A 12 MW battery that actually got built and energized in Orange County in 2023 — and then became the region's cautionary fire story.
Warwick · Orange County · Energy storage · Status: delivered — built and operating (with a contested safety record)
Unlike the proposals elsewhere on this site, the Warwick system was sited, approved, and energized. Convergent Energy + Power, working with utility Orange & Rockland, built three 4 MW battery systems (12 MW / 57 MWh total) — two on Warwick Valley Central School District property and one at 28 Church Street in the Village — and brought them online on May 15, 2023. The Village of Warwick Planning Board had approved the Church Street site plan back in December 2020. (Orange & Rockland; Convergent)
It is a non-wires alternative: O&R selected Convergent competitively to defer costly substation and distribution upgrades serving roughly 7,500 customers, rather than build new poles-and-wires capacity. (Orange & Rockland)
The same site became the region's cautionary tale. It caught fire in June 2023, weeks after coming online — Convergent attributed it to a manufacturing defect — and again on December 19, 2025. After the second fire, Village officials said the Church Street facility was an "unauthorized," non-compliant system that should not have been operating. (Energy-Storage.news; Village of Warwick) That December fire became the rallying point for a fresh wave of municipal moratoria across the Hudson Valley (see the landscape overview).
opens the door to a more sustainable energy future for our customers
critical to a more sustainable, cost-effective and reliable electric grid
unauthorized,
Warwick is the counter-example the rest of the inventory needs — proof that ordinary local site-plan review can produce a built, operating BESS — but it is not a clean one, and presenting it as such would be dishonest. The project both demonstrates the process working and supplies the fire-and-compliance story that hardened opposition to projects like Terra-Gen/Alcazar and the Saugerties proposal. The detail opponents and defenders read differently is the "unauthorized system" framing: if the December 2025 unit was operating out of compliance, the case for enforced standards over blanket prohibition is stronger — but the recurrence of fire at a single Hudson Valley site is exactly what local boards cite.