As I've said and written for years, solar power is good in niche applications. In fact, it's only really good in niche applications. As a grid-level source of electricity, it just isn't practical; it's a low-density energy source, it's intermittent, requiring massive battery backups, and its footprint, well, it's huge. Solar power takes up, per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, far, far more land than a coal- or gas-fired power plant, and the difference is even more stark when you compare it to nuclear power. These are facts.
These facts haven't stopped the state of New York from pushing to cover thousands and thousands of acres of farmland with solar panels. Governor Kathy Hochul, who daily contends with Minnesota's Governor Walz and California's Governor Newsom for the title of "worst governor in the United States," is pushing towards just that, and it's an indescribably stupid idea.
The CO2 Coalition's Vijay Jayaraj has some thoughts.
New York is tearing up rural communities, wiping out wildlife sanctuaries, and burying prime agricultural soil under solar installation in the name of green energy. The root of this campaign is New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) of 2019, which demands that renewable sources supply 70% of the state’s electricity, that greenhouse gas emissions fall 40% below 1990 levels, and that the state build at least 3,000 megawatts of storage.
The footprint of the 18 solar power plants is staggering. The Cider Solar Farm in Genesee County will cover 4,000 acres, and the Ridge View Solar Farm in Niagara County will take another 2,000. Both were pushed through over the strong objections of the people who farm.
The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act is a Net Zero scheme by any other name. Under this catastrophically bad law, New York is expected to reach 70 percent of its electrical generation to carbon free sources, including solar and wind, by 2030 - four years hence. By 2040, the goal is to reach 100 percent. That's not possible, of course; it simply won't happen. These sources, remember, aren't carbon-free, despite the claims from Governor Hochul's office; they simply shift emissions elsewhere while at the same time managing to be unreliable, intermittent, and low energy sources.
In this case, though, it's the amount of farmland and essential wildlife habitat that is at risk.
What becomes of the animals living where these panels will sit? The Fort Edward project targets land inside a Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) grassland and bird sanctuary. DEC documents describe the area as critical for breeding grassland birds and wintering raptors.
The site hosts the short-eared owl, a bird so rare that the Grassland Bird Trust counts fewer than 50 breeding pairs in New York. The northern harrier, listed as threatened, hunts there. Fifteen species of reptiles and amphibians already of concern to biologists will lose their homes. These are key indicator species wildlife specialists monitor to judge ecosystem health.
You would expect a state that prides itself on environmental leadership to publish this information without hesitation. Instead, residents who filed Freedom of Information requests for an agency report on the Fort Edward site received a document so heavily blacked out that one local compared it to the redactions in the Epstein files. Why does a government agency need to hide a solar project’s effect on endangered owls?
We have seen, vividly illustrated in Wyoming and Montana, where the death toll of eagles and other raptors mounts day by day, that the green energy scolds only care about wildlife when it's convenient, when that wildlife doesn't stand in the way of the agenda. Nor does farmland, and New York is proposing to pave thousands and thousands of acres of valuable farmland with solar panels.
Also: Have Governor Hochul and her administration not looked at a map recently? Despite the left's constant howling about global warming, New York still gets a lot of snow in the winter. Winter is precisely when the need for reliable energy is at its peak - and it's precisely when solar panels are at their least useful. Has the state factored in the expense of having someone go out and remove the snow from these panels?
This has to be one of the most poorly thought-out "green" energy schemes ever come up with, and in that, it's up against some pretty stiff competition.
The pushback has already started.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s support of sprawling solar energy fields in rural upstate New York has caught the ire of three federal agencies — and one country music star — who are demanding answers about the state’s “rush” to approve projects “without fully accounting for their long term costs.”
USDA Sec. Brooke Rollins and EPA Chief Lee Zeldin, along with country singer John Rich, have co-signed a letter skewering the Hochul administration’s industrialization of prime farmland for solar energy complexes while potentially strapping costs to rural communities.
While that letter was no doubt sternly worded, it's going to take a major change in the makeup of the state government to bring this lunacy to a halt.
If New York's state legislature and the governor were seriously concerned about reduced emissions and clean, reliable energy, they would be soliciting bids to build nuclear power plants, and plenty of them. Instead, we see another economically unsound, ecologically frightful, reality-defying alternative energy boondoggle that will, in time, all come crashing down.
Come on, New York. You can do better.
