The Town of Oyster Bay extended its moratorium on battery energy storage systems for 12 months Tuesday, the fourth time the board has stretched a temporary ban that first took effect in April 2024.
The board voted unanimously to push the deadline from April 30 to April 30, 2027. Previous extensions ran six months each. This is the first time Oyster Bay has issued a full year-long ban.
The fight has deep roots in Nassau County’s North Shore. Jupiter Power Company once proposed a 275-megawatt lithium battery storage facility in Glenwood Landing, a project that would have sat near both Glen Head and Glenwood Landing elementary schools. Jupiter Power has since abandoned that plan. But residents aren’t satisfied. They worry the company, or a competitor, could come back with a revised proposal and start the whole process over again.
Michael Montesano, special counsel to the town attorney’s office, told the board at a March 24 public hearing that the new extension is identical to the current ban except for its duration. He said New York State has taken small steps toward updating its fire code, one of the town’s central concerns since the moratorium debate began. Small steps aren’t enough. Town officials have also raised concerns about clean water access, evacuation zones around large storage sites, and broader health risks to nearby residents.
The Glenwood Landing situation isn’t the only fire the town is watching. Montesano has said a storage facility is also proposed on one acre at the former Grumman site in Bethpage, a parcel already carrying its own complicated environmental history from decades of aerospace manufacturing. Whether that proposal moves forward depends partly on how aggressively Nassau County’s towns hold their regulatory ground.
Glen Head residents Chris Panzeca and Doug Augenthaler have become two of the most consistent voices against storage projects in the area. Both spoke Tuesday before the board approved the resolution, and their positions haven’t softened.
Augenthaler focused on fire risk. “The state should be killing this, you should be killing this, everybody should be killing this,” he told the board, according to Long Island Press. He called on the town to keep standing up for its residents.
Panzeca pushed for action beyond the moratorium. “I think we need to be expeditious and look at what’s going on in other communities and think about zoning,” she said.
That’s a fair point. Extending the ban buys time, but it’s not a permanent fix. At some point Oyster Bay will need zoning language that actually sticks, the kind that can survive a legal challenge from an energy developer with deep pockets and patient lawyers. The moratorium is a holding pattern. The New York State Association of Towns offers resources on permanent zoning tools, and the town would do well to use them before April 2027 arrives.
Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Joseph Saladino said public safety is the town’s top priority. He’s said some version of that before, and the unanimous board votes back it up. All three of Nassau County’s towns now have their own moratoriums in place, and each town supervisor has supported measures to protect local zoning and resist large-scale energy projects near residential areas.
Nationally, the technology isn’t going away. The U.S. Energy Information Administration tracks more than 900 battery energy storage systems across the country, with the heaviest concentrations in California and Texas. New York’s suburbs aren’t California, and the density and school proximity issues that define a town like Oyster Bay don’t translate well to the wide-open industrial corridors where most of these projects get built without a fight.
That’s the core tension here. State and federal energy policy pushes storage projects as a clean-energy necessity. North Shore Nassau residents push back because they live close to the proposed sites, they have children in the schools nearby, and they don’t trust that the fire codes or evacuation protocols are anywhere near ready. Both positions carry real weight. What doesn’t carry weight is stalling indefinitely while pretending the decision doesn’t have to be made.
Twelve months. Oyster Bay now has until April 30, 2027 to get its zoning framework in order, or it will be back at the table voting on extension number five.