Surry County’s Planning Commission has again postponed voting on whether to advance a proposed zoning ordinance amendment that would allow battery storage facilities.

The draft language was requested by Idaho-based Cleaner, which wants to build a 20-acre facility capable of storing up to 320 megawatt hours of electricity off White Marsh Road. The language would add “battery energy storage system” as a defined “civic use” allowed in agricultural-rural or industrial-zoned parcels by conditional use permit.

Once the Planning Commission votes on its recommendation, the matter will head to the Board of Supervisors for a public hearing and final vote. Once that happens, Clenera can return with a conditional use permit application for its specific project.

The Planning Commission had previously postponed the matter in December to its January meeting. The additional delay is to give county staff time to incorporate a series of changes the commissioners recommended on Jan. 27.

Commissioner David Coggin, who was absent from the Jan. 27 meeting, had in December recommended adding a gravel buffer outside the required site fencing to further mitigate the chance of a forest fire in the event one of the battery units overheats. He’d written to his fellow commissioners ahead of the January meeting recommending this buffer be a minimum 25 feet.

Commissioner Dianne Cheek also reiterated her December recommendation to lower the maximum permitted noise level from the current 72-decibel standard as measured from the property line of an adjoining parcel. She recommended 40 decibels as measured from the nearest residence.

“There have been so many complaints that we have been getting from the solar projects,” Cheek said.

Noise associated with solar farms typically comes from the inverters that convert direct current to the alternating current bed into the power grid. The noise from battery storage systems is typically from the cooling systems used on individual battery units, according to an Acoustical Society of America study.

Cheek also suggested increasing the setback requirements, though Planning Commission Chairman Giron Wooden said this is something the Planning Commission could recommend on a case-by-case basis as a condition when a battery storage developer applies for a conditional use permit.

“You have to look at what are the resources needed for an energy battery storage facility; you’re not going to put an energy battery storage facility beside the apartments on Lebanon Road,” Wooden said. “They’re going beside a transmission line, and you don’t have, in most cases, housing developments beside a transmission line. If you do, then that’s where we look at the CUP.”

In early 2024 Surry supervisors approved a new “emerging technologies” zoning district and rezoned roughly 600 acres for Middleburg-based Green Energy Partners’ proposed first-in-the-nation combination hydrogen fuel hub and data center powered by small, modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. That zoning district already allows battery storage but doesn’t impose local regulations specific to the arrays of shipping container-sized batteries that have become controversial for their fire risk.

The proposed ordinance would mandate that battery storage units include 24/7 automated fire detection and built-in fire suppression technology.

Clenera says battery storage arrays increase the reliability of the power grid amid rising demand for electricity, which a Dec. 9 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, or JLARC, report to the General Assembly says is being driven by the proliferation of data centers.

The battery units themselves consist of individual cells that get placed into what’s known as a module and are stored in racks similar to a data center server tower. Those racks, and a battery management system programmed to keep the units at an acceptable temperature, then get placed into the final outdoor unit.

In addition to the power grid reliability boost, Clenera estimates its Surry site would generate $4.9 million in tax revenue for the county over 20 years.