National Grid Ventures, co-owner of Long Island’s first two battery storage plants, has withdrawn plans for a half-dozen other plants across the region, even as it works with partner NextEra Energy Resources to overhaul a plant in Montauk that’s offline. National Grid Ventures, a division of London-based National Grid whose U.S. operation owns a fleet of Long Island power plants and the regional natural gas system, had been listed in a state grid-connection database as proposing battery plants in West Babylon, Southampton, Far Rockaway, Port Jefferson, Wading River and Glenwood Landing.

Together the projects represented hundreds of megawatts of potential energy storage, some using space at power stations National Grid owns from its acquisition of KeySpan in 2007. (The plants were previously owned by the former LILCO.)

Mark Harrington reports in NEWSDAY that New York Independent System Operator, which manages requests to connect to power grids across the state, previously had proposals for about 60 battery-storage facilities for Long Island in 2025. That list has since been whittled to 20. "National Grid is not planning to develop any additional battery sites on Long Island at this time," other than the two on the South Fork, National Grid Ventures spokesman Will Brunelle told NEWSDAY. "The other proposals were withdrawn in favor of opportunities that better aligned with our business priorities."

National Grid was listed as proposing battery plants in Wading River, Southampton and Glenwood Landing. The two existing facilities on the South Fork, in Montauk and in East Hampton, have been operating under contract to LIPA since 2018. LIPA’s 20-year contracts to use the facilities, which are rated at 5-megawatts each, amount to a combined $109 million.

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Suffolk County health department testing of Peconic River samples following last week’s sewage discharge at an East Main Street construction site have shown “bacteriological indicator levels …. well below NYS Standards for bathing beaches” a health department official wrote in an email to Riverhead Sewer District Superintendent Tim Allen yesterday. Denise Civiletti reports on Riverheadlocal.com that the Suffolk Health Department has lifted a Jan. 14 health advisory urging the public against recreating in the tidal waters of the Peconic. The agency said in a press release “recent analysis of surface water samples collected from the potentially affected area indicates this area is suitable for primary contact recreation.” “SCDHS took multiple rounds of samples for bacterial contamination at various locations in the tidal portion of Peconic River. Results were unremarkable and do not suggest any sewage-related contamination,” Suffolk County Associate Public Health Sanitarian Nancy Pierson said in her email to Allen. A break in a Riverhead Sewer District pipe at the 203-213 East Main Street construction site on Jan. 14 resulted in a discharge of approximately 10,000 gallons of untreated wastewater at the site, located a short distance from the river. Allen said last week the situation was quickly “mitigated” and there was no visible evidence of the discharged wastewater contaminating the river. The property under construction is being developed by Heatherwood with a 165-unit apartment building. Allen told the Riverhead Town Board last Thursday that the discharged wastewater “saturated into the ground” so “there was no cleanup.” The contractor has a dewatering box on site because the shallow depth to groundwater requires dewatering during excavation for sewer pipes and the building foundation.

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The Calverton Civic Association is urging members of the public to attend this evening’s Riverhead Town Zoning Board of Appeals meeting at 6 p.m. to raise concerns about a proposed construction and demolition debris processing plant at 1792 Middle Road, which is currently the site of a single family...

With the growing prevalence of cameras in public spaces and what some refer to as a "surveillance state," many citizens are concerned with the widespread use of license plate readers and related video technologies in police departments. James Kiernan is Chief of Police for the Town of Southampton police department. He joins the panel to discuss the practical and local applications of video surveillance and how he views law enforcement's moral precedent to use technology available to them for the sake of public safety. The topic was prompted by a recent article from the East End Beacon about the seemingly sudden rise in solar-powered traffic cameras across the East End.

Live on WLIW-FM Saturday at 10am, and on demand right here where you get podcasts.

Every 7 minutes on average, a crash causes death, injury or significant damage on Long Island.

Cars playing cat and mouse on the Southern State Parkway.

Motorists regularly pushing 90 mph on the Long Island Expressway.

Drivers casually blowing through stop signs and hitting excessive speeds in residential neighborhoods.

On Long Island roadways, crashes that lead to serious injuries or death often do not involve a singular cause.

Sometimes drugs or alcohol are at play. Other times, it's the weather or motorists driving aggressively or while distracted.

But one thread connecting the bulk of the most serious crashes on Long Island is speed.

"People don't realize just how dangerous speeding is and how much they're increasing the risks of having an accident by routinely speeding," said Stuart Cameron, a former chief of the Suffolk County Police Department. "They need to just slow down…Probably the most dangerous thing that people do on Long Island is to drive their cars."

Robert Brodsky and Michael O'Keeffe report in NEWSDAY that from enhanced driver education and beefed-up enforcement to lowered speed limits and improved road designs, experts contend there are a multitude of ways to reduce Long Islanders' need for speed.

But in a region where most of its 3 million residents use a vehicle to get to work or school or to navigate their daily lives, Long Islanders' desire to quickly get where they're going has made the roads increasingly dangerous, according to data analyzed by Newsday and interviews with more than a dozen traffic safety experts, law enforcement officials and victims of speed-related crashes.

On Long Island, 65 people were killed in 2024 in crashes where police determined that speed was a contributing factor, up from 51 such fatalities in 2019, according to data from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research in Albany. Across Long Island, speed was a factor in more than 35% of all fatal crashes in 2024, the data shows.

Meanwhile, crashes involving serious injuries spiked to a 10-year high in 2024, at 353, according to Institute data.

"Speeding is avoidable — it is dangerous, and it can be deadly," Transportation Department spokesman Stephen Canzoneri said. "There is no question that speeding makes crashes worse on Long Island and across New York State."

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Long Island school districts would see an increase of 3.8% in state aid under New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget proposal, which would allocate $200 million more to the region’s schools in 2026-27, a Newsday analysis found.

The proposed aid package for Long Island schools totals nearly $5.5 billion, according to aid projection figures released yesterday.

If approved by the state legislature, the governor’s proposal would boost funding for most school districts in Nassau and Suffolk.

Nine districts would see modest declines in their total aid.

Dandan Zou and Michael R. Ebert report in NEWSDAY that state aid makes up about 30% of the total revenue for schools on Long Island, with the majority funded through local property taxes. School taxation makes up roughly two thirds of homeowners' tax bills.

Governor Hochul's plan calls for a minimum increase of 1% in Foundation Aid for all districts. Foundation Aid is the largest source of school revenue from the state and represents “new money,” compared with expense-based funding that comes in the form of reimbursements, said Bob Vecchio, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association.

Although the overall amount of Foundation Aid for the region would rise by 2.9% to nearly $4 billion under Hochul's budget plan, educators noted 73 of Long Island’s 121 districts would only see the minimum increase.

“This is an encouraging first step but there’s still work to be done,” Vecchio said of the governor’s...