One Hundred and Fifty Moratoriums

A company called Carina Energy just published a database that should unsettle every project finance team in the country. The BESS Moratorium Monitor, launched this week, counts at least 150 local governments across 17 states that have enacted moratoriums, bans, or restrictive ordinances targeting battery energy storage. New York alone accounts for 98 of them.

The concentration. New York holds roughly two-thirds of every tracked restriction in the country. The research identifies concentrations in the Hudson Valley, Capital Region, and Long Island. The pattern follows a familiar geography: communities adjacent to transmission infrastructure and open land where utility-scale developers have filed interconnection applications, but where local zoning codes contain no framework for evaluating a battery installation.

The expansion. The database’s most consequential finding may not be New York’s dominance but the emergence of new restriction corridors. Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Maine are all seeing rising waves of BESS-targeted ordinances as utility-scale projects push into regions that previously had no exposure to large battery installations. The pattern mirrors what happened with wind energy siting a decade ago: initial enthusiasm, a few contentious projects, then a cascade of precautionary local restrictions that outpace any coordinated state response.

Developers are learning about these restrictions the expensive way. Carina’s press release describes companies committing capital to interconnection deposits and land options before discovering that the host jurisdiction has restricted battery storage construction. The BESS Moratorium Monitor updates weekly, drawing from municipal agendas, meeting minutes, and local ordinances, attempting to give developers visibility into a regulatory landscape that has been, until now, almost entirely opaque.

The missing distinction. The database does not distinguish between battery storage technologies. A containerized outdoor lithium-ion installation occupying several acres and an indoor-certified, wall-mounted system inside an existing commercial building receive identical treatment in every moratorium tracked. The fire and safety concerns that motivate most local restrictions, reasonable or not, apply unevenly across these form factors. Yet the ordinances do not differentiate.

New York City’s LL97 compliance timeline is pushing building owners toward battery storage solutions that would be deployed indoors, in existing structures, under fire codes that already govern the buildings. A moratorium drafted in response to a proposed utility-scale outdoor installation in a rural township can, depending on its language, sweep in a small system in a Manhattan basement. The commercial behind-the-meter segment and the utility-scale segment face the same regulatory language despite sharing almost nothing in terms of risk profile.

The structural problem. Deployment statistics measure what gets built, not what gets blocked. If 150 local governments have enacted restrictions and the number is growing, the effective addressable market for battery storage is smaller than pipeline figures suggest.

The wind industry’s experience is instructive. Local restrictions reshaped wind development over the past decade, concentrating projects in permissive jurisdictions and creating multi-year delays elsewhere. Battery storage appears to be entering a similar cycle, accelerating faster as the technology expands into communities with no prior exposure to energy infrastructure siting disputes.

The information gap. Before this database existed, there was no centralized, regularly updated source tracking local battery storage restrictions. Developers relied on project-by-project discovery, often after committing capital. Carina’s contribution is less a policy argument than a diagnostic tool: it maps the gap between where the industry plans to build and where local governments have decided, at least temporarily, that building is not welcome.

The 17-state footprint suggests the siting problem is structural, not geographic. It is not a New York problem with scattered incidents elsewhere. It is a pattern driven by the same gap repeating across jurisdictions: communities encountering battery storage proposals for the first time, with no zoning framework to evaluate them, defaulting to the most conservative available response.

The timeline. Many moratoriums are temporary by design, enacted to buy time for local governments to develop zoning standards. If the pattern holds, some of these 150 restrictions will lapse or convert into permanent regulatory frameworks that allow development under defined conditions. Others will harden into indefinite bans. The trajectory depends largely on whether the industry, state governments, or both provide model zoning language before the temporary measures expire.

The industry’s 2026 deployment ambitions assume that siting is a solved problem at scale. One hundred and fifty moratoriums, updated weekly, suggest otherwise.

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