New York State Renewable Permitting Scandal

Roger Caiazza

Paraphrasing the Washington Post “Environmental Protections Die in Darkness”, could be a slogan for New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (CLCPA) monomaniacal emphasis on renewable energy development.  Reasonable limits have never been established on wind and solar projects, so developers have been given free rein to build wherever is most convenient and cheap without regard to the environment.  If a recent article in the New York Post is any indication, however, that may be changing.  I explain the context of solar development in New York in this article.

Background

The CLCPA has been an exercise in political pandering to emotion-driven activists convinced that climate change is an existential threat that can be solved by transitioning to an energy system reliant on wind, solar, and energy storage.  I have been writing for years about the lack of a feasibility analysis that demonstrates that relying on renewable energy that does not provide energy all the time, including the times when needed the most, does not work well in New York’s climate and high latitude, and relies on resources that tend to fail at the same time over large areas. Instead of an ordered approach to decarbonization, New York lawmakers enacted a transition plan that consists of building as much wind and solar as possible, as fast as possible, and assumed that it would all work out. 

In the first year after the CLCPA was enacted renewable development did not get permitted as fast as the developers and activists wanted.  In April 2020, New York lawmakers enacted the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act that created the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES) to implement a consolidated, expedited siting and permitting process for major renewable energy facilities.  Because New York progressive lawmakers know everything, the idea that there should be conditions on development was not included in the law.  There was no provision to ask the Department of Agriculture and Markets for recommendations on limits for the taking of prime farmland.  The Public Service Commission was not asked if solar developers should have technology mandates like tilting axis solar panels or recommendations not to build solar facilities in the Great Lake snowbelts that get 20 feet of snow a year.   The Department of Health did not establish noise limits to protect industrial neighbors of wind turbines.  In every instance there have been egregious impacts that the ORES permitting process has ignored as they rubber stamped approvals despite the strenuous efforts of local groups concerned with those impacts. 

The more I learn about the permitting process the more I am convinced that most New Yorkers have no clue about these destructive policies.  The local grassroots organizations have been knee-capped by this law and have failed to kill projects that cause what I am sure state agencies would agree are unacceptable impacts.  Publicity is needed to expose this scandal. The grassroots organizations opposed to unfettered renewable development that has no safeguards usually count themselves lucky to get a mention in a local newspaper or TV station, but their reach is limited.  They have not been able to get this issue publicized enough.

There is another egregious impact. I have no doubts that if the lawmakers had asked the Department of Environmental Conservation to recommend limits on destruction of rare and endangered species habitat, they would certainly have demanded limits on fragmenting habitat.  That did not happen and it has come to the attention of a social media influencer who is articulate, passionate and mad.  She also has a platform.

Alexandra Fasulo

Alexandra Fasulo has a Substack called House of Green with the stated goal “to equip you with the information and stories you need to farm, garden, homestead, futurestead, set up agricultural education businesses, and heal the environment.”   Her overall Substack presence (including House of Green and other titles) is listed as having “53K+ subscribers” and ranked around #13 in the Climate & Environment category.  Her Youtube channel has 384K subscribers and videos routinely get tens of thousands of views.  In her latest endeavor she established  a farm and her followers can monitor her homestead progress. 

When she found out about the nearby planned 100 MW Fort Edward Solar Project she attended a public hearing.  It was a wakeup call.  I think her public reach as social media influencer is going to have an impact as exemplified by the fact that the New York Post reached out to her.  She gave him the overview and connected him with other people in the article.

Fort Edward Solar

Chadwick Moore’s article describes Fasulo’s initial reaction to the Fort Edard Solar Project at a public hearing:

“There was nearly unanimous opposition to this project. So, I thought it wouldn’t go through. That’s how representative democracy works, right? Wrong.”

I had the same reaction about this project.  As shown in the following map that was used in the article, the project is within the Audubon-designated Fort Edward Grasslands Important Bird Area and the NYNHP Raptor Winter Concentration Area.  It also surrounds the NYS DEC Grassland Wildlife Management Area on three sides.  Note that the developer frequently points out that their project does not surround the Wildlife Management Area on all sides. The idea that fields of solar panels could be permitted adjacent to a wildlife management area is beyond my comprehension.

The Fort Edwards site, in red, is in the middle of a state-recognized wildlife sanctuary.

Grassland Bird Trust/ American Land Rescue Fund

I admire Fasulo because she did not take the rejection of her concerns sitting down.  She established a non-profit American Land Rescue Fund to “defend America’s land through law and action.”  Because the permitting documents are heavily redacted, she hired independent consultants to assess the environmental impact.

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.

Moore goes on to describe 17 other solar projects in Upstate New York that have their own issues. 

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 (6.25-square-mile), 500-megawatt Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County and the 2,000-acre (3.1-square-mile) Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County, as shown on The Post’s map.

To add insult to injury, many of the multibillion-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. 

He describes a smaller project in Copake NY. 

A hundred 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 10 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.

Moore also describes a lawsuit against ORES in Montgomery County. 

Developers were permitted to gobble up 6,400 acres (10 square miles) — 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.

Issues

The article describes the futility of changing the climate with solar power and explains that solar resources in New York are not strong.  According to the New York Independent System Operator summary of renewable performance utility-scale solar facilities provided between 16 and 19% of the maximum possible generation over the last four years.   There is a bigger problem.  Electric resource planning must be based on the worst-case event.  During last winter’s extreme winter weather 18-day episode the daily solar capacity available was less than 10% half the time and less than 5% three days.  I also showed that this episode proves that in these events all short-term energy storage would be depleted early, leaving insufficient renewable generation to both meet demand and recharge storage systems. As a result, a new dispatchable emissions-free resource is needed to keep the lights on.

I recommend checking out the article’s map of the 18 solar projects currently under consideration by ORES that extend from far western New York to the Canadian border in the north.  All these projects are needed to provide New York City with zero-emissions electricity as part of the CLCPA.  Because they are so spread-out transmission upgrades will undoubtedly be required, if not for these projects, then surely for all the other renewable projects necessary.

The experiences recounted in the article indicate that unfettered renewable energy development in New York is causing demonstrable environmental impacts.  Given environmental advocacy outrage over environmental impacts of data centers it is disappointing that they have not expressed their concerns over the more extensive impacts of renewable energy development.

At the end of the day this outcome is solely on the lawmakers who supported these laws.  They never enabled state agencies to fulfill their missions, and I think you could say they prevented them from doing so in the process.  The developers cannot be faulted for taking advantage of the situation and ORES staff is simply following the law.  Prior to 2019, the state agencies would have said the environmental impacts f Fort Edward Solar are unacceptable and asked the developer to build their facility somewhere with less impacts.

Conclusion

Montgomery County lawmaker Michael Muhlebeck summed up the scandal:

“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,” she added.

Publicity is needed to expose this scandal. I hope that the power of social media exemplified by Alexandra Fasulo can bring this to the attention of enough New Yorkers that the policies can be changed to protect the environment and interests of the local communities impacted by these industrial developments.  The only way this can be fixed is for legislative change.

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  Dealing with the RGGI regulatory and political landscapes is challenging enough that affected entities seldom see value in speaking out about fundamental issues associated with the program.  He has been involved in the RGGI program process since its inception and has no such restrictions when writing about the details of the RGGI program.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.