How much room does battery storage need?
Less than most people picture. One Tesla Megapack holds enough electricity to run about 200 New York homes for a day, and it fits in a single parking space. The bigger question for land is how far a town asks the equipment to sit from its neighbors.
How big is a battery?
Move the slider from a single home battery up to a large utility project. Each view is drawn to scale next to something familiar.
Seen from above
- Battery equipment, to scale
- Familiar object, same scale
Stores
3.9 MWh
One Tesla Megapack 2 XL
Takes up
156 sq ft (28.9 × 5.4 ft)
About the size of
About one parking space, and shorter than a 40 ft shipping container
Could supply
About 209 average New York homes for a day
What is the rest of the site for?
Project filings list a number called the disturbance area: all the land cleared or graded during construction. On a large project the batteries are a small part of it. At the 240 MWh Long Island project, the battery units would cover about 0.2 of its 6.5 acres.
- Battery units
- Roads and fire lanes
- Cleared for construction
- Replanted
Illustrative layout, roughly to scale. The parts are the ones listed in the Aria project filing in East Fishkill. Real layouts vary by site.
During construction the whole work area is cleared or graded. Besides the batteries, it needs space for cranes, deliveries and materials.
Stays while the project runs
- The fenced battery yard, with the spacing between units set by fire testing
- Fire lanes wide enough for a fire truck, at least 20 feet under the fire code
- The switchyard and transformers that connect to the grid
- Water tanks for firefighting, stormwater basins, fencing and planted screening
Goes away after construction
- Staging yards for cranes, deliveries and materials
- Temporary roads and graded slopes
- New York's construction stormwater permit requires every disturbed area to be stabilized, usually by replanting, before the permit can close
And at the end of its life, the decommissioning plan and bond that towns require pay to remove the equipment and restore the site. The Huntington project's 6.5 acres sit on an 11-acre industrial property, a precast concrete business at the time of its filing.
How much land does a setback take?
A setback is the minimum distance between the equipment and a property line or a nearby home. Pick a rule used in or near Westchester, or drag the slider, to see how much land it keeps clear around a 20 MWh site like Tarrytown's.
- Battery site, 110 × 46 ft
- Setback: no homes this close
- Homes on quarter-acre lots
Setback
100 ft
Tarrytown, Ossining, Greenburgh
Land kept clear
1.55 acres
13 times the fenced site
About the same as
Room for about 6 homes on quarter-acre lots
About 1.2 football fields
That land can stay as lawn, woods or parking. What the distance really decides is which properties are big enough to host a project at all. Tarrytown's approved site sits on a 7.9-acre parcel.
What do the rules say today?
One fire code for every battery
The 2025 New York Fire Code took effect on December 31, 2025. Its battery rules are based on NFPA 855, the national standard, which spaces equipment according to large-scale fire tests and sets a default of 10 feet from property lines and buildings.
Towns set the distance
NYSERDA's model law, updated in its February 2026 guidebook, treats systems above 600 kWh as a larger class. It asks them to meet the same setbacks the zoning district already sets for buildings, with 10 feet cleared of brush.
100 feet is common
Tarrytown (2025), the Town of Ossining (2021) and Greenburgh (2021) each require 100 feet. Tarrytown also keeps projects 200 feet from homes, and Greenburgh keeps its largest systems 500 feet from the nearest house. Several other towns have paused new projects while they write rules.
What is already built nearby?
Tarrytown
20 MWh
Approved by the Planning Board 4 to 0 in September 2025. About 110 × 46 ft inside the fence, on a 7.9-acre parcel, 200 ft from homes.
Hawthorne, Yorktown, Ossining
55.7 MWh
Three Tesla Megapack sites totaling 13.5 MW, completed in early 2025.
Huntington, Long Island
240 MWh
A 60 MW project using 6.5 acres of site work inside an 11.2-acre parcel.
How we know this
Sizes come from manufacturer datasheets: Tesla Powerwall 3 (2025), Tesla Megapack 2 XL (Rev 1.6, 2023: 8,800 × 1,650 mm), SolarEdge CSS-OD cabinet (April 2026: 1,100 × 930 mm, 97.3 kWh usable). Familiar objects: Maersk container specifications, ITF tennis rules, the NFL rulebook (360 × 160 ft), and a standard 9 × 18 ft parking space from the Town of Southeast code.
Homes for a day uses the average New York household: 571 kWh a month in 2024 (EIA), or about 18.8 kWh a day. A battery shifts power rather than making it, so this is a way to picture how much it holds.
Land kept clear is the fenced area pushed outward by the setback distance on every side, with rounded corners, which is what a minimum distance produces. A quarter-acre lot is 10,890 sq ft.
- Tesla, Powerwall 3 and Megapack 2 XL datasheets. tesla.com
- SolarEdge, CSS-OD battery cabinet datasheet, April 2026. solaredge.com
- EIA, 2024 Average Monthly Bill, Residential (Table 5A). eia.gov
- NY Department of State, 2025 code adoption notice. dos.ny.gov
- NYSERDA, Battery Energy Storage System Guidebook, February 2026. nyserda.ny.gov
- Village of Tarrytown code §305-68 (2025) and Planning Board minutes, 25 September 2025. ecode360.com
- Town of Ossining code §200-31.4 (2021). ecode360.com · Town of Greenburgh, reported by the Scarsdale Inquirer, August 2021. scarsdalenews.com
- Town of Warwick, proposed Local Law 5 of 2026 (hearing closed, not adopted). townofwarwickny.gov
- Calibrant Energy and CS Energy, three Westchester projects, 2025. calibrantenergy.com
- NYSERDA Bulk Storage Incentives, KCE-NY-21 public project summary. nyserda.ny.gov
Notes for reviewers
- The Westchester draft code is still to come from Leo Wiegman. Its distance drops in as one more preset button.
- The 10 ft fire code figure is NFPA 855 §4.4.3. We could not read the New York text of Fire Code §1207 to confirm New York kept it unchanged.
- Greenburgh's numbers come from 2021 news coverage, and its code is being revised (County Planning, April 2026). The two published copies of Ossining's law disagree on height and brush clearance, not on the 100 ft setback.
- Tarrytown's minutes describe the layout ambiguously, so the five-unit arrangement inside the fence is illustrative. The fence size is from the minutes.
- The 240 MWh drawing is a square of the right area, and its unit count assumes Megapack 2 XL.
- EIA's 2025 household figures are due in October 2026.