New York is strong-arming 18 industrial-scale solar power plants into rural communities across the state despite strong opposition from locals.
Schuylerville farmer Alexandra Fasulo had just settled into the idyllic acreage she purchased in 2023 when Governor Kathy Hochul’s bulldozers came roaring in, poised to thrash 1,800 acres of protected grassland to build a 100-megawatt-capacity solar energy complex in nearby Fort Edward, NY.
Worried chemical run-off and contamination may affect her farm, Fasulo attended a town meeting last fall to voice concerns to developers and state authorities.
“We were like serfs coming before a king. It was so much worse than I ever imagined,” Fasulo, 33, told The Post.
“There was nearly unanimous opposition to this project. So, I thought it wouldn’t go through. That’s how representative democracy works, right? Wrong.”
New York’s green energy mandate came into effect with 2019’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) which requires 70 percent of statewide electricity to come from “renewable” sources; a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels and at least 3,000 megawatts of energy storage capacity.
All this is supposed to happen by year 2030—but the deadline keeps getting pushed back.
To accomplish her Herculean green feat, Hochul set up the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission (ORES)—an agency charged with getting the projects rammed through by cutting red tape, torching environmental impact reports and squashing local pushback.
Each of the 18 sites ORES has selected will have a capacity over 25 megawatts. The agency also has an additional dozen wind projects in the works.
Some of the largest projects are the 4,000 acre, 500-megawatt Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County and the 2,000 acre Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County, as shown on The Post’s map.
To add insult to injury, many of the multi-billion dollar solar contracts have been farmed out to foreign companies—including Canada’s Boralex, France’s EDF Renewables, and South Korea’s Cypress Creek Renewables, The Post has found.
The sweeping fields of shimmering panels will generate only a “pathetic” amount of electricity in cold, cloudy upstate New York, Fasulo claims.
Critics point out that while sites like Fort Edwards are billed as 100-megawatt power plants, studies like those from the New York Independent System Operator show actual output will be about 15 percent of that number, given the gloomy climate.
Even with relentless sunshine, solar power plants have proved ineffective and burdensome. California’s $2.2 billion Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert is set to close this year after only a decade in operation, citing inefficiency and outdated tech.
Locals battling the projects told The Post solar panels are easily damaged in storms, need to be replaced every 15 years and create no local jobs.
Taking on ORES has turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare, said Fasulo.
“It’s a shadow agency. They don’t pick up the phone. They don’t answer emails. You can’t make a physical appointment with them.”
In a statement to The Post, an ORES spokeswoman said, “The staff at ORES take their responsibility for permitting these energy resources very seriously, including incorporating critical input from communities, and are focused on ensuring the best outcome for New York State consumers in every decision that comes before ORES.”
Fed up, Fasulo used the Freedom of Information Law to obtain the agency’s local wildlife impact report for the Fort Edward site and was flabbergasted at what came back.
“It was so heavily redacted it looked like the Epstein files,” she said, referencing the heavily amended portions of the millions of files on the pervert financier released by the government.
It led her to commission her own report from conservation nonprofit Hudsonia.
That report, reviewed by The Post, shows the Fort Edwards site sits inside a NYS Department of Environmental Conservation-managed grassland and bird sanctuary “well known for high species diversity of breeding grassland birds and important numbers of wintering raptors including an Endangered and a Threatened species,” the report stated.
The species impacted by the development include the endangered short-eared owl (fewer than 50 breeding pairs remain in the state, per the Grassland Bird Trust), the threatened northern harrier and 15 species of reptiles and amphibians of “conservation concern,” among many others.
100 miles south in the bucolic Hudson Valley town of Copake, local resident Sara Traberman has made fighting Big Solar her full-time job. Chicago-based developer Hecate Energy scooped up over 700 acres of productive farmland to install a planned 42-megawatt capacity solar facility, expected to go online late next year.
Locals were told to expect two years of nonstop construction where 547 dump trucks and ten pile drivers along with numerous cranes and excavators will swarm the picturesque hamlet from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. — seven days a week.
“It’s about changing the character of this town. It’s a rural, farming community. We just ask that the rules of the town and the view of what the people want for where they live is respected,” Traberman told The Post.
“It’s going to impact tourism, local traffic, the schools. It’s going to be horrible.”
An assessment by NYS Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation found that solar plant also will have an adverse impact on five historic and cultural sites in the area, with viewsheds decimated by a sea of gleaming silicon.
“[CLCPA] was a nice idea but it was put in place by ideologues. It wasn’t thought through properly and has these timelines that everyone has now acknowledged are not feasible. A cost assessment was never done. And where’s the energy going? We don’t know,” she added.
The state claims solar energy is necessary to thwart the critical, statewide emergency of “climate change.” While Article IX of the New York State constitution grants local authorities power to legislate land use, the Hochul administration has argued the state has a substantial interest in selling it off to green energy developers.
Award-winning Princeton University physicist William Happer claimed to The Post the supposed climate emergency was “non-existent” and long disproven, adding that the solar scheme was “designed to keep politicians fat and happy.”
“The public has been brainwashed,” Happer said. “There’s no evidence whatsoever of a climate emergency. There’s been no change in frequency of extreme weather. The sea level rise in New York is on the order of two millimeters per year, about the same as it’s been for the last two centuries.”
He claimed the climate scare is purely profit-driven. “It’s just the latest protection racket,” he alleged.
Federally Donald Trump has cancelled billions in solar grants and froze wind farm leasing on federal land.
In April, ORES boss Zeryai Hagos suddenly quit amid an avalanche of lawsuits against the projects, but so far judges have sided with the Hochul administration, leaving rural New Yorkers further disillusioned.
Montgomery County, west of Schenectady, is the latest local government to sue ORES. Developers were permitted to gobble up 6,400 acres—most of it active farmland—for two massive solar complexes near the towns of Canajoharie and Root.
Montgomery County Attorney Meghan Manion told The Post the litigation challenges “the grossly unlawful actions of ORES,” which “deviated from lawful procedure by choosing not to follow their own regulations in granting these [solar] permits.”
While developers cover the cost of construction, locals have to eat revenue losses on property tax for the sites, Montgomery County lawmaker Michael Muhlebeck told The Post. He also said his constituents, who are “97 percent” opposed to the projects, will likely face higher utility costs due to the increased demand that often follows large industrial projects like this.
Then there’s the cost of decommission—estimated at $30 million for one Montgomery County site, according to a report commissioned by the county—if the solar company goes belly up or decides to ditch the project.
Montgomery County already has two inactive, decaying solar farms that have languished after being abandoned by developers, with no money to take them down.
“Our county is one of the poorest in the state and that’s why we’re being targeted,” Muhlebeck said. “New York State has taken more and more from our communities and they’ve literally just shut us down. We no longer have the right to protect our residents.
“But there’s a goal that has to be met. And that goal is bigger than our local communities, our wildlife, our wetlands. And they don’t care,” he added.
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