Why New York towns can pass their own battery-storage moratoria — but can't block a large solar or wind farm. The home-rule vs. state-siting split that drives every moratorium case on this site.
The single fact that explains most of the cases on this site: in New York, a large solar or wind farm and a standalone battery follow different permitting tracks, decided by different levels of government. A town can pass a moratorium that stops a battery project cold — but it cannot, on its own, stop a 25-megawatt solar farm. That asymmetry is why these fights play out town by town.
Large renewables (≥25 MW) → the state. Big solar, wind, and major transmission go through the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission (ORES), which issues a single permit covering both state and local law — overriding ordinary local zoning approval. Any renewable project 25 megawatts or larger must use ORES. The office was created in 2020 under Executive Law §94-c; that section was repealed in April 2024 and ORES now operates under the RAPID Act and Public Service Law Article VIII. (NYS DPS) Local governments get input and can submit their local laws, but ORES can decline to apply a local requirement it finds unreasonably burdensome — so the final call is the state’s.
Standalone battery storage → the town. There is no state siting forum for a standalone battery. As one legal analysis of the law puts it, “Section 94-c does not cover standalone energy storage projects” — these facilities “remain subject to local permitting.” (Hodgson Russ) This is home rule: a battery facility is approved (or refused) under the town’s own zoning, at every size — a 10 MW battery and a 200 MW battery are both local decisions.
So the dividing line for a battery is not its size — it is whether it stands alone:
Because almost every project documented here is a standalone battery, it lives entirely under local control. That is also why New York’s wave of local restrictions bites so hard: for standalone storage, a town moratorium is a binding constraint with no state-level workaround — unlike a large solar farm, which the state can site over local objection.
Towns are not writing battery rules from scratch. NYSERDA publishes a Battery Energy Storage System Guidebook with a Model Law and Model Permit — editable templates local governments customize. (NYSERDA) The Model Law’s 600 kWh Tier 1 / Tier 2 line recurs across these cases: it is the threshold Chester and Gardiner used to define the “large-scale” systems their moratoria target, while Athens and Stanford chose to cover all battery storage regardless of size.
The home-rule split is the engine behind the inventory on this site. A town like Montgomery could ban battery storage outright and thereby stop a project; no town could do the same to a 25 MW solar farm. It is also why the pending bills S5506 / A8378 — which would extend ORES to standalone “qualified energy storage” — would reframe the whole state-vs-local story if they passed. As of 2026 they remain in committee.
This is distinct from SEQR, the environmental-review process: SEQR governs how carefully a specific local project is studied, while the home-rule question here is which government gets to decide at all. A standalone battery can face both — a full local SEQR review and the risk of a town moratorium — at once.
The NYS DPS ORES overview lays out the state siting process and thresholds, and NYSERDA’s Battery Energy Storage Guidebook collects the Model Law and permit templates that local battery ordinances are built from.