Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to expand large-scale solar projects across rural upstate New York is drawing sharp scrutiny from Washington — and from a prominent country music artist — as critics question whether the state is moving too quickly to greenlight developments “without fully accounting for their long term costs.”
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and country singer John Rich have signed onto a letter criticizing the Hochul administration over what they describe as the industrial use of prime farmland for solar energy facilities, warning that rural communities could be left carrying the financial and practical burden.
“Nothing is more insulting to hardworking New Yorkers than Albany politicians who think they know it all and enthusiastically override local control and railroad local communities,” Zeldin told The Post.
“The recent actions of Hochul and her allies to force upstate communities to take on the burden of far more solar farms on agricultural land is on-brand elitism that New Yorkers have grown to despise.”
Zeldin, a former Long Island congressman, said the letter is intended to press Hochul for “answers” about what he called her “heavy-handed steamrolling over America’s most productive farmland.”
The demand for scrutiny comes after The Post reported on growing frustration in communities across New York, where residents have argued the projects threaten to scar rural landscapes while creating potential economic and environmental risks.
Residents told The Post they have been largely shut out of meaningful conversations about the solar developments, saying public outreach has amounted to little more than scripted town hall-style meetings hosted by developers.
A third federal agency, the Small Business Administration, has also entered the dispute, raising concerns about what it described as “regulatory arbitrage” that could disadvantage small farmers.
“New York has two-and-a-half-million small businesses and we’re watching a state apparatus go against these small businesses in favor of 18 large solar farms that are going to only raise the cost of operating for those … small businesses, which employ nearly half of New York’s population,” SBA chief Kelly Loeffler told The Post in an exclusive interview. “This is an example of big government overreach. That is the promise of socialism.”
As for the farmland itself, “America has become a net importer of food, as of the Biden administration, because of policy that disrespects agriculture and tries to replace agriculture with climate activism,” Loeffler said. “These are farmers operating a small business designed to feed, fuel and clothe America. And the climate lobby is exerting pressure through these regulatory bodies to really have regulatory arbitrage against small businesses.”
On July 10, the Trump Administration appointed Rich, of the Nashville duo Big & Rich, as Special Envoy for American Landowners under the USDA — with a primary mission to “be an advocate for farmers, ranchers, foresters & other landowners with matters related to renewable energy development projects … ,” according to a White House press release.
Rich has turned all eyes on New York, where 18 solar complexes are being developed across the state, including 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.
The solar bonanza is part of New York’s green energy mandate that went into effect with 2019’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) and requires 70% of statewide electricity to come from “renewable” sources, along with a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels and at least 3,000 megawatts of energy storage capacity.
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.
The state has taken a bold, first-in-the-nation move to sidestep the federal USDA soil ranking system, which is used to identify and protect the nation’s most high-yield farmland.
“We have a lot of ways to produce electricity: nuclear, natural gas, coal, hydro. We only have one way to grow food, and that’s prime farmland,” Robert Bryce, a Texas-based author and energy industry insider, told The Post. “New York really needs to take a sober look at what is really happening here because this headlong rush to pave rural America is a big mistake.”
In 2020 New York’s energy authority, NYSERDA, quietly replaced references to the USDA national standard “Prime Farmland” with New York’s own “Mineral Soil Groups (MSG) 1-4” in renewable energy guidance and incentive programs, an analysis by The Post reveals.
This, critics claim, allowed New York to have its own in-house metric to set rules for what counts as “high-value” farmland — including what taxes and penalties developers have to pay, or not, for building on the most productive soils.
Rollins and other Trump administration officials have blasted the new soil ranking system as a scheme to fast-track solar projects onto historically high-yield prime farmland and bypass the more restrictive federal classifications.
Meanwhile, Hochul has run in the opposite direction regarding data centers, announcing last week a moratorium of up to one year on construction of new ones that use more than 50 megawatts of electricity — roughly enough to power 40,000 homes.
Comparable data centers sit on a modest 15-40 acre sites. But New York has already placed industrial-scale solar complexes on an estimated 11,000 acres of USDA-certified prime farmland, according to an analysis by the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
The USDA has the ability to block taxpayer dollars and limit subsidies to solar projects sitting on certified prime farmland.
While there is heavy overlap, tension has emerged between the two ranking systems. In their letter, Rollins and Zeldin point to the Mill Point Solar complex, a proposed 250-megawatt facility sitting on 2,600 acres in Montgomery County.
“USDA’s classification system identified more than 82% of the affected land as prime farmland or its equivalent, while New York’s MSG system counted only 11% of that same land as prime,” the letter stated regarding that site.
“On some parcels where panels are proposed, USDA considers the acreage to be entirely prime farmland or its equivalent, while New York classifies less than 5% — or none — of it as prime.”
Montgomery County, west of Albany and one of the state’s poorest areas, is in the crosshairs for 18,000 acres of solar complexes — larger than the island of Manhattan and over 7% of the county’s entire geographic area.
But even all that land will produce an abysmal amount of electricity. An analysis by The Post reveals that in upstate New York, a dizzying 24,000 acres of solar panels — roughly the footprint of Paris, France — are required to equal the output of one typical natural gas facility, which takes up about 25 acres and powers 250,000 homes annually.
Still, environmentalists, along with Zeldin’s EPA, are sounding the alarm on an impending tsunami of green energy garbage which they fear Hochul has no plan to deal with. Industrial solar panels have a lifespan of roughly 15 years and contain toxic metals like lead, cadmium and arsenic.
“In a few years, the volume of discarded panels will be equal to or greater than all the panels being deployed today. We are facing a massive solid waste disposal crisis for which there appears to be, at the moment anyway, no recycling infrastructure in place,” said Bryce.
A spokesperson for Gov. Hochul boasted that New York was a “national leader in agricultural land protections” and had “invested hundreds of millions of dollars toward protecting agricultural land since the inception of the State Farmland Protection Program in 1992.”
New York “maintains robust environmental and agricultural protections for the development of new energy infrastructure projects. Under Governor Kathy Hochul, the state has increased its support of the Farmland Protection Program, which has now preserved more than 138,000 acres of prime farmland. New York energy project development is occurring only on land that is willingly leased by landowners,” the spokesperson told The Post.
The governor’s office has yet to respond to the letter, which set a July 26 deadline, a representative from the EPA confirmed.
