Large renewable energy projects are blindsiding upstate communities

 A new state office creates a one-stop shop tor renewable energy developers to get necessary approvals but frequently preempts local laws in the process. There has been a surge in solar projects across New York, often dividing families and communities. 

 

By Ezra Bitterman, Staff Writer

 

Sunday   Nov 9, 2025

OAKFIELD — For much of this past summer, the piercing clangs of metal on metal penetrated the bucolic farm country surrounding Donna Harris' 30-acre hay farm nestled in the heart of Genesee County.

The noise from the massive solar project was largely the result of steel beams being driven into the earth to hold up the thousands of panels that will convert sunlight into energy. For Harris, whose residence is part of the farm, the jarring work will forever change the viewshed of her property that sits about 40 miles west of Rochester.

“My horses can’t take this,” Harris recalled telling the developer at one point, referring to her equines she named Sonny, Fred Astaire, Tal and Lola. 

Upon its scheduled completion next year, the project known as Cider Solar will be the state’s largest solar facility, consuming 2,452 acres of rural farmland — a little more than 25 times the size of Albany’s Washington Park. 

 

For struggling farmers or landowners seeking to get compensation for their properties, the payoffs can be lucrative and often far exceed what can be reaped from raising crops. Jim Czub, a Schaghticoke soybean and corn grower, said he can make up to six times more on land dedicated to solar instead of harvesting crops. 

Additionally, lucrative payments from renewable energy developers are lowering taxes and creating rainy day funds for many of the small upstate communities that house them.

The Genesee County project is one of many renewable energy endeavors being developed upstate to try and meet the state’s clean energy mandates and the growing power demand expected from electrification regulations and artificial intelligence data centers. 

And nearly all of the projects are being overseen by a first-of-its-kind office the state Legislature created five years ago to enable renewable energy projects to speed through review processes, even if that means pushing aside local control. 

The Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission has established a one-stop shop for renewable power developers to get necessary siting and environmental approvals for their energy and transmission facilities.

The intent was to streamline the permitting process and also prevent local zoning regulations that are deemed “unreasonably burdensome” to be allowed to block or slow down projects. The fallout has been that local municipal agencies, and also the voices of their residents, have been frequently big-footed in the process, according to a Times Union review of multiple projects.

For example, South Ripley Solar, a large-scale project in Chautauqua County, was able to override several sections of the town of Ripley’s Solar Law. And in some cases, municipalities agree to have local rules removed for renewable energy developers.

The rapid development of solar projects across upstate is helping New York try to reach the mandates of the 2019 Climate Act — which many have said are unattainable under the statute’s time frame — but also dividing communities and families. Pastoral farmlands and environmentally sensitive terrain are often the recipient of the projects, which can bring a financial windfall for some while creating eyesores and consternation for their neighbors.

Back in Oakfield, the Cider Solar project has “put a strain on everybody’s relationships,” Harris said. 

She had considered leasing her land to solar developers because she supports “green energy,” but decided against it after she said they became pushy. Harris and her two siblings each inherited a share of their family’s farm. Now, Harris is the only one still farming for a living as her siblings have decided to lease their share of the property to energy developers.  

“It’s hard because I know how hard my parents worked for it,” Harris said. “My property here is the only little thing left of my parents that is not going into solar, which is really sad.”

Harris said she hardly speaks with her siblings anymore.

 

‘Pitting neighbor against neighbor’

Some residents are turning to local officials like Robert Crossen, the supervisor in the town of Alabama in northwest Genesee County, to voice concerns over incoming renewable projects. On a recent drive through roads lined with colorful fall foliage, birds were soaring in tight formation overhead as Crossen listed off the names of residents who’d approached him with concerns about a proposed solar project.

He pointed to a newly built house, saying, “young couple comes to find out, right up to their back door is going to be solar panels.” 

Renewable development puts him in a tough position because local governments have little ability to fight the projects and almost no say in whether to approve them. 

“I feel bad because these people who lease the parcels, I understand why they’re doing it with so much money (at stake),” he said. “But the people that are impacted by it, I also know, and they’re very upset about it, too, so it’s kind of pitting neighbor against neighbor.”

Alabama Solar, which is slated to take 550 acres of land in Alabama and other neighboring towns, stands in stark contrast to other major projects in the community, Crossen said. The Science, Technology & Advanced Manufacturing Park in Alabama is home to advanced manufacturing facilities. Residents were able to negotiate some of the planning stipulations, ensuring the project presents limited visual impact.

Municipalities are still responsible for approving small-scale solar projects that don’t create enough electricity to fall under the state’s jurisdiction. New York is also a nationwide leader in those smaller community solar projects.

Yet, growth is slowing because some towns are adopting more restrictive solar laws in response to the large projects getting built without oversight from the localities, said Noah Ginsburg, executive director of the New York Solar Energy Industries Association. The irony is that the state can preempt local zoning for big projects, meaning it mostly affects small projects. 

 

‘Exactly as is’

Jason Pfotenhauer, director of planning in St. Lawrence County, is all for renewable energy development. The county created a map of locations where solar would cause minimal disruption to the community’s prime agricultural land. Pfotenhauer said that while the state process mandates public collaboration, it still gives developers the “upper hand.” 

“(I want) more genuine engagement with the local municipalities,” Pfotenhauer said. “Let’s listen to the local municipality, rather than saying, if their local (regulations) are excessive, we can override them, and (the state and developer) get to decide what’s excessive.” He added that when communities have come up with alternative plans, they’re often “discounted” by regulators. 

The tension described by Pfotenhauer surfaced during deliberations over the 1,700-acre Rich Road Solar Project in the St. Lawrence County town of Canton. Rich Road isn’t going to be operational until 2028, but it has a permit from the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission.
Residents expressed discontent with the developer over the project’s impacts on the Route 11 corridor, which leads into Canton.

“Part of what makes Canton attractive to visitors and residents is our idyllic setting as an agricultural community situated between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondacks, where there are plentiful rivers, lakes and ponds,” Canton Village Trustee Anna Sorensen said at a public hearing. 

The project bucked several local zoning rules and Canton’s comprehensive master plan. Part of the project will occupy areas of Canton zoned residential-agricultural.

“If solar panels occupy these zones, all potential future residential development will be effectively destroyed,” the town wrote in a review of the project. The town also asked for the development to occur outside its commercial district to give precedence to businesses with a greater potential to create jobs. 

It appears the town’s pleas went unanswered. The project’s approved footprint is unchanged from a 2023 proposed version presented to community members. 

Evergreen trees and shrubs are going to be planted along Route 11, where panels will be visible, but they’ll take almost 10 years to reduce visual impact, according to filings from the developer. Even when constructed, they’ll only partially obscure the panels. More vegetative screening will be added in response to community concerns, a spokesperson for the project said. 

At a public hearing, Pfotenhauer had objected to a plan to remove “150 acres of forest land and hedgerows.” But state regulators took no issue with the removal of the vegetation in a report filed afterwards, contending it was the minimum amount necessary to avoid shading the panels. 

“Thank you for your input, we’ve heard you, and we’re going to leave the project exactly as is,” Pfotenhauer said, describing state officials' reaction to local issues with the Rich Road project.

James Denn, a spokesman for the Department of Public Service, said renewable energy developers are strongly encouraged to “resolve issues regarding local law compliance” with the municipal officials rather than push to overcome their rules. He also noted that the state has preempted local rules for siting renewable and other energy projects dating back decades.

But newer rules require projects to be approved or denied within one year. And as the number of large-scale solar projects has ramped up, the state office is facing more scrutiny from residents and municipal officials who are often blindsided by a process that’s out of their hands. And according to New York State Energy Research and Development Authority data, there will be six times more large-scale renewable energy projects in service in the next five years than were brought online in the past decade.

 

20,000 pages

Developers usually enter agreements with local governments where in exchange for a property and sales tax abatement, they pay a lump sum each year. 

The town of Mount Morris in Livingston County receives about $300,000 a year from a utility-scale solar project, Supervisor David DiSalvo said. The payments make up roughly 25% of the town’s budget, allowing DiSalvo to lower property taxes.

“The state agencies that were involved (in siting the project) were probably the best teams that I’ve ever worked with,” DiSalvo said.

Renewable energy projects don’t create many long-term jobs, but do have a “positive” impact, said Molly Ryan, director of economic development for Clinton County. The town of Clinton eliminated local property taxes with the money coming in from wind farms. Ryan said she isn’t in favor of taking away local control but sees renewable development as a driver of the local economy. 

Even though communities get financial benefits, it’s unclear if they get a fair shake.

“There’s an outsized power imbalance between industry and local government,” said Edward W. De Barbieri, an Albany Law School professor who researches community benefit agreements.

Developers may obscure what they paid to lease land as a “trade secret or through other means,” hindering transparent “benefits bargaining,” De Barbieri added. Host benefit arrangements traditionally have been more common in cities rather than small towns. Now, with renewable development, AI data centers and a surge in advanced manufacturing, that dynamic is shifting with more large developments coming into rural areas. 

Representatives of the Rich Road project delivered around 20,000 pages of documents to Pfotenhauer to comply with the initial application requirements outlined under the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission. 

Reviewing so much material isn’t feasible and likely futile because nearly every large renewable project has been approved by regulators, Pfotenhauer said.

“You could produce one piece of paper and get the same result. It’s going to get approved,” he said. 

The office denied Shepherd’s Run, a solar project in the Columbia County town of Copake, after a group of farmers purchased some of the land targeted for development. The project was quickly redesigned and submitted again. 

Local governments get funds from developers to hire attorneys, but Crossen said the amount is insufficient. 

Alabama, Oakfield and Batavia will collectively split a pot of $130,000 to work with the Alabama Solar project in Genesee County. Crossen said attorneys and consultants are expensive, but the state won’t communicate with the town without them.

“It’s absolutely crazy,” Crossen said.

 

‘We have bled’

Thirty years ago, Matt Landers sped 100 mph through the quiet, field-lined roads of Elba. Landers was excited to be home again from college. His eagerness was short-lived. Landers took a left directly into a forklift. Despite not wearing a seatbelt, he sustained no injuries but found himself buried in three crates of onions as they fell from the lift into his car through a shattered windshield.

Today, Landers is the manager of Genesee County, which includes Elba, a town 30 miles from Rochester that’s so committed to growing onions there’s a community effort to paint the local water tower to look like one.

 Now, Landers doesn’t travel the roads of Elba with reckless abandon.

But there are roads in Elba Landers has chosen to avoid because, “it’s just too heartbreaking to see what is happening to the community that I’ve grown up in and chosen to stay in for the rest of my life.” 

Cider Solar and Excelsior Solar are consuming swaths of both Elba and the nearby town of Byron. More than 10% of Byron’s tillable farmland is going to the Excelsior project, according to data from the town’s comprehensive plan and the project’s land use plan.

That’s a significant impact, given 73% of the town’s land is agricultural. No New York county dedicates a higher percentage of land to agriculture than Genesee County, according to a report last year from the state comptroller’s office. Sheep will graze on about 300 acres of the Cider Solar project to keep some of the project’s footprint in active agriculture. About 70% of projects approved by the energy siting office include a plan to use some land for both renewable energy and agriculture, Denn said.  

Driving through Elba and Byron recently during the construction is striking. Colorful fall foliage frames Norman Rockwell-esque farm homes in parts of town. That pastoral imagery is offset by the construction vehicles pouring into fields of solar panels, with protruding metal posts and mounds of topsoil visible in many areas.

Landers' concerns are twofold. He’s worried Genesee County is losing prime agricultural land to solar. He’s also wary that renewable development is growing so quickly that it will forever change the county’s rural appeal.

Nearly half of the Cider Solar project is sited on high-quality soil, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Most of the Excelsior project is on high-quality soil as well. 

Genesee County has a smart growth plan in conjunction with municipalities to buttress the regional economy while preserving agricultural land. Rapid growth in renewable development without municipal control “throws that (plan) out the window,” Landers said. “Allowing for thousands of acres of prime farmland to be gobbled up for these developments without local say is wrong,” he added.

In announcements touting renewable energy development, the state sometimes refers to the farmland that the projects are built on as “vacant,” drawing ire from residents.

“When they (downstate politicians) come up here and they see huge swaths of farmland, they think, ‘Hey, look at all this vacant land available for development,’” Landers said. “That’s not how we think of it.”

Molly Torrey Anderson grows onions and other vegetables on more than 10,000 acres in Elba. She’s a 12th-generation farmer and said she’s a “hard no” on putting solar on her land. 

“We’re in the business of farming and producing vegetables and feeding this country, and I take pride in that,” Anderson said. She added that farmers who lease land to solar builders are going against the “natural progression,” where land is sold or passed on to the next generation. 

Other farmers see solar as the only way to retire. 

“(Farming) is not your legacy, take care of your family first,” Ray Dykeman’s dad used to tell him. 

Farming is becoming more and more difficult because of high production costs from inflation and a combination of state and federal policies. New overtime wages for farmworkers are particularly burdensome, Dykeman said. Dairy producers are being asked to “overproduce milk,” leading to break-even margins.

“They’re (the state) very concerned about my animals, they’re very concerned about my land, but I’ve learned over the years that they could really give a crap about the men and women that own these farms,” Dykeman said. 

Over and over, Dykeman turned away solar developers who’d stop by to discuss leasing some of his 3,000-acre dairy and corn farm in Fultonville. Then the company that pasteurized the raw milk from Dykeman’s farm went out of business. He had to quickly scale up a distribution business of his own, sending milk to New Jersey and other buyers across upstate New York.

Dykeman’s father’s words kept echoing in his head amid the economic headwinds. He eventually leased around 1,400 acres to a solar developer. 

“I want to live a life, just like everybody else does,” he said. “I don’t want to milk cows or be in charge of labor when I’m 75 years old, which a lot of farmers do.”

Dykeman also hopes dairy production will go down if producers lease land to solar. Then, the price of milk will rise, he said, allowing farmers to make a living instead of being forced out of business.

Agricultural land within two miles of energy infrastructure sold for about 18% more than farms further away, researchers from Cornell University found. This creates an incentive structure for landowners to lease and sell more to renewable energy developers instead of keeping valuable acres in production, the study asserts. Increasing property values may also push out “beginning farmers who depend on affordable land for agriculture,” the report found.

The New York Farm Bureau, a statewide organization that advocates for the interests of farmers and rural communities, is caught in the middle of the tension over renewable energy development. The organization “recognizes the inherent property rights” of land owners, but also supports a “prohibition” on government subsidies for solar projects built on “prime soils,” said Amanda Powers, a spokeswoman for the bureau.

Solar buildout in Genesee County is unlikely to slow anytime soon.

A high-voltage transmission line that carries electricity to central New York cuts through the county, allowing for solar generation projects to easily hook up to the grid. Prime farmland, which exists throughout the county, is usually flat and unshaded, allowing for the efficient setup of panels and maximum sun exposure. It creates a complex dynamic for the state because placing solar panels in strategic areas lowers the eventual cost to consumers but requires transformational shifts in towns like Byron. 

 

Counties with most megawatts of renewable energy in development

Genesee

780

Steuben

537

Montgomery

523

St. Lawrence

452

Clinton

400

Source: New York State Energy Research and Development Authority

The Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission is trying to strike a balance between listening to communities while also ensuring the regulatory environment isn’t too burdensome for projects to be built, said Jeff Freedman, an atmospheric scientist and attorney at the University at Albany.

Other states committed to building renewable energy sources, like Texas, have very little local zoning, allowing for rapid and affordable development. New York’s renewable siting process is “a balancing act,” Freedman said.

Local governments, Freedman added, are “not shut out of the process, but they are not given unlimited veto power.”

Seeing more solar production coming, Landers, the Genesee County manager, is preparing to fight future projects.

“We have bled; we have paid our fair share,” he said.

The Genesee County Legislature passed a resolution formally opposing utility-scale solar projects but leaving the door open for localities to approve smaller projects. The county’s economic development agency is not entering into tax abatement agreements with any future projects. 

But it doesn’t appear developers are going to be deterred. 

Alabama Solar is “ready to be an economic engine for Genesee County,” said Amy Varghese, a spokeswoman for EDP Renewables North America.

 

Hunger Games

Environmental groups in the North Country are concerned about solar project impacts on grassland birds. The state Department of Environmental Conservation is protecting 478 acres of former agricultural land in Fort Edward in Washington County to protect “grassland birds, whose numbers are in sharp decline in the country and in New York state.” 

A solar development slated to be built around those protected lands is sparking opposition from the Grassland Bird Trust, a group focused on preserving the habitat for birds like the endangered short-eared owl. 

As the name indicates, grassland birds build nests on the ground rather than in trees. 

“Raptors like the northern harrier need a lot of space to hunt and forage … and they can’t if you put solar panels down,” said Katherine Roome, a board member with the Grassland Bird Trust.

Right now, the area surrounding the 478 protected acres is farmland. Roome is concerned that if part of that surrounding area is covered with solar panels, the birds won’t have enough room for hunting and nesting. The trust is asking the developer, Boralex, to protect 567 acres of grassland bird habitat to make up for the project’s footprint. 

Boralex is adding 216 acres connected to the 478-acre grassland preserve, increasing the protected area to nearly 700 acres. The solar arrays will be over 1,000 feet away from the preserve in an updated version of the project’s footprint. Construction on wintering bird habitat will only occur between April and November. Boralex remains committed to communicating with the Grassland Bird Trust to find “a mitigation plan that works for all parties,” spokesman Zachary Hutchins said.

Alexandra Fasulo, a Saratoga County resident, publishes a popular Substack newsletter focused on climate and environment. She’s been lambasting the Fort Edward solar project to her more than 600,000 Instagram followers. 

“I don’t see any checks or balances on these solar corporations because they’re being coddled in the name of green energy,” Fasulo said. “I think the ironic opposite is going to happen when there’s major farmland and grassland catastrophes.”

She compared renewable development upstate to "The Hunger Games," a popular novel where distant districts are forced to give up natural resources so residents of the capital can live opulent lives. “We’re being pillaged to turn on data centers in the tri-state area,” Fasulo said.

Some Genesee County residents are getting out before the impacts of renewable development set in.  

Harris’ — the Oakfield farmer — neighbors are looking for homes in Tennessee. She isn’t. Harris and others who can’t afford to leave will be stuck with the noise, view and sullied relationships. “It just feels like we’ve been invaded,” she said. 

Nov 9, 2025

Ezra Bitterman

Investigative Reporter

Ezra Bitterman is a Joseph T. Lyons Investigative Fellow for the Times Union. He is from Los Angeles and studied Journalism at the University of Missouri. Ezra previously reported for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Columbia Missourian and Euractiv. He's reachable at Ezra.Bitterman@TimesUnion.com.

 

Renewable projects are transforming upstate New York