I invited Kelly Stalder, Deputy Chief – Inspections and Engineering with the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office to present to our Commissioners Court during our January 27th meeting and inform the court what they can and can’t do for us with respect to Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) facilities that are attempting to invade our county. I have provided a copy of his presentation below. You can also view the presentation and hear the discussion by watching the YouTube video of the Commissioners Court meeting (a link to the video is provided below – the State Fire Marshal’s agenda item comes on at around 1:27 minutes into the video).
Kerr County Commissioners’ Court , January 27, 2025
The important take away from this discussion is that even though Kerr County is not large enough (population-wise) to adopt a fire code and even though we don’t have a Fire Marshal (it would likely add $130,000+ to our annual budget, which we would prefer to avoid), the State Fire Marshal’s office will send an officer to inspect any new facility to their latest Texas State Fire Codes, including NFPA 855 which covers BESS facilities (at no cost to the county!). Officer Stalder informed our court that they would likely require containment around the entire BESS facility and sufficient water stored on site to enable adequate firefighting response (at least initially). So, the message to any developers considering installing a BESS facility in Kerr County is this: we will ask the State Fire Marshals to conduct an inspection of your facility, so it had better have adequate firefighting resources including thermal runaway protection, fire sprinkler suppression systems, on-site firefighting water at all times as prescribed by NFPA 1, a minimum 10 ft of separation between BESS and property lines (to be increased to 500 yards as soon as HB 1378 is passed this session), more than one road into your site for emergency services ingress/egress, and considering the close proximity to our Gaudalupe River and potential groundwater contamination, full containment around the facility to capture any contaminated water that results from fighting a fire, should one occur. It is in your best interest to factor all of this into your development plan and cost estimates as it will all be required. It might even be better to look at another county for your project.
Many thanks to Kelly Stalder and Engineer, Eric DeArmitt, from the State Fire Marshal’s Office for coming to Kerrville to inform our commissioners’ court. They did a great job!
