Key Findings at a Glance
- $3 billion+ in NY-Sun subsidies financed by ratepayer surcharges on electric bills already 48% above the national average.
- $26.5 billion of New York State pension money committed to climate and solar investments, with no accountability for managers if returns fall short.
- 84% of land suitable for New York solar development is agricultural — while the state loses farmland at five times the national average rate.
- ~80% of global solar panels manufactured in China, predominantly from Xinjiang polysilicon produced with documented forced labor.
- 60–70% of annual solar output in northern climates comes from the six warmest months — while demand peaks in winter when panels sit under snow.
- Only ~10% of end-of-life solar panels recycled globally; the U.S. faces up to 10 million tons of panel waste by 2050.
- Floating solar on drinking water reservoirs risks chemical leaching, cyanobacterial toxins, and altered pathogen dynamics — with no federal safety standard in place.
- Solar farm construction causes permanent soil compaction that New York’s decommissioning rules do not require developers to remediate.
A Scheme Dressed as a Solution
The solar energy revolution arrives dressed in the language of necessity. Sunlight is free. The climate demands action. The panels are clean. The future is renewable. These are not lies, exactly. They are the most flattering truths in a story full of inconvenient ones — and in New York State, those inconvenient truths are being buried under billions of dollars in public subsidies, ratepayer surcharges, pension fund commitments, and political goodwill, none of which come with any serious accountability for the people deploying them.
What is actually happening across New York’s agricultural heartland — from the Finger Lakes to the Mohawk Valley, from the Southern Tier to the broad Hudson River plain — is a wealth transfer. Foreign developers, largely backed by Chinese manufacturing capital, are leasing prime farmland, drilling into topsoil that took centuries to build, blanketing it with panels made in factories tied to forced labor in Xinjiang, and collecting the proceeds of an elaborate government subsidy architecture paid for by ordinary New Yorkers: through their electric bills, through their state taxes, and through the retirement savings of New York’s teachers, firefighters, and civil servants.
When the panels stop working in twenty-five years — covered in the snow of a northern winter for months at a time, degraded, cracked, leaching lead and cadmium into the soil beneath them — the developers will be gone. The politicians who approved the subsidies will be long retired. The utility companies that took money from both ends of the transaction will have moved on to the next rate increase. And New York will be left with fallow land, degraded soil, uncertain water quality, and a bill that nobody in power had to sign personally.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a policy structure. Let us trace it carefully.
The Public Money Machine: Rate-payer Subsidized
Start with the money, because the money is why this is happening.
New York State has committed over $3 billion to its NY-Sun initiative — the statewide program administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to subsidize solar installation across the state. The program’s budget, authorized through 2032, funds direct cash incentives, rebates, and grants to solar developers and installers. Every dollar of that $3 billion-plus flows, ultimately, from New York ratepayers: the program is financed through charges on electric utility bills, approved by the state’s Public Service Commission and embedded in the delivery rates of investor-owned utilities including Con Edison, National Grid, NYSEG, and Orange & Rockland.
The Public Service Commission, in approving the NY-Sun expansion, estimated that the costs would produce a statewide average residential bill impact of $0.75 per month over the program period, with a peak impact of $1.24 per month in 2024. These figures, presented as modest, are worth examining. A “statewide average” that includes New York City weighs down rates that upstate customers — living in areas with the least economic cushion — pay disproportionately. The monthly charges land on top of electricity rates that were already, in 2024, 48% above the national average, with Con Edison customers paying 31.6 cents per kilowatt-hour — among the highest in the nation.
These rates are rising. Con Edison sought an 18% increase in electricity rates and an 18.8% increase in gas delivery rates in 2025, even as the company reported increased profits. By June 2025, 371,720 residential accounts were behind on their bills, with arrears totaling $838 million. Con Edison had sent over 120,000 final termination notices and conducted over 16,000 disconnections for nonpayment — while simultaneously seeking double-digit rate increases to fund renewable infrastructure upgrades. NYSEG’s parent company, Avangrid, saw its profits increase by approximately 185% between 2015 and 2024.
This is the utility business model in the renewable transition era: utilities are regulated not to profit from electricity itself, but from infrastructure investment — the poles, wires, substations, and grid connections required to integrate new renewable generation. Every solar farm requiring a new grid interconnection is a revenue opportunity. Every mandate to upgrade transmission infrastructure to carry renewable power is another rate case. The utilities are, structurally, indifferent to whether the solar program succeeds or fails in delivering cheap, reliable energy. They are paid on capital deployed, not energy outcomes. They take money from ratepayers to fund subsidy programs, they take money from developers for grid interconnection, and they take money from the state for infrastructure upgrades mandated by the same energy policies. They are positioned at every tollbooth in the system.
Meanwhile, the on-budget subsidy architecture stacks in layers. Federal: a 30% Investment Tax Credit on solar system costs, extended to 2032 by the Inflation Reduction Act. State: a 25% New York State income tax credit up to $5,000, plus sales tax exemptions, property tax exemptions for 15 years, and additional NYC-specific abatements covering up to 30% of system costs. NYSERDA: direct MW-Block rebates. The net effect is that a solar developer in New York can recover a substantial majority of project costs through public subsidy before a single watt of power reaches the grid.
There is no analogous subsidy accountability mechanism. If the project underperforms — and the New York Power Authority’s own strategic planning documents acknowledge that the levelized cost of new solar in New York has risen to at least $100 per megawatt-hour while merchant revenue from selling that electricity amounts to less than $50 per megawatt-hour — the subsidy money is not returned. The developer is not penalized for delivering half the energy economics promised. The ratepayer who funded the program has no recourse. The politician who approved the mandate faces no electoral consequence on a 25-year timeline. The subsidy flows regardless of outcome, and no one in the transaction chain bears a meaningful financial risk except the New Yorker paying the electric bill.
Pension Fund Gamble: Betting Retirees’ Savings
The public subsidy exposure does not end with electric bills and tax credits. It extends to the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of New York public employees.
The New York State Common Retirement Fund — the third largest state pension fund in the United States, with approximately $273 billion in assets — has committed to deploying $40 billion toward “sustainable investments and climate solutions” by 2035. To date, it has already deployed more than $26.5 billion toward that target. The fund’s most recent major move committed $2.4 billion to three climate-focused investment vehicles in April 2025 alone, including $250 million to the Oaktree Power Opportunities Fund VII (targeting renewable energy infrastructure including solar) and $150 million to the Vision Ridge Partners Sustainable Asset Fund IV.
This is the retirement security of New York’s teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses, and civil servants being channeled into the same solar development pipeline that is buying up their neighbors’ farmland. The Comptroller’s office frames these investments as prudent ESG-aligned portfolio strategy. The question that is not asked loudly enough is: what happens when the investments underperform?
The answer is that the consequences fall on New York’s taxpayers and municipalities. If the Common Retirement Fund’s climate investment portfolio fails to achieve the returns needed to meet its actuarial target — currently 7% annually — the shortfall must be made up through increased contributions from state and local governments, which means higher taxes or reduced services. The fund managers who allocated $26.5 billion to sustainable investments face no personal financial consequence if those investments disappoint. The Comptroller who championed the ESG strategy will be out of office long before the results are known. The firefighter in Binghamton or the schoolteacher in Rochester whose pension depends on those returns had no vote in how the fund is invested.
Meanwhile, the solar industry that benefits from pension capital offers New York retirees no special assurance of returns. The New York Power Authority has acknowledged in its planning documents that new solar projects cannot pay for themselves from electricity sales alone and depend on the sale of renewable energy credits at satisfactory prices to be financially viable. Those REC prices are set by the state’s energy bureaucracy — meaning the “profitability” of these investments depends on the continuation of a regulatory regime that future administrations may not maintain.
Who Gets Rich
Trace the money forward and the beneficiaries become clear.
The foreign-backed developer enters New York, often organized as a limited liability entity with opaque ownership — a structure that limits legal liability and makes regulatory accountability difficult. It secures long-term farmland leases at $1,000 to $1,500 per acre per year, ten times the typical agricultural rent. It collects federal tax credits, state rebates, and NYSERDA incentives on the construction cost. It sells renewable energy credits to utilities, which pass the cost to ratepayers. It signs a power purchase agreement — again, with costs flowing to ratepayers through utility procurement obligations. And at the end of twenty-five or thirty years, it has the option to walk away, leaving decommissioning obligations to whoever holds the bond — assuming any bond was posted at all.
The Chinese solar panel manufacturer, operating within a supply chain that U.S. and European investigators have linked to forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, sells panels into the U.S. market through a network of transshipment intermediaries designed to circumvent the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The world’s largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, Hoshine Silicon Industry, had its products banned by U.S. Customs in 2021 for documented use of forced labor. Its sales nevertheless grew from 530,000 metric tons in 2021 to more than 1.2 million tons in 2024, with roughly 90% still produced in Xinjiang. China accounts for approximately 80% of global solar panel manufacturing. The panels going into New York’s fields are, in all probability, products of that supply chain.
The solar installer collects labor costs, project management fees, and a share of the development margin. In New York City, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection in January 2026 filed suit against Radiant Solar, alleging deceptive conduct throughout the entire lifecycle of consumer transactions — including shoddy or incomplete installations, predatory financing, and abandonment of promises to secure tax incentives — and sought nearly $18 million in restitution. New York Focus documented a parallel case involving Attyx/SUNco, which NYSERDA barred from its subsidy program in 2021 for inadequate disclosures, yet the company continued using the state’s logo in sales agreements for almost another year before a cease and desist was finally sent.
The politician, meanwhile, collects something more durable than money. The renewable energy mandate is the perfect political instrument: its costs are dispersed invisibly across millions of electric bills and pension allocations, its failures occur on a timeline longer than any electoral cycle, and its beneficiaries — developers, installers, utilities, financial intermediaries — are well-organized donors and lobbyists. New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (CLCPA), celebrated by its sponsors as a historic commitment to environmental justice, has in practice authorized an industrial buildout — on farmland, in forests, above drinking water — whose costs are paid by those least able to bear them and whose benefits flow most visibly to those least in need of help.
Farmland Destroyed by Solar Farms
Against this financial backdrop, the physical damage to New York’s farmland is not an unfortunate side effect. It is a predictable and in many cases irreversible consequence of industrial development pursued without adequate protection of the underlying resource.
New York lost more than 2,700 farms and 350,000 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022. A more recent report from the State Comptroller’s office found that between 2024 and 2025 the state lost another 500 farms and 100,000 acres — a decline rate of 1.5%, five times the national average of 0.3%. Without intervention, the state could lose an additional 450,000 acres of arable land by 2040. Solar development is the leading competitor for that land.
A Cornell University study confirmed that approximately 84% of land identified as suitable for future solar development in New York is agricultural. To achieve the state’s renewable energy goals, developers would need to cover a staggering proportion of the most productive soil in a state already losing farmland at an alarming rate.
The construction process itself is destructive. Heavy machinery — graders, pile drivers, cable trenchers — traffics repeatedly across fields, compressing soil to depths of 45 centimeters or more. Soil compaction collapses the pore spaces that allow water infiltration, destroys the biological community that sustains fertility, and can take many years to reverse — or may be permanent. The U.S. EPA has documented that solar farm construction practices, including clearing and grading large sections of land, can lead to significant erosion and sediment runoff into nearby waterways.
After installation, the shade cast by panel arrays permanently alters the microclimate beneath them. Reduced sunlight, altered temperature and moisture cycles, and depressed biological activity degrade soil quality over the 25-to-30-year life of an installation. When decommissioning arrives, New York regulations require infrastructure removal to four feet below grade on agricultural land — but the deeper biological and physical damage cannot be undone by excavation. The topsoil that fed New York for generations cannot be replaced in a season or a decade.
And yet New York law does not require solar developers to demonstrably restore soil to pre-installation agricultural productivity. The decommissioning bond requirement covers removal costs — not remediation costs, not the cost of rebuilding organic matter, not the cost of reestablishing the drainage patterns and microbial communities that make prime farmland valuable. New York Senate Bill S4749 of 2025, introduced to require reclamation bonds, explicitly acknowledges the risk that developers “might no longer exist, might be bankrupt, or might simply lack the financial resources” at the end of a project’s life. That acknowledgment, in a bill not yet signed into law, is as close as New York’s policy apparatus has come to honest accounting of what it is asking communities to risk.
What Solar Panels Are Made Of
Solar panels, during normal undisturbed operation, do not emit pollutants. This is true, and it anchors virtually all industry reassurances about panel safety. It is not, however, the full picture.
A photovoltaic panel contains lead-based solder, polymer encapsulants, aluminum frames, tempered glass, and — in a significant share of thin-film panels — cadmium telluride or copper indium gallium selenide compounds. California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control has confirmed that several categories of panels carry the hazardous characteristic of toxicity when discarded under RCRA. The U.S. EPA’s own assessment states flatly: “Some solar panels are considered hazardous waste, and some are not, even within the same model and manufacturer.”
The safety assurances are conditional on the panels remaining intact. In New York’s climate — where hailstorms, ice storms, tornadoes, and heavy snow loads are regular occurrences — the probability of large-scale panel damage across thousands of acres over a 25-to-30-year period is not trivial. A 2015 tornado at the Desert Sunlight solar farm in California broke 200,000 modules in a single event. A large-hail event capable of shattering panels on a 2,500-acre solar farm in western New York — where several of the state’s largest new installations are being built — is not a remote scenario. When panels shatter, their encapsulation is breached, and whatever lead, cadmium, or selenium they contain is exposed to rainfall and to the agricultural soil and groundwater beneath them.
Floating Solar Panels on Reservoirs
The logical endpoint of the drive to find land for solar panels is the surface of the water itself. In Peekskill, Westchester County, a proposal to install a floating photovoltaic (FPV) array on Camp Field Reservoir — the city’s drinking water source — generated a public hearing and significant community opposition in 2026. Project backers projected $2 million in combined savings and lease payments over 25 years. Residents were not persuaded: they did not want panels on their water supply.
That concern is not unfounded. Research on floating solar systems, including a study published in Water Practice & Technology, has identified multiple pathways of concern: leaching of metals and chemicals from panel materials and flotation infrastructure into the water column; altered thermal stratification that can promote cyanobacterial growth and associated toxin production; reduced UV penetration that limits natural pathogen die-off; and changes to dissolved oxygen and nutrient dynamics that challenge treatment plant capacity. Oregon State University researchers found that floating solar systems consistently altered water temperature and stratification in reservoirs, with effects that varied substantially by location and were difficult to predict in advance.
The particular risk of floating solar on a drinking water reservoir — as opposed to a recreational lake or wastewater lagoon — is that any contamination enters a system where human health is the direct downstream consequence. There is currently no federal safety standard governing floating solar on drinking water sources. The 25-year lease that delivers $2 million in savings to Peekskill’s municipal budget is also a 25-year experiment on the city’s drinking water supply. The officials who sign the lease will not be in office when the experiment’s results are fully known.
Solar Efficiency in New York Winter
Industrial solar in New York is sold on the basis of rated capacity and annual generation projections. These projections, typically produced by developers using idealized irradiance models, represent a ceiling that the northern New York climate reliably fails to reach.
The winter sun is not the enemy that critics often imagine — solar panels are actually more electrically efficient in cold weather, as lower temperatures improve electron mobility. But northern New York’s winter delivers fewer than 9 hours of daylight on the shortest days, frequent heavy cloud cover (which reduces output to 10% to 25% of clear-day levels), and significant snowfall — 100 to 150 inches annually in much of western New York and the Adirondack foothills — that blankets ground-mounted arrays for weeks at a time.
Solar systems in northern climates generate 60% to 70% of their annual electricity output during the six-month period from April through September. During January and February — when New York’s heating demand peaks — a utility-scale array under a foot of snow in the Genesee Valley is producing essentially nothing. The gap between rated capacity and actual winter output is a structural mismatch between what solar can deliver and when New York most needs energy.
This mismatch cannot be resolved by the panels alone. It requires either massive grid-scale battery storage — which does not yet exist at anything approaching the necessary scale — or continued reliance on dispatchable generation: natural gas, nuclear, hydropower. Every solar installation that displaces zero-carbon nuclear or reliable hydro on the dispatch stack and forces the grid to maintain natural gas backup capacity is not reducing New York’s carbon footprint by the amount its rated nameplate suggests. The honest accounting of solar’s northern-climate contribution requires subtracting the cost of the backup capacity it necessitates — a cost that also flows to ratepayers through utility rate cases.
The New York Power Authority’s own strategic planning documents acknowledge the core problem: the levelized cost of new solar in New York has risen to at least $100 per megawatt-hour, while actual market revenue amounts to less than $50 per megawatt-hour. The gap — at minimum $50 per megawatt-hour — must be made up through renewable energy credit sales, public subsidies, and ratepayer mandates. This is not solar economics. This is solar accounting, and New Yorkers are on the losing side of the ledger.
End-of-Life Waste: Hazardous & No Adequate Plan
The most consequential long-term problem with industrial solar is arguably the one least visible to the people who approved it: what happens to the panels when they stop working.
The U.S. EPA estimates that by 2030, the United States will have as much as one million total tons of solar panel waste. By 2050, the U.S. is expected to be the second-largest generator of end-of-life solar panels in the world, with up to 10 million total tons of decommissioned material. Globally, only about 10% of end-of-life PV panels are currently being recycled. The overwhelming majority are dumped, buried, or incinerated.
This is not a future problem. Panels installed during the early 2010s are already beginning to fail. The “early loss” category — panels failing before their rated lifespan due to manufacturing defects, installation damage, or weather events — accounted for more than 63% of the solar panel recycling market in 2024. In New York’s climate, with its freeze-thaw cycles, hail, ice loading, and UV exposure, early degradation is a structural risk, not an edge case.
The hazardous waste dimension is real. Some panels, when subjected to federal RCRA toxicity testing, qualify as hazardous waste. Panels containing lead solder, cadmium telluride, or other regulated metals require disposal as hazardous material at substantially greater cost than standard solid waste. In practice, enforcement is minimal. Panels from developers who have declared bankruptcy — and over a 25-year project lifecycle, many solar development entities do — frequently end up in municipal landfills regardless of their chemical composition.
New York State has taken nominal steps to address this. Legislation requiring reclamation bonds has been introduced. NYSERDA’s decommissioning guidance requires infrastructure removal to four feet below grade on agricultural land. But the bond amounts are typically calculated at current cost levels and may be grossly inadequate decades later when inflation and changing disposal regulations have increased the true cost. The community that leased its farmland in 2025 will be dealing with the consequences in 2055. The developer may be long gone. The politician who approved the mandate will be retired. The ratepayer who funded the program will have no one to call.
The Balance Sheet: What It Costs — and Who Collects the Profit
The specific policy structure New York has built — the NY-Sun subsidy apparatus, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act mandates, the pension fund ESG commitments, the utility rate treatment of renewable infrastructure, the expedited siting process that overrides local input — is not primarily an environmental policy. It is a wealth transfer mechanism. It moves money from ordinary New Yorkers to a small group of well-connected beneficiaries: foreign developers, Chinese manufacturers, domestic installers, utility shareholders, and the financial intermediaries who package renewable energy projects for institutional investors like the state pension fund.
The losers are easy to identify: the farmer whose land is leased into industrial use for a generation, the ratepayer who cannot pay an electric bill inflated by subsidy charges and renewable infrastructure mandates, the retired teacher whose pension is being deployed into solar projects that cannot cover their own costs without public support, the rural community that watched its prime farmland disappear under panels and will watch those panels degrade and be abandoned without adequate remediation.
The winners are just as easy to identify: they are represented by lobbyists in Albany, they write checks to campaigns, and they have no long-term obligation to the land they develop, the water they put at risk, or the communities they leave behind.
New York’s farmland is not a sacrifice zone. Its drinking water reservoirs are not experimental platforms. The agricultural communities of the Finger Lakes and the Hudson Valley and the Southern Tier are owed an honest accounting of what is being done in the name of climate progress — and an honest reckoning with who is doing it, who is paying for it, and who will be left holding the consequences when the panels stop working and the developers are gone.
A state that is serious about energy transition would site solar on brownfields, rooftops, parking lots, and degraded land. It would mandate domestic supply chains free of forced labor. It would require decommissioning bonds adequate to the actual future cost of remediation. It would hold pension fund managers accountable for returns, not political optics. It would regulate utilities on outcomes, not infrastructure expenditure. It would tell its citizens the truth about what northern-climate solar costs, what it delivers, and who profits when the gap between those two numbers is filled with public money.
Until it does, what New York is running is not an energy program. It is a subsidy racket with a green coat of paint.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are solar panels on New York farmland subsidized by ratepayers?
Are Chinese solar panels made with forced labor?
How much power do solar panels actually produce in winter in New York?
Are solar panels hazardous waste when disposed of?
Is floating solar on a drinking water reservoir safe?
What happens to New York farmland after a solar farm is decommissioned?
Is the New York State pension fund invested in solar energy?
Sources: American Farmland Trust; Cornell University Agrivoltaics Research Program; New York State Comptroller’s Office; New York State Common Retirement Fund (SICS Program); New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA); New York Power Authority (NYPA) Renewable Energy Strategic Plan (2025); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA); Sheffield Hallam University (In Broad Daylight); California Department of Toxic Substances Control; Oregon State University (FPV reservoir study); IWA Publishing (Water Practice & Technology); New York Senate Bill S4749 (2025); Public Service Commission NY-Sun Expansion Order; Power Advisory LLC; New York Focus; Spectrum News 1 NY; PV Magazine USA; Rep. Ocasio-Cortez et al. Letter to PSC (August 2025); NYC Dept. of Consumer and Worker Protection v. Radiant Solar (2026); CSIS (A Dark Spot for the Solar Energy Industry); S&P Global / Hoshine Silicon Industry reporting.
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