Complete civil packages for battery energy storage in Kings County, New York: pad subgrade and mass grading, foundation excavation, access and crane pads, collection trenching, ductbank, SWPPP, and substation civil.
Backwell is a civil site work general contractor serving battery energy storage developers and EPCs building in Kings County, New York. We contract the complete civil package under one agreement, with Backwell superintendents and lead operators on site.
Brooklyn is the clearest environmental justice driver for storage in New York City. The Narrows Generating Station next to Sunset Park released more than 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023 and the nearby Gowanus Generating Station about 9,000 metric tons, and Eastern Generation has advanced plans to build energy storage at its Gowanus, Narrows and Astoria facilities in place of continued peaker operation. Pressure is real: a NYISO assessment identified a 189 MW New York City deficiency for the 2026 summer peak on assumptions that included the Gowanus and Narrows barges staying in service. Community scale storage is moving in parallel, with NineDot Energy developing a 4.9 MW facility at 421 Bushwick Avenue and carrying further Brooklyn sites in the Con Edison interconnection queue. New York State targets roughly 1,000 MW of storage inside New York City on the way to 6,000 MW statewide by 2030. The civil scope in Brooklyn is small industrial parcels, deep urban fill and waterfront groundwater.
Publicly reported battery energy storage in and around Kings 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.
Brooklyn straddles the Harbor Hill moraine, which runs roughly along the Prospect Park ridge, with glacial outwash sloping south and west toward Gravesend Bay and Jamaica Bay. Natural soils are deep, well drained sands and gravels in the Riverhead and Plymouth families on the outwash, and till derived soils along the moraine. As with the rest of the city the working profile is human transported material. The New York City soil survey identified thirty two series formed in human transported materials, and Laguardia, Ebbets, Secaucus and Breeze artifactual fill soils cover about six percent of the city. The Sunset Park, Red Hook, Gowanus and Newtown Creek waterfronts are filled tidal marsh and shoreline, in places over soft organic deposits. Laguardia soils carry construction debris, high pH from concrete content, compaction and elevated lead and other trace metals. Groundwater near the harbor is shallow and tidal.
Brooklyn storage sites are excavation and fill problems before they are structural ones. Over deep debris fill, enclosure pads and transformer foundations generally need over excavation and replacement with structural fill, or a structural mat that spans variable support, rather than a thin slab on native grade. Buried obstructions, old foundations and timber piles are routine, so excavation should be planned as select removal with hand work around live utilities. Excavated material has to be characterized before export because artifactual fill commonly fails clean fill criteria, which drives segregation, covered stockpiles and manifested disposal. On Red Hook, Gowanus and Sunset Park sites, a shallow tidal water table means dewatering with treatment and discharge approvals for footings, duct banks and grounding. Where soft organic layers underlie the fill, settlement governs pad design. Access and delivery routes are tight, so staging and traffic control are part of the civil scope.
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. New York City has no battery storage moratorium. City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality, approved by the City Council in December 2023, permits non accessory energy storage as of right up to 10,000 square feet in residence districts and requires a special permit above that. Department of Buildings and Fire Department review and permitting are unchanged by that amendment.
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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