ACP’s Model Battery Ordinance Is Scoped to Systems of 1 Megawatt and Above, Leaving Building-Scale Storage Outside the Template

The American Clean Power Association’s 2026 edition Model Ordinance for Battery Energy Storage Systems is the storage industry’s standard answer to municipal permitting friction. It builds NFPA 855 in as its organizing principle. It imposes a 30-day initial application review clock, after which a municipality must issue either written approval or a notice of deficiency. It covers decommissioning, emergency response coordination, and hazard mitigation.

It is also scoped explicitly to systems of 1 megawatt or larger, and it is titled Model Ordinance: Utility-Scale Battery Energy Storage Systems. The scope matches the title. Nothing in the national template addresses the sub-megawatt indoor commercial case.

The clock. The 30-day review requirement is the document’s central procedural mechanism. A municipality that adopts the ordinance takes on a defined obligation to respond within a fixed window rather than an open-ended one, and the applicant receives either an approval or a written statement of what is missing. For a developer weighing whether a jurisdiction is worth entering, a bounded timeline is a schedule input that can be underwritten. The trade is documentation: siting, decommissioning, and emergency-response material assembled for a utility-scale project in front of a planning board.

Below the line. A battery sized to shave a commercial building’s monthly demand peak is a different object. Systems installed indoors in commercial buildings are commonly specified in the 200 to 500 kilowatt-hour range, with power ratings well below the ordinance’s megawatt floor. Spain’s RENOINN 2 awards, announced August 7 by the Ministry for Ecological Transition, offer a yardstick for the size class: the self-consumption tranche carried 150 megawatt-hours of storage across 274 projects, averaging under 550 kilowatt-hours each. Those projects sit an order of magnitude beneath the threshold that triggers the model ordinance’s protections.

Systems in that range receive no shot clock and no standardized safety schedule from the national template. They receive whatever the local building department decides an unfamiliar electrical installation requires.

The cost argument. An opinion piece published in Utility Dive on August 4 argued that municipal permitting, rather than federal policy, is the binding cost constraint on battery storage. The argument is not new in solar, where soft costs have been a recognized share of installed price for a decade, and it applies with more force to a product category that local officials encounter less often.

The relevant observation is what the industry’s own remedy does about it. The ordinance that exists to compress permitting time does not reach the size class that the op-ed’s logic implicates most directly, because that size class falls below the applicability floor rather than outside the document’s subject matter.

The market. The Wood Mackenzie and American Clean Power US Energy Storage Monitor, Q2 2026 edition, put commercial and industrial installations at 97.7 megawatts in the first quarter of 2026, up 27% quarter over quarter. California accounted for 75 megawatts of that total. Total US storage across all segments reached 3.3 gigawatts and 8.4 gigawatt-hours in the same quarter.

That arithmetic leaves roughly 23 megawatts of commercial and industrial installation across the rest of the country in a quarter. The segment is forecast to grow 26% through 2031, and the report identifies at least 215 megawatts of community-scale projects in development across Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

Those states are where non-California growth is currently sited. California’s own incentive support has narrowed: the Self-Generation Incentive Program’s non-residential storage budget moved to closed-and-waitlisted status, reported August 4, removing the subsidy that sat underneath roughly three-quarters of the quarter’s installed volume.

What each instrument was built to solve. The model ordinance responds to organized local opposition to utility-scale siting: land use, decommissioning obligations, and coordination with fire departments that have not previously encountered a battery facility. Those disputes happen in front of a planning board, and a template that standardizes them has clear value.

A cabinet in a building’s electrical room does not generate a zoning proceeding. It generates a plan review and an inspection, with an authority having jurisdiction deciding whether the manufacturer’s listings and hazard mitigation analysis are sufficient. The model ordinance does not tell that official what sufficient looks like at that scale, because the document is scoped above it.

The default artifact. One consequence follows directly, though it is inference rather than anything the ordinance states: in the absence of a public code written for the size class, the manufacturer’s certification package does the standardizing work. UL 9540A test documentation becomes the artifact that carries a sub-megawatt commercial project through review in most jurisdictions. That shifts the basis of a permitting decision from a published municipal standard onto a private test report, and makes the outcome depend on how a particular reviewer reads one.

The available remedy. Two paths exist in principle. Federal preemption of local battery permitting, the remedy the Utility Dive piece argues for, would require congressional action and years. A sub-1 megawatt indoor annex to a model ordinance that ACP already publishes and periodically updates would require a drafting committee. The second is materially cheaper than the first, and no organized constituency is currently pressing for either.

The gap is straightforward to state. The commercial and industrial segment installed 97.7 megawatts in a quarter, three-quarters of it in one state whose main incentive has now closed, with its forecast growth located in four states where the buildings in question are smaller than anything the industry’s permitting template was written to cover.

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