A 20 MW battery built and energized near Buffalo in 2023 — through a state award, an IDA PILOT, and a host-community agreement, with no recorded fight. Included as an out-of-region 'the process works' comparison.
Village of Blasdell / Town of Hamburg · Erie County · Energy storage · Status: delivered — built and operating
Why this case is here. It is not in the Hudson Valley. It is included as a clean, well-documented "the process worked" comparison — the kind of outcome the Hudson Valley cases on this site have so far not produced. Read it alongside Warwick, the in-region delivered case, whose record is messier.
KCE NY 6 is a 20 MW / 45.6 MWh battery storage facility in the Village of Blasdell and Town of Hamburg, south of Buffalo, brought online by Key Capture Energy around June 6, 2023. It was assembled through the ordinary toolkit for getting a project built: a $5.0 million NYSERDA Bulk Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive, a PILOT through the Hamburg Industrial Development Agency, a host-community agreement with the Village of Blasdell, and union labor (IBEW, USW, CSEA). No organized opposition appears in the public record. (Key Capture Energy)
a major step towards New York
critical to accelerating deployment of transformational energy storage resources
What distinguishes KCE NY 6 from the blocked and stalled Hudson Valley cases is not the technology — it is the same lithium-ion grid storage — but the absence of a fight: a state incentive, a negotiated PILOT and host-community agreement, union labor, and energization on a normal timeline. Whether that reflects a more receptive Western New York siting climate, the absence of a triggering fire incident nearby, or simply that the project was structured with local buy-in from the start is the question worth asking against the statewide pattern. It is the honest data point that storage does get built in New York — just not, so far, in the towns documented here.