Complete civil packages for battery energy storage near Ellicottville, NY: pad subgrade and mass grading, foundation excavation, access and crane pads, collection trenching, ductbank, SWPPP, and substation civil.
Backwell contracts complete civil site work packages for battery energy storage developers and EPCs building near Ellicottville in Cattaraugus County, New York. One contract covers site preparation through final stabilization, with Backwell field leadership on site.
Ellicottville is a resort town built around the Holiday Valley and HoliMont ski areas, served by US-219 and NY-242 with I-86 a short run south at Salamanca. The defining site condition is relief, since the town sits among the steepest ground in Western New York and level parcels large enough for a battery pad are scarce and concentrated in the valley bottom along Great Valley Creek, where floodplain limits apply. Upland ground carries Volusia and Mardin till with fragipans over shallow shale. Scenic and tourism driven land use review is more active here than in neighboring rural towns.
Publicly reported battery energy storage in and around Cattaraugus County:
Project details come from public filings and reporting and are listed to show where the work is. Backwell is not affiliated with these projects or their developers.
About three quarters of Cattaraugus County lies on the glaciated Allegheny Plateau, and the remainder falls within the Salamanca Re-entrant, a triangular area around Salamanca and Little Valley that escaped glaciation and is the most northerly unglaciated landscape in eastern North America. On the glaciated uplands, dense till soils of the Volusia, Mardin, and Cattaraugus series carry fragipans, with the Cattaraugus channery silt loam showing a fragipan commonly at 26 to 40 inches, and Lordstown series soils sit shallow to shale on the ridge crests. Valley bottoms along the Allegheny River, Ischua Creek, and Great Valley Creek carry Chenango and related gravelly outwash with high water tables, and Rhinebeck, Hudson, and Niagara association soils occupy the finer lacustrine pockets. In the unglaciated re-entrant the residual soils are thinner and the bedrock surface is closer and more irregular. Bedrock throughout is Devonian shale, siltstone, and sandstone. Relief is high, slopes are long, and design frost depth is commonly taken at 42 inches or more.
The controlling condition is slope combined with shallow, weathered shale. Level ground for a battery pad generally has to be manufactured on a hillside bench, which means a cut and fill balance that rarely closes without either export or imported structural fill, and retaining or slope armoring where the cut face is steeper than the shale will stand. Fragipans perch water on the upland, so seeps appear in cut faces and have to be intercepted with underdrain and outletted before the pad subgrade will hold. Rock excavation should be assumed for footings and deeper duct bank runs on ridge sites. In the valley bottoms the problem reverses to a high water table in outwash gravel, which trenches easily but requires continuous dewatering and floodplain review along the Allegheny River. Access roads carry long sustained grades, so heavier stone sections, culvert sizing, and aggressive erosion control govern the stormwater package.
Full detail on the Cattaraugus County market is on the Cattaraugus County battery storage civil page.
Concrete is placed by our subcontractor partners under the same contract, so the foundations follow the earthwork without a separate award. We price the civil package as one scope under one contract, which gives the EPC a single point of responsibility for the civil critical path instead of managing separate clearing, earthwork, and underground subcontracts.
Battery storage in New York is governed by Section 1207 of the 2025 Fire Code of New York State, which the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council adopted on July 25, 2025 with an effective date of December 31, 2025. Section 1207 carries material based on the 2023 edition of NFPA 855 and renumbers what the 2020 code placed at Section 1206. Systems must be listed to UL 9540. Large scale fire testing under UL 9540A, reported to and approved by the fire code official, is what permits reduced separation distances and quantities above the table limits, and a hazard mitigation analysis is required to exceed the maximum allowable quantity. Outdoor installations carry a ten foot clearance to lot lines, public ways, buildings, stored combustibles, and other exposure hazards, with ten feet of combustible vegetation cleared on each side. New York added a mandatory peer review at Section 1207.12 for systems above the Table 1207.5 quantities, covering the site plan, the emergency operations plan, and the UL 9540A report. Those provisions fix pad layout and access road geometry before any earthwork is priced.
Battery storage siting in New York runs on the Fire Code of New York State, which adopts the International Fire Code provisions for stationary energy storage, together with NFPA 855 and the UL 9540A test reporting the authority having jurisdiction will ask for. The civil consequences are set early and they are ours to build.
We build to the approved civil drawings and the fire code commentary that comes with the permit. We do not stamp the design.
Local law. As of September 2026 the Town of Freedom carries an active battery energy storage moratorium and the Carrollton moratorium has expired. Most other towns in the county have no active restriction on record, which makes Cattaraugus one of the more permissive counties in Western New York on local law. Source: https://carina.energy/bess-moratoriums/new-york/
Backwell superintendents, project managers, and lead operators run every site. We mobilize company equipment for the core scope and scale each project with leased production fleets, qualified regional subcontractors, and agency-placed field staff, all under Backwell supervision and a single contract.
Contractor licensing. New York does not issue a statewide general contractor license for commercial construction. Licensing is handled locally, so individual cities, towns, and counties may require contractor registration or a local license, and a few trades are licensed at the state level, including asbestos handling and crane operation. Separately, contractors and subcontractors performing public work, and work covered by Article 8 of the Labor Law, must be registered with the New York State Department of Labor under its statewide contractor registry, which took effect December 30, 2024. Owners, EPCs, and integrators on battery storage projects will typically ask for that DOL registration number along with insurance and, where required, bonding.
Construction stormwater. SPDES General Permit for Stormwater Discharges from Construction Activity, permit number GP-0-25-001, issued by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. It took effect January 29, 2025, replacing GP-0-20-001, and runs through January 28, 2030. Coverage is triggered at one acre of soil disturbance, or less if part of a larger common plan, and requires a Notice of Intent plus a SWPPP prepared and implemented under the DEC design manual. Coverage under the prior permit did not carry over automatically, so active sites had to refile. Backwell carries the SWPPP scope, installs and maintains the controls, keeps the inspection log, and closes the permit out with final stabilization.
Prevailing wage. Standalone battery storage sits outside New York Labor Law Section 224-d. That section applies to a covered renewable energy system as defined in Public Service Law Section 66-p, and that definition lists generating technologies only, so energy storage is not included and Section 224-d contains no storage clause. Prevailing wage still reaches many storage projects by other routes. Labor Law Section 224-a expressly excludes an energy storage system with a capacity equal to or under five megawatts alternating current, which means a larger storage system on a privately contracted project that meets the public funds and cost tests can be covered. The Public Service Commission order of June 20, 2024 establishing the updated energy storage goal states that projects of one megawatt alternating current and larger will be subject to prevailing wage requirements, so incentivized projects carry it as a program condition rather than by statute. Storage co-located with a covered renewable generator follows that generator. Separately, contractors and subcontractors performing public work, and work covered by Article 8 of the Labor Law, must be registered with the New York State Department of Labor under the statewide contractor registry effective December 30, 2024. The applicable trigger should be confirmed project by project. Backwell produces certified payroll, pays the applicable wage determination, and supports apprenticeship labor-hour compliance.
All New York battery storage civil work or the New York solar civil cluster.
Send plans, a scope of work, and the schedule through the form below or call (315) 400-2654. We review the civil package, walk the site if it is at that stage, and return a scoped proposal with a schedule of values, stated fill allowances, and unit rates for overages. A one-page capability statement is available for prequalification files.
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