Surry County’s Planning Commission voted 9-1 on Feb. 24 to favorably recommend a proposed zoning ordinance amendment that would allow battery storage facilities.

The draft language began last year with a request by Idaho-based Clenera, 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.

Commissioner Dianne Cheek cast the dissenting vote. She’d previously asked to lower the maximum permitted noise level from the initial 72-decibel limit to 40. The final language the Planning Commission voted to recommend to the Board of Supervisors specifies a 55-decibel limit as measured from the outer wall of any adjacent structure.

Fifty-five is a number “we are confident we can comply with,” said Scott Foster, an attorney representing Clenera.

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.

If the supervisors approve the recommended ordinance changes, Clenera can return with a conditional use permit application for its specific project.

The draft the commissioners recommended includes several other changes from the version Clenera had initially proposed. Among the changes is language that would allow the county to impose, on an as-needed basis via the conditional use permit process, stricter setbacks than the minimum buffers specified. The draft ordinance currently mandates projects in agricultural-rural zoning be set back a minimum 200 feet from all property lines except those that abut industrial-zoned land, and be at least 500 feet from all residential and commercial structures. Battery storage facilities in M-1 or M-2 industrial zoning must be a minimum 75 feet from all property lines.

The version the Planning Commission advanced also mandates a minimum 25-foot non-combustible buffer to be located between the fence surrounding the project and the required landscaping, as requested by Commissioner David Coggin to mitigate the chance of a forest fire in the event one of the battery units overheats.

Another edit stipulates the estimated salvage value of the battery storage system components “may” be used to offset the decommissioning costs, rather than “shall,” which according to Community Development and Planning Director Horace Wade gives the county greater flexibility in decommissioning agreements for battery storage sites. According to Foster, decommissioning is less of an issue for battery storage sites than solar farms because individual batteries nearing the end of their useful life can be swapped out for new ones on an as-needed basis, potentially allowing the site to operate in perpetuity.

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.

Derek Post, a fire protection engineer working with Clenera, told the Planning Commission in December that each battery unit consists 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.

The draft ordinance would mandate that battery units include fire suppression technology compliant with the latest standards developed by the National Fire Protection Association.

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.

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.