Melville Chamber of Commerce

Islip Moves to Ban Battery Storage Over 600 Kilowatt Hours

Tonight Islip hears a code change that would prohibit any battery system above 600 kilowatt hours in town, including one beside a factory wall.

By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·

Aerial view of rows of battery storage containers and transformers on a gravel utility site

The Islip Town Board holds a public hearing at its 5:30 p.m. meeting tonight, Tuesday, September 15, on a rewrite of section 68-456 of the town zoning code. If the board adopts it, one category of equipment becomes illegal to install anywhere in Islip: a battery energy storage system with more than 600 kilowatt hours of capacity.

The issue reached the board through a single project, a utility scale battery plant proposed for Rabro Drive in Hauppauge. The draft the board sent to hearing at its August 27 special session reaches much further than that site. It deletes every district where the largest systems are allowed today, and it deletes the exemption that let a business put a modest Tier 3 system next to its own building without a special permit.

How the code sorts batteries

Islip classifies storage by total energy capacity. Tier 1 is 80 kilowatt hours or less and is allowed in every zoning district. Tier 2 runs from 81 to 600 kilowatt hours, or covers any room that mixes more than one battery technology, and is allowed in the Business 1, 2 and 3 districts and in the Industrial 1, Industrial 2, Industrial Corridor and Industrial Transition districts, subject to site plan review that the town engineer can waive. A Tier 2 system within 200 feet of a home or a residential zone also needs a Planning Board special permit.

Tier 3 is everything above 600 kilowatt hours. Under the current text it is permitted in Industrial 1, Industrial 2 and Industrial Transition with site plan review and a Planning Board special permit. A Tier 3 system that serves a permitted principal use on the same lot and occupies less than 2,000 square feet skips the special permit, unless it sits within 200 feet of a residential use or zone.

The amendment strikes all of that and puts one sentence in its place: Tier 3 systems are prohibited. It also removes the fencing, screening and 25 foot street landscaping standards written for Tier 3 sites, and it narrows the decommissioning bond and abandonment rules to Tier 2, since no new Tier 3 site would be left for them to govern.

What does not change

Systems legally installed before the law takes effect do not have to meet it, and storage at or below the threshold quantities in the state Uniform Code falls outside the section entirely. Tier 2 stays available in the same business and industrial districts as before.

One clause deserves a second look from anyone who already owns a large system. The existing text makes any modification that increases a system's power rating or discharge duration subject to the article. Read next to a flat prohibition on Tier 3, that clause is the one to take to a lawyer before paying for an expansion.

A second law adds an annual fire permit

The same agenda carries a hearing on Local Law 6 of 2026, which adds an article on energy storage systems to Chapter 19 of the town code. It requires an operating permit from the Chief Fire Marshal for any storage system above the energy capacity thresholds in the Fire Code of New York State. The marshal has the system inspected before a permit issues. The permit runs for no more than a year, has to be renewed before it expires, and can be suspended or revoked for a code violation that puts occupants in immediate danger. The Chief Fire Marshal sets the fee.

Two details matter to a business with storage on site. The permit is issued to the owner or operator for one specific system and cannot be transferred to a new owner or operator. And it sits on top of every other license and approval the system already needs.

The site that started it

The Suffolk County Planning Commission reviewed the Rabro Drive application in January 2024. Its staff report describes a request by KCE NY 29 LLC to demolish a 52,416 square foot office building at 220 Rabro Drive, a 6.6 acre Industrial 1 parcel bounded by Wheeler Road, and replace it with a 150 megawatt lithium ion facility of 276 battery modules in containerized enclosures, tied by underground line to the LIPA substation directly north of the site. Islip set its first moratorium on battery storage approvals in March 2024 and has extended it since.

Huntington is working through the same question. In April the town referred a proposed six month moratorium on battery storage permits and approvals to the county planning commission, after its earlier moratorium expired in November 2024.

The Islip zoning amendment is classified as a Type I action under the state environmental review law and is referred to the county planning commission, whose comments the board has to weigh. The board can vote once the hearing closes.

What it means for members

If a battery system larger than 600 kilowatt hours is anywhere in your plans for an Islip property, whether for backup power, a solar array or an electric fleet, size it at 600 kilowatt hours or less, because the draft leaves no district where the bigger system is allowed. If you already run storage above the fire code thresholds, put the annual fire marshal permit in next year's budget and on the checklist for any sale of the business, because a buyer cannot inherit it.

Owners in the Islip portion of the Hauppauge Industrial Park, and in Bohemia and Ronkonkoma, who want the town to keep a route for business scale storage have one public moment to ask for it, and it is tonight's hearing.

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