$500M battery farm skipped environmental review

The Healey administration has approved the largest lithium battery farm in Massachusetts history — a $500 million, 700-megawatt complex on 20 acres of a former ExxonMobil tank farm in one of the most densely populated cities in the state — and waived its own environmental review to do it.

The facility will sit next to 3,200 planned homes in working-class Everett. The mayor begged them not to build it. Former Mayor Carlo DeMaria fought the project through the entire permitting process. "We don't need any more black smoke in our city," he said. The state overruled him.

The Trimount Energy Storage facility will sit along the Everett waterfront, near the Encore Boston Harbor casino and the site of a planned 3,200-unit housing development. More than 800 lithium-ion battery enclosures — each roughly 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, and nearly 10 feet tall — will be packed side by side across the site. The developer is Jupiter Power, a Texas-based company whose largest completed projects to date are 200-megawatt facilities in Texas. The Everett project is three and a half times larger.
 

Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Rebecca Tepper granted a MEPA waiver, letting the project skip the standard Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act review.

Construction is expected to begin in 2026 or 2027, with the facility potentially operational by 2028 or 2029. The battery farm is Phase 1 of a larger development called the "Everett Docklands Innovation District" — 3,200 housing units, 3.3 million square feet of lab and office space, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail.

The batteries go in first. The housing goes in next to them.