Installation of Electrical Energy Storage Systems

Online comments: 2

• Carol Ott

  This is one of the most welcoming rules I have seen. I own a brownstone in Chelsea that I’m renovating. Along with the installation of heat pumps, I am installing solar on the roof. Because this is a landmarked district I am limited in the amount of panels that can be installed (for visual reasons) and the roof isn’t that large. Having some kind of energy storage system would be a very welcome prospect (even if my system is small). Since my home will be completely electric, this option would be great. Please pass this rule!

  Comment added December 25, 2024 10:27am

• Daniel Bersohn

  Broad adoption of energy storage systems (ESS) is, as noted in the informative text attached to the proposed rule, critical to maximizing delivery of renewable energy into the NYC grid by making better use of in-building and in-street infrastructure during periods of otherwise low utilization. Texas, for example, has put sustainability and carbon emissions focused New York to shame by rapidly connecting renewable energy resources to its grid and deploying ESS. In Texas this is driven by exposing consumers to highly variable electricity prices and managing grid congestion primarily through unaffordable pricing during periods of extreme congestion and demand. In the Texas grid, ESS at the building level allows utility customers to profit from buying cheap electricity during periods of low grid congestion, and preferentially draw from their ESS during periods of high congestion or even sell back to the grid to relieve transmission congestion and turn a handsome profit due to extreme variability in rates. Some customers also gain resiliency against some storm related outages. New York certainly will adopt different market mechanisms that may better protect vulnerable consumers, but the basic story is the same: we have a lot of underutilized copper in streets and buildings a lot of the time when there’s a lot of cheap and cheap renewable energy available. It is important for NYC to facilitate the affordable and safe installation of ESS within buildings with large electrical services to meet the promises of the CLCPA and §28-320 of the NYC Admin Code and meet the affordability needs of utility rate payers in the City.

  As a past and current participant in multiple code development processes, I value the efforts and rigor in development of technical standards and those who contribute to them. Moreover, I value and respect the volunteered time put toward this work. I also recognize that national standards come from processes run by people and are just as perfect as people are. As such, the standards development processes may not always meet the needs of New York City or may contain errors or conflicts which must be resolved through modified adoption of standards by NYC. Much of this proposed rule appears to be well considered and the result of significant stakeholder engagement and careful thought. I am supportive of the goal of achieving broader adoption of and regulatory certainty around ESS in NYC.

  However, I am concerned that the some of the specifics of this particular drive to provide an appropriate level of safety for NYC for ESS installations may create significant and unintended market barriers that will limit adoption of or significantly increase the cost of these systems. There also appears to be a risk of some regulatory bycatch or potentially unintended consequences.

  I am concerned that not only is the proposed modified adoption of NFPA 855 introducing requirements that will be unique within even the US market, but that we are failing to take the opportunity to incorporate global/allied country cognizant standards which may address our safety needs while expanding the availability of products for the NYC market. For example, could we adopt EU, Japanese, Korean or other allied country standards in addition to NFPA 855? As an example of how this might work, during the 2022 NYC Mechanical Code process which occurred largely before 2020, we looked to EN 378 when older versions of US standards like ASHRAE 15-2013 and IMC 2015 did not adequately navigate and differentiate the risks associated with VRF heatpump systems and large chillers. This move protected the public safety while also providing clarity to designers and facilitating adoption of technology that is key to decarbonization efforts. ASHRAE 15-2022 now includes some of the same concepts from EN 378. I suspect similar opportunities exist in the ESS space and have not been pursued. This should not hold up an initial rule, but investigation and adoption of additional allied-country safety standards should proceed as soon as possible to give NYC access to a broader rather than narrower array of safe products. Japanese products can be expected to operate at similar voltages to NYC and in areas with similar population densities.

  I am concerned by the multiple steps of NYC specific approvals required: listing to NYC modifications of a US-only technical standard, a COA process with unclear requirements to obtain approval in addition to those recited in the draft rule, and a peer review process that appears to duplicate some of the work of the COA process. If a COA process is included, it should be used to the advantage of adoption of ESS creating an opportunity to evaluate and adopt safe products from a broader marketplace. Instead it appears to be re-creating the MEA.

  In my view COAs should generally be limited to types of equipment for which a cognizant technical standard from the US or allied-country market and appropriate testing is not available at all or the standard lacks clarity around different performance levels beyond a simple pass/fail and only some performance levels are acceptable within the City. Again, we got rid of MEA numbers for good reasons. We should not re-create a new MEA under FDNY via the COA process. To the extent that UL 9540 listing is achieved by a product, wouldn’t the installation instructions be consistent with maintaining the conditions of the listing? What more is needed? Where the City is proposing that COAs be part of a regulatory process, as part of the rule making process, the design and ownership community ought to be able understand why existing national or allied country technical standards and third-party testing is inadequate to the safety needs to the application and what the criteria for obtaining a COA for the specific product is. For example, this might be necessary to check on UL 1974 battery repurposing manufacturers. This justification should be published as part of the rulemaking process. The statement of Basis and Purpose does not appear to specifically address the proposed NYC modifications to NFPA standards.

  Where listed and tested products are available, the FDNY COA requirement seems to place an unnecessary burden on manufacturers and limits the availability of otherwise compliant products to be incorporated in designs to a subset that have gone through a NYC-specific bureaucratic process without clear standards for obtaining approval. Having a UL 9540 listing for ESS units should be adequate unless there is only a subset of UL 9540 listed equipment that showed especially good performance per UL 9540A testing. In which case the NYC specific acceptance criteria need to be clearly laid out in this proposed rule.

  Additionally, the modifications of NFPA and UL standards appear to be proposed in a way that could make it difficult to adopt newer, safer, more stable battery chemistries by requiring tests that are not necessary or perhaps not even possible for some chemistries. Specifically, in regards to the modifications to NFPA 855 § 3.3.13 + 4.1.5.1 these two modifications combined are probably unworkable and potentially incompatible with UL 9540A test procedures. It is possible that a ESS will not suffer a cascading thermal runaway due to its design under the UL 9540A test procedure. Also, it appears that UL 9540A cuts off testing at smaller scales when the smaller scale test does not produce results that are indicative of larger scale hazards. The proposed rule would require that manufacturers do the large scale test even if the smaller scale tests determine that the larger scale test is not necessary for their product. Li-ion is less stable and probably proceeds to the large scale test anyway. Lithium iron phosphate cells or other newer chemistries might prove to be more stable and not proceed through all the UL9540A tests to achieve a listing. This may counterintuitively preclude the availability of newer, safer technologies to NYC by requiring that the manufacturer perform a scale of test which is not necessary to achieve product safety listing or worse where the test cannot be completed because it’s impossible to generate a smaller scale fault the test is trying to propagate through a system at a larger scale. Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood the rule language, in which case the language should be revised a bit to avoid the misinterpretation I’ve made.

  Additionally, these rules propose that as part of a peer review to be conducted that the peer reviewer re-evaluate UL test data. Theoretically, the COA process is meant to verify that the UL listing is real. If the peer reviewer’s duties include verification of the UL listing the COA seems particularly redundant. Alternatively, if the COA process is more efficient, then the peer reviewer should not be tasked with doing anything with regard to the listing beyond verifying conditions on the COA are complied with in the design.

  The peer review strategy has unclear value to me as proposed. It seems to contain equal conflict of interest risk in the peer reviewer as compared to the designer of record. It presents similar risks to compliance with the progress and special inspection regime, but the peer reviewer has fewer professional risks than those professionals. If the revenue to the peer reviewer flows through the DOB, then the City is the client. If the revenue flows to the peer reviewer through the owner, then the owner is the client and the City’s interests are represented only in so far as the peer reviewer has more public-oriented incentives than the design professionals hired by the owner to do the design in the first instance. The professional liability remains entirely with the applicant of record, so it’s not clear why the checkpoints assigned to the peer reviewer wouldn’t be adequately satisfied by making them clear documentation requirements for checking at the plan exam stage. In my view it would better if the City brought on board or trained staff to be able to conduct the required plan exams. Hiring a consultant to assist with reviews would be a close second. This plan seems to be one where the City may limit its ability to develop expertise in understanding the design of these systems or may end up being blind to the very risks it is trying to address.

  On the other hand, if the peer review process is essentially to check a design against manufacturer specific installation requirements, the peer review process could be efficient as an engineer trained or employed by the manufacturer would be well placed to efficiently check against installation instructions that are part of maintaining the UL listing of the product when installed. It’s not clear from the proposed rule if this is what’s envisioned.

  There’s a potential issue with repairs and retrofits under the proposed rules. With respect to proposed amendments to NFPA 855 § 4.2.3.1. Item (3) it’s not clear how manufacturers or owners of legacy unlisted systems would be able to obtain such a listing as part of a retrofit. This likely precludes alterations or potentially even repairs to unlisted systems since representative components thereof would need to undergo destructive UL 9540A testing. This retroactive listing requirement should be limited to altered components, i.e. an alteration incorporating new products to replace existing components in a larger installation. Also, if an existing unlisted system fails the test, then what happens? Does the owner abort the project and leave the remaining components in service in place? Does the owner face an obligation to then immediately decommission the whole system? What happens if the owner needs to repair/replace a component and is now putting in a new listed component because the old unlisted component is no longer manufactured? Does the owner now have to get all the existing to remain components tested and listed to keep the entire system in service? I’m not sure how much of an issue this is and whether there’s really a large fleet of these things in the City. If there’s a large fleet of existing installations, this is a problem. This appears to be an attempt to phase out installations which do not meet all the listing requirements of the proposed rule, but does so quite inelegantly. The rules for which components of legacy installations need replacing and which may remain in service should have clearer and more specific triggers based on the component altered or replaced. These could be aligned to the already established scales of products and installations in the escalating scales of product testing within UL 9540. A cleaner solution might be to simply have a scheduled phase out of legacy installations.

  There appears to be a possible jurisdictional issue with the proposed modification of NFPA 855 § 4.1.2.1.2. This modification appears to be giving FDNY broad jurisdiction and authority over utility company installations as written. Generally, the DOB and FDNY have not had jurisdiction over things like utility company installations, transit systems, and state- and federally-owned structures. Some of these structures have voluntarily complied with City rules and laws in the past to facilitate, for example, the sale of a building no longer needed by NYS, the federal government, the MTA, or similar to another entity with a proper certificate of occupancy. To the extent that these utility installations are not within buildings, asserting this jurisdiction could invite litigation from well-heeled litigants (i.e. investor-owned utilities) and delay implementation of much of the good work being done here to bring ESS installations to New York City.

  The threshold quantities table together with the definitions section presents potential issues with cooking electrification in existing buildings and electric vehicles. New classes of induction ranges that include LFP batteries so that a can be fed from the existing 120V receptacles that power gas range igniters on gas ranges. Products are already available to and shipping to consumers which exceed 1kWh battery. There are also portable consumer batteries which exceed this energy storage. NYCHA and NYSERDA are currently evaluating these types of electric ranges with batteries as a means to improve indoor air quality in public housing as well as a cost-effective solution to restore cooking to tenants when old gas piping systems inevitably become leaky. Buying new battery-induction ranges that plug into existing outlets while cutting and capping and abandoning failed gas piping in place can be safer, cheaper, and faster than trying to expose—requiring work that may trigger asbestos and lead paint abatements—and fix the gas piping. The quantities also raise questions about whether parking garages which allow EV charging or even those which simply store EVs are subject to any of these requirements.

  Comment added January 15, 2025 9:25pm