Complete civil packages for battery energy storage in Queens 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 Queens County, New York. We contract the complete civil package under one agreement, with Backwell superintendents and lead operators on site.
Queens holds New York City's densest concentration of in city generation, and that is where storage is going. The clearest example is the East River Energy Storage Project at 31-03 20th Avenue in Astoria, a 100 MW and 400 MWh system in containers totaling roughly 130,680 square feet on a 4.4 acre parcel of New York Power Authority land where the Charles Poletti plant once stood, developed by East River ESS, LLC, an affiliate of 174 Power Global, with a fixed price contract with Con Edison for its first seven years. The Public Service Commission authorized construction in 2022, and the New York City Industrial Development Agency has treated it as its largest storage transaction to date. Eastern Generation has also pursued storage at its Astoria site. NineDot Energy carries active community scale development in the borough within a Con Edison interconnection pipeline that spans four boroughs. For civil work this means constrained industrial waterfront sites, heavy fill, and pad and trench scope threaded between live utilities.
Publicly reported battery energy storage in and around Queens 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.
Queens spans the Harbor Hill moraine across its northern neck and a broad outwash plain sloping south toward Jamaica Bay. Natural soils on the plain are deep sands and gravels of the Riverhead, Haven and Plymouth families, and the borough's northern and western edges carry glacial till over deeper deposits. What governs construction is not the natural profile. The New York City soil survey identified seventy soil series in the city, thirty two of them developed in human transported materials, and the artifactual fill series Laguardia, Ebbets, Secaucus and Breeze together cover roughly six percent of the city's land area. The industrial waterfront in Astoria, Long Island City and along Newtown Creek and Flushing Creek is largely reclaimed marsh and shoreline filled with construction debris, ash and dredge spoil. Laguardia soils in particular carry chunky construction debris, high pH from concrete content, compacted layers and elevated lead and trace metals. Groundwater along the waterfront is close to grade and tidally influenced.
Waterfront and reclaimed sites in Queens mean that the pad subgrade is engineered fill, not native ground. Expect obstruction excavation through concrete, brick and timber, undocumented foundations, and buried relics from prior industrial use, and budget the excavation as select removal rather than bulk cut. Material leaving these sites has to be characterized and manifested, because artifactual fill routinely fails clean fill criteria on lead and other metals, and that changes both the export plan and the on site stockpile layout. Enclosure pads over deep fill usually call for over excavation and replacement with structural fill, or a structural slab designed to span the variability rather than a thin pad on grade. Tidal groundwater near the shoreline drives dewatering with treatment and discharge permitting for duct banks, grounding grids and any below grade structure. Access roads and crane pads need engineered sections because compacted debris fill settles unevenly under concentrated loads.
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. The City Council approved City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality in December 2023, which reclassified non accessory storage as energy infrastructure equipment and allowed it as of right up to 10,000 square feet in residence districts, with larger installations requiring a special permit. The Department of Buildings and the Fire Department continue to review and permit every installation.
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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