ERVING — A public hearing to delineate wetlands and other natural resources at the 3 Rose Lane property poised to be developed as a battery energy storage facility was continued until the Conservation Commission’s next meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 4, as the applicant examines comments from a third-party review.
The 100-megawatt, 9-acre battery energy storage facility would be located on Poplar Mountain and would connect to Eversource’s Erving substation. The facility is called Rose Brook Battery Energy Storage due to its location off Rose Lane.
BSC Group soil scientist Ethan Sneesby, in his presentation to the Conservation Commission, explained he had six comments for the group that mainly included the marking of isolated wetlands. He explained that the addition of a river wetlands buffer zone and an isolated wetlands section that was, in fact, connected to a larger wetland were the more prominent changes to the applicant’s wetlands mapping he identified.
“During my review, I found that there’s a section of hydric soils that connected an isolated section to another larger wetland. Through discussion with TRC, they agreed that within the section, it would be considered isolated, so that was removed or actually enlarged and incorporated into the larger system. That would be one major change,” Sneesby said. “This is all just from one stream that was identified. … [TRC] agreed that those non-jurisdictional streams would be shown as intermittent streams, so they would receive a buffer zone — that’s another fairly large change.”
Ximena Lugo, senior development associate at Spearmint Energy, the project’s applicant, said at the hearing Tuesday night that TRC, the company Spearmint hired to review wetlands delineation, was still reviewing Sneesby’s comments.
“To your point,” Lugo said to Sneesby, “we talked through all your comments and they agreed with every single one and said they would incorporate them.”
An informational handout from Spearmint Energy explains the facility would store energy for future use by connecting to a charging source, such as a substation. The facility would help stabilize the energy grid, improve electric reliability and provide tax revenue, according to Spearmint.
A number of Erving residents attended the public hearing to voice their opinions on the project, particularly its potential impact on wildlife. However, Town Planner Glenn Johnson-Mussad, in a point of order, explained that discussion should be limited to the resource area delineation.
The Conservation Commission voted unanimously to continue discussion on the battery energy storage facility on Nov. 4 to give TRC time to review Sneesby’s comments.
