest anxiety was what could happen if a battery overheats and catches fire.
“Fires at similar facilities have released toxic gases and required large-scale emergency responses,” said Oakham resident Sarah Petersen.
“The siting of this project raises some serious environmental concerns, not just for our small rural town, but for the entire commonwealth,” said another resident, Lisa Killick.
She, like many speakers, emphasized that the proposed facility would sit just outside the Ware River Watershed, which feeds into the Quabbin Reservoir, the main source of drinking water for much of eastern Massachusetts.
What happened in Monterey
Many speakers at the meeting mentioned Moss Landing, a battery storage project in Monterey County, California that caught fire in January, prompting the evacuation of more than 1,500 people. The fire burned for days and destroyed many of the battery units on site. No one was immediately injured, but in the months after the blaze nearby residents have complained about persistent headaches and bloody noses.
Burning lithium-ion batteries can release toxic gases and particulate matter, but federal and independent air monitoring “showed no risk to public health throughout the incident,” according to county officials. University researchers did detect elevated levels of heavy metals in a nearby marsh, but followup testing found no contamination in samples within a 10-mile radius of the facility.
Almost a year later, it remains unclear what caused the Moss Landing fire. But what is clear is that the facility’s design played a role in fueling the destructive blaze, said Stephanie Shaw, a senior technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent research organization.
While the Moss Landing batteries were housed indoors and installed before the advent of safeguards that prevent flames from spreading from one battery unit to the next, today’s projects are almost always built outdoors, and each battery unit is designed to contain a fire.
Like with any technology, things can, and do, occasionally go wrong, she said. Battery systems can fail, or worse, catch fire or explode.
“But again, lessons learned over the years from research, and from a few real-world fires, have actually gone into creating design features and response tactics to minimize all of those risks,” Shaw said.
In fact, data collected by her organization shows that as global battery deployment skyrocketed between 2018 and 2024, the rate of failure has decreased by 98%.
“There seems to be this expectation that these systems are going to fail, when in reality that’s very rare,” Shaw said.
What’s more, the lithium-ion batteries built today for large energy storage projects usually use a different chemistry than what existed at Moss Landing, said Greg Less, director of the University of Michigan’s Battery Lab.
The Moss Landing batteries were made with nickel, manganese and cobalt, whereas most grid-scale batteries being put on the grid now use iron and phosphate.
The latter “are less likely to catch fire. And when they do catch fire, they don’t get as hot and they release less gas, so they’re less likely to explode,” he said.
What happened at Moss Landing was tragic, said Brian Benito, vice president of development at Rhynland Energy, the company proposing the project in Oakham.
“But saying that same thing is going to happen to us in our Oakham project is not, I think, a fair representation,” he added.
Benito was at the three-hour meeting in the gym. He said he understands people always have questions about construction proposals in their town, especially if the technology is relatively new. But at that meeting, he said, he heard more than concerns about safety or noise.
“What I also heard was a lot of misinformation, unfortunately,” he said. “And that information, once it takes hold, is very hard to dislodge.”
Mistrust and misinformation
Oakham is just one of several places where the anti-battery movement has taken root in Massachusetts. In the last few years, residents have mounted fierce opposition to proposals in Boston, Tewksbury, Agawam, Westfield, Wendell and Pittsfield.
Since 2024, developers have canceled at least four large battery projects, all of which faced strong local pushback.
Nationally, opposition to batteries is growing as well. According to Heatmap News, which tracks this trend, at least 96 battery projects with a cumulative capacity of 25,000 megawatts have faced public pushback since 2021. The most commonly cited reasons are public safety and environmental concerns.
“There have been, certainly, a number of high profile events in the past few years that are alarming, and I understand where the concerns come from,” said Erin Smith, clean grid director at the Environmental League of Massachusetts. “Fire is a risk of a battery storage system, but it’s also a risk of the natural gas pipelines that go into homes.”
The relative risk of a battery fire is “incredibly low,” she added. And in Massachusetts, lithium-ion battery systems have been operating safely since at least 2019.
More than 6,000 operating lithium-ion battery systems provide about 500 megawatts of energy storage capacity in the state today, according to the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. This includes facilities on Cape Cod and Nantucket, which help keep the lights on during power outages; several small battery projects connected to solar fields; and many back-up power battery systems in homes and businesses.
It also includes Cranberry Point, a new 150-megawatt battery facility in Carver that’s similar in size to those proposed in Oakham and throughout the state.
The state is working to get more large projects like the one in Carver online in the coming years, said Mike Judge, undersecretary of energy and environmental affairs for Massachusetts. And by 2030, it aims to procure at least 5,000 megawatts of energy storage. This target, part of the 2024 Massachusetts climate law, is intended to reduce the state’s reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels and compliment the adoption of more renewable energy like wind and solar.
“Batteries can do a lot of different things,” Judge said. “They’re multifunctional in a way that other types of resources aren’t.”
Battery facilities soak up excess renewable energy generated when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and store it for when it’s needed, he said. They provide backup power to the electrical grid in case of an outage. They can ease the region’s reliance on expensive — and often highly polluting — power plants that only get turned on during times of peak demand. And they can reduce electric utilities’ need to build additional infrastructure, which Judge said is the main driver of rising utility bills in the state.
“If you can reduce peak demand, then you don’t need to build as many poles, wires and substations,” Judge said. “And if you can avoid building more poles, wires and substations, you can save ratepayers a tremendous amount of money for decades to come.”
The power of local resistance
Matthew Broderick has lived in Oakham for 34 years and serves on a town committee tasked with reviewing battery proposals. He said he understands why the state is pursuing energy storage, but doesn’t think the benefits outweigh the risks, however small they may be.
And across the state, he sees a growing group of people who agree with him.
“There are so many communities that this is beginning to impact,” he said. “They are kind of coming to the same conclusion as us: These things are not appropriate for locating in densely populated areas, or even populated areas for that matter.”
But what Broderick sees as a network of like-minded people sharing information, Joe Curtatone, president of the advocacy group Alliance for Climate Transition, sees as a swelling threat to the state’s climate goals and efforts to make energy more affordable.
New technology is always a little scary, Curtatone said. But, he added, there’s a lot of bad information circulating online that exaggerates the safety risks and distorts the benefits.
“Misinformation about energy storage is spreading faster than facts,” he said. “This isn’t just a debate over technology, it’s a battle over truth.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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