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Town of Hamburg Planning Board Minutes May 20, 2026 Member Stewart asked what is the lifespan of the battery packs and what happens to the batteries after their life use? The Applicant answered that the lifespan is 20 years for the battery pack. Once the battery is at its end there is a full decommissioning plan where the cabinets themselves are removed, with the batteries still in them and taken back to Tesla. Tesla then recycles all of the components and disposes them at their designated facility. Once the cabinets have been removed, the applicant would continue the decommissioning of the land by digging up the concrete foundations and restoring the land. Mr. Rogers also wanted the Planning Board to know that similar to the Solar Law, if the project were not to be in operation for more than a year, the Town has the right to enact the decommissioning plan and use the bond that will be on file to then remove the infrastructure. Mr. Rogers stated that there has been a lot of questions regarding noise, and asked the Applicant if they could speak to the fact of whether or not this project produces more noise than a typical kind of facility. The Applicant answered that the only noise associated with this project is the fans for the cooling system. They are not particularly robust and are variable speed fans, so their operating level is going to depend upon things such as ambient conditions. The noise does not propagate that far and there is virtually no impact on the surrounding areas. Mr. Rogers noted that going back to the coordinated review, as stated before, there are no other agency approvals but as Mr. Hopkins noted earlier, this property had been rezoned about two years ago from M-2 to Neighborhood Commercial. At that time, the Town did get a number of comments from Erie County about the industrial rezoning that had been done. While the County does not have any approval power per se for this project, he suggested that the Board send the project to the County to get their comments from a regional standpoint. Chair Gronachan stated that last month, she attended a Planning/Zoning training session, and this was a topic of discussion. These are the issues that she has: ▪ It was not just one fire in the State of New York; there was a total of 5. What was explained to her was the reason the fire code got changed in January was because there were not any fire stations that could handle the fires that took place in these towns, so the fires had to burn for day. Why is it that you think there was only one fire when she was told there were five. ▪ How many of these sites or operations are throughout the State of New York? And how many instances have there been in the last five years? 19