Brooklyn’s Next Big Charging Hub Won’t Start With a New Substation. It Starts With a 9.5 MWh Battery.
New York City has never had an “easy mode” for EV fast charging. Space is tight, construction is expensive, and the grid in many neighborhoods was not designed for dozens of high-powered chargers firing at once.
The newest charging depot planned for Williamsburg, Brooklyn is taking a different approach: store electricity onsite, then dispense it to cars when drivers plug in. The project — backed by about 9.46 megawatt-hours of battery storage and 44 battery-integrated fast-charging units serving 88 parking spaces — is slated to open in Q2 2026, according to the developer team and multiple trade reports.
For real estate owners and urban planners, the story isn’t just “more chargers.” It’s a marker of a broader shift: in dense cities, batteries are becoming the enabling layer that makes fast charging feasible and financeable without waiting years for major utility upgrades.
Why a battery-backed depot is a different animal
Traditional DC fast charging is simple in concept and hard in practice: big chargers pull big power from the grid in real time. In a dense neighborhood, that often means transformer upgrades, new switchgear, and sometimes a long, uncertain interconnection queue.
A battery-backed hub flips the logic. The site can pull power more steadily (often off-peak), store it, and then deliver high power to vehicles in short bursts when drivers arrive. That “buffer” can reduce the peak load the site demands from the grid at any given moment — which matters for both interconnection feasibility and operating cost.
That’s the core promise of the Brooklyn project. XCharge North America and Energy Plus (operating the site under its “Eplug” brand) say the depot is designed for dense, high-demand urban environments.
The CRE reason this matters: demand charges and “peak pain”
If you manage a commercial meter, you already know the trap: your bill is not just energy (kWh). It’s also how hard you hit the system at your worst moment.
Many commercial customers pay demand charges tied to their peak usage during a billing period, and those charges can represent a large share of total cost depending on the tariff. Clean Energy Group’s demand-charge primer notes demand charges can account for 30% to 70% of a commercial customer’s monthly bill in many cases.
Battery-backed charging is, at its best, an anti-peak tool. It’s a way to provide “fast charging experience” while keeping the site’s grid draw more controlled — which can be the difference between a project that pencils and a project that becomes a demand-charge horror story.
Brooklyn is the case study, but the trend is national
The federal Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has been studying “battery-buffered” fast charging specifically for grid-constrained sites, framing it as a practical option when traditional upgrades are too costly or too slow. The private market is moving in the same direction:
ElectricFish has been pitching battery-integrated DC fast charging as a way to deploy high-power charging without stressing the grid, with public case-study materials describing “grid-constrained EV charging” deployments and a containerized approach.
FreeWire has long marketed battery-integrated DC fast charging as a way to connect to lower-power service and reduce infrastructure needs; public presentations describe battery-integrated fast charging designed to limit grid impact.
These approaches differ by vendor and configuration, but they rhyme: use storage and power electronics to turn a difficult interconnection problem into a more manageable behind-the-meter design problem.
The “urban charging” challenge is bigger than Brooklyn
Nationally, charging infrastructure is still growing, with fast charging as one of the hottest categories. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center reports DC fast charging ports have been increasing quarter to quarter (for example, +7.4% in Q2 2024).
Cities face a specific gap: many drivers don’t have a driveway. That means public charging has to work more like urban infrastructure — curbside Level 2, garage charging, and strategically placed fast charging for high-turnover users.
That’s why you’re seeing experimentation on both ends of the spectrum in New York: from battery-backed fast charging depots like this one in Williamsburg to pole-mounted Level 2 concepts designed to avoid disruptive construction.
What batteries change for buildings and parking operators
Battery-backed charging depots are essentially a preview of how batteries are likely to show up inside commercial properties over the next few years — not just as backup, but as an operating system upgrade.
For building owners, there are three building-scale “battery jobs” that matter:
Peak shaving for NOI defense
A well-controlled battery can reduce the building’s peak demand and help limit demand charges.Electrification shock absorbers
If you add EV charging, heat pumps, or new electric loads, batteries can help smooth the transition — limiting how often your site hits a new peak that resets demand charges or triggers electrical upgrades.Customer experience insurance
In public charging, the experience is the product. A battery buffer can help keep charging speeds more consistent even when the local grid connection is constrained — which matters in dense urban markets where uptime and predictability drive repeat use.
The fine print owners should ask about
Battery-backed charging is not magic. It’s infrastructure — and owners should treat it like infrastructure.
If you’re an owner, investor, or municipal decision-maker evaluating a battery-backed charging proposal, the questions are straightforward:
What grid connection is actually required, and what upgrades are still needed? (Battery buffering can reduce required service size, but it doesn’t always eliminate upgrades.)
How is the battery dispatched — and who controls it? (Is it optimized for charging sessions, for demand management, or both?)
What’s the operating plan for maintenance and safety? (Batteries bring permitting, fire-code review, and insurer scrutiny — and those factors can become schedule drivers.)
What happens when utilization grows? (Does the site have expansion rights for more storage, more dispensers, or higher power?)
The bigger picture: storage is becoming the enabler layer
For a long time, the EV charging story has been told as a hardware story: more chargers, faster chargers, better plugs.
The Brooklyn depot story is a reminder that the next chapter is often a power-shaping story: using batteries, controls and behind-the-meter design to make charging viable in places where the grid is constrained and real estate is expensive.
In other words: fast charging is no longer just a “parking lot problem.” In many cities, it’s becoming a distributed energy problem, with batteries increasingly becoming the solution.
