An Orange County town with no battery application on record has held large-scale storage under a moratorium — now twice extended into late 2026 — to protect its agricultural landscape while it drafts rules.
Town of Chester · Orange County · Energy storage · Status: never-proposed (precautionary moratorium)
Chester has no battery application on record — its moratorium law says so outright: "there are no pending applications." Local Law 8 of 2024 imposed a 12-month moratorium on large-scale BESS, defined as aggregate capacity of 600 kWh or more, so smaller residential, farm, and business backup systems are exempt. The town has extended it twice — Local Law 10 of 2025, then Local Law 3 of 2026 (adopted February 25, 2026) — moving the expiration to August 26, 2026. The stated purpose throughout is to integrate any future storage with "the existing agricultural community and landscape." (Local Law 8 of 2024; Local Law 3 of 2026)
there are no pending applications
Chester is the inventory's example of a narrow precautionary moratorium that nonetheless persists: it touches only large-scale systems, it has never had an application, and yet it has run for nearly two years through successive extensions. That combination — no project, a tightly-scoped pause, repeated renewals — sits between the all-BESS pauses (Athens, Stanford) and the towns that converted a moratorium into a permanent ban (Montgomery). Whether Chester lands on workable large-scale zoning or simply lets the moratorium lapse in August 2026 is the open question.