Deadly Grid Battery Fallacy Exposed in Massachusetts – Watts Up With That?

From CFACT

An alert Massachusetts watchdog group has blown the whistle on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for issuing potentially catastrophic guidance for building grid scale battery facilities. They are specifying a standard which is only meant for small batteries making some rules deadly wrong at grid scale. Turns out this fallacy is widespread nationally making their warning that much more important.

The background is that Massachusetts is rushing an enormous grid battery buildout driven by their 2024 Energy Act. Something like 3,500 MW of battery projects are to be built around the State in the next two years or so. A 40 foot long, tractor trailer sized battery is typically just 1 MW so think 3,500 giant batteries but it could be many more.

The Energy Act required the DEP to issue safety guidance for this buildout which they did in August. Laurie Belsito, Policy Director at the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, just blew the whistle in a Boston Herald article titled “Belsito: Battery guidance lacks juice to deal with Mass. projects.”

See https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/10/03/battery-guidance-lacks-juice-to-deal-with-mass-projects/amp/.

The DEP guidance focuses on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 855 — “Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage Systems.” As Belsito points out this standard is only for small batteries not the giant batteries and battery complexes about to flood Massachusetts.

Here how Belsito puts it:

“By way of scale the NFPA Standard 855 is limited to batteries with an energy storage capacity of 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or less. Such a battery might be used for emergency blackout protection in an office building. However, each of the state’s Energy Act batteries is likely to have a capacity of 4,000 kWh (equal to 4 MWh) or more.

Giant batteries 80 times bigger than Standard 855 allows are not adequately covered by that standard. Unfortunately, as of yet there are no national standards for batteries of this scale.

In some aspects, applying 855 would be catastrophically wrong. For example, 855 says that when there are multiple batteries, they should be three feet apart so if one burns it will not ignite its neighbors. That tiny spacing would provide no protection in the case of the giant batteries being mandated in Massachusetts.

The greatest risk with these huge batteries is that a single battery burning has the potential to set the entire complex on fire. The Department of Energy Resources (DOER) has issued a Request for Proposals for Energy Act batteries that in effect, specifies that projects have at least 40 batteries and could have up to 1,000. The possibility of catastrophe is undeniable.”

Unfortunately NFPA 855 sounds like the right standard for grid scale facilities so it is cited frequently, not just in Massachusetts, which is a potentially deadly national error.

For example EPA recently put out “Battery Energy Storage Systems: Main Considerations for Safe Installation and Incident Response” for grid scale batteries. It too features NFPA 855.

The American Clean Power Association has a fact sheet: “NFPA 855: Improving Energy Storage System Safety” which never mentions the 50 kWh limitation. Even worse it features a grid scale battery background photo.

NFPA is partly responsible for this widespread, potentially catastrophic error. In Standard 855 the crucial 50 kWh limitation is not featured; in fact it is hard to find. In the latest 855 I could only find it stated once, as Section 9.5.1.1 where Section 9 is for electrochemical batteries including lithium ion grid batteries. This small battery limitation should be flagged up front in red.

The deeper question is why has NFPA not issued a standard for the giant grid scale batteries? There is a grid scale battery building boom going on. While recent legislation is rapidly phasing out lucrative subsidies for wind and solar it left untouched the similar subsidies for giant batteries.

Clear rules for safe design of grid battery facilities are desperately needed if deadly catastrophe is to be avoided. Belsito has made this urgent need clear for Massachusetts. The other States and the Federal Government need to hear it as well.

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