The Texas owner of the newly opened Cross Town Energy Storage in Gorham Industrial Park is assuring residents and neighboring businesses built-in safety measures reduce the risk of a serious fire.

“Plus Power, our suppliers, and our contractors take wide-ranging precautions across design, procurement, development and operations to mitigate the unlikely risk of a thermal event,” said Brianna Baker, a senior communications associate at Plus Power.

The system was designed in accordance with all applicable state and national battery storage codes and standards, the firm’s statement said.

“Knock on wood, I don’t think it would go wrong,” Gorham Fire Chief Kenneth Fickett said when asked whether he had concerns about the potential for an emergency at the site.

The facility stores energy from the electrical grid during off-peak hours and plugs it back in when demand rises. With 175 MW/350 MWh of battery energy capacity, it’s billed as the largest facility of its kind in New England.

The fenced battery farm is located on 5 acres of a 13-acre-site, adjacent to Central Maine Power’s Mosher Substation in the easterly part of Gorham near Westbrook. The site has 156 containers housing batteries, all of which come with multiple safety features.

Plus Power said the individual container units are constructed of steel and each holds about 3,000 battery cells. “The (battery) chemistry is lithium-ion,” Baker said. The project is remotely monitored around the clock by “trained personnel using a variety of automated sensors and alarms.”

If the temperature inside a container rises, Fickett said, air conditioning “kicks on.” A battery can also be taken offline. He said if a fire did occur inside a container, a firefighter would stand by and “watch it burn,” but it’s unlikely a fire would spread outside of its container.

“It would be an extremely rare occasion where a fault at the Cross Town site would result in a fire,” Plus Power said in its email.

If it did, Fickett said firefighters would spray the container with mist from a regular fire hose to cool things down and keep flames from spreading.

In the case of an external fire, the fire department could order an evacuation of the area up to 800 feet. But an evacuation would also hinge on weather conditions like the wind and its direction.

“The isolated location in the Gorham Industrial Park further reduces the risk of an evacuation,” Plus Power said. “As would be expected with any fire, the trained Gorham first responders will take appropriate actions in the best interests of the surrounding communities.”

According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report, in 2024 there was one fire at a battery storage system in California, and another in 2025.

The EPA says lithium battery fires are “extremely difficult to extinguish” and can reignite hours or days later, and battery fires can release “harmful gases that pose health risks to nearby residents and first responders.”

Cross Town provides a boost for Gorham property owners. The facility’s assessed value is $47.2 million and, for the current tax year, pays nearly $700,000, according to town tax records posted online.

“It’s an exciting update for our industrial park for sure,” Kevin Jensen, Gorham economic development director, said at the ribbon cutting.

With the battery farm coming online, Fickett said his department didn’t need to acquire any additional firefighting equipment.

Plus Power, headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, also has battery storage facilities in use or in construction in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Arizona, and four in Texas.