By Kelly O'Neil
New York is not backing away from its clean energy ambitions. But the politics of getting projects built are changing — quickly.
For years, renewable energy siting debates in New York were often treated as a permitting challenge: complex, technical, highly regulated, and ultimately solvable through a state-level process; but that assumption no longer holds.
Across parts of upstate New York, opposition to renewable energy projects has broadened from isolated local resistance into something more coordinated, more political, and more emotionally charged. What began as project-by-project opposition is increasingly becoming a regional narrative about land use, rural character, local control, farmland preservation, and whether communities feel they have a meaningful voice in decisions that will shape the places they live.
At the center of that tension is New York’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission, or ORES, the state entity charged with moving major renewable energy projects through a consolidated siting process. That role has made ORES essential to New York’s energy transition — and, increasingly, a target.
In early April, Senate Republicans — led by Finance Committee Ranking Member Tom O'Mara — sent a formal letter to ORES raising concerns about the agency's broad authority to supersede local zoning and land-use laws, its approval of projects on productive farmland and near sensitive habitats, and what they described as a lack of transparency and accountability. The letter wasn't a fringe complaint. It reflected pressure that has been building across both parties and both chambers.
The pressure on ORES came to a head in late April, when executive director Zeryai Hagos stepped down the same morning three separate lawsuits were filed against the agency out of Montgomery County — including one filed by the county itself. Jason Zehr, a longtime DPS official, has since stepped in as interim executive director, with DPS emphasizing continuity in permitting and technical review. But leadership continuity alone will not resolve the larger issue: in some communities, the siting process is facing a legitimacy challenge.
For developers and investors, that matters. Permitting risk in New York is no longer just regulatory. It’s reputational, it’s political, and it’s increasingly being shaped before a formal application is even filed.
One of the biggest mistakes the industry can make right now is treating all renewable opposition the same. Based on KAOH Media’s work supporting and monitoring renewable energy projects across New York, we have seen that opposition looks very different depending on the asset class, the geography, and the local political environment.
For solar and wind, opposition in parts of upstate New York has become broader and more regional. The dominant concerns are often about land use, viewsheds, rural character, farmland, cumulative impacts, and whether state policy is moving faster than local trust.
Battery energy storage systems, by contrast, tend to face a different form of opposition. BESS concerns are often more hyperlocal and incident-driven. Residents are less likely to begin from an ideological opposition to clean energy and more likely to focus on safety, fire risk, emergency response, proximity to homes, and whether independent experts can validate the claims being made.
In other words - geography matters, local history matters, and the messenger matters.
Large-scale renewable development in New York takes years from inception to operation — a reality NYSERDA has acknowledged in its own solicitation materials, which increasingly build in requirements around stakeholder engagement alongside the usual permitting, interconnection, financing, and supply chain milestones.
That sequencing is critical. Too often, community engagement is treated as something that begins when a project enters formal review. In today’s environment, that’s too late. By the time a permit application is public, a narrative may already be formed. Local opposition groups may already be organized. Elected officials may already be receiving calls. Opponents may already have framed the project as a threat to local control, public safety, farmland, or community identity.
Once that happens, it’s hard to catch up. Developers need to front-load engagement before the opposition controls the narrative. That means listening before presenting. It means understanding which concerns are technical, which are emotional, and which are rooted in a deeper lack of trust. It means identifying credible third-party validators early, especially for storage projects where safety concerns can define the entire conversation.
Even if ORES remains structurally intact, the current political environment has weakened its perceived legitimacy in some regions. That doesn’t mean the office can’t do its job, but it does mean developers should not go around community acceptance seeking only state approval.
In fact, the opposite may increasingly be true: the more a project is perceived as relying solely on state authority, the more it may need to overcompensate on transparency, local alignment, and trust-building.
For developers, this means community acceptance can’t be outsourced to the state, and it can’t be solved only by counsel, or put off until the hearings.
Projects will need more time, planning, stakeholder mapping, local listening, rapid response, and disciplined communications from the earliest stages of development.
New York’s clean energy transition is not just a policy challenge. It is a trust challenge. The projects that succeed will not simply be the ones with the strongest applications. They will be the ones that understand the communities around them, anticipate the politics ahead of them, and communicate with enough transparency to earn permission beyond the permit.
That is the work ahead, and this is the work we are doing every day at KAOH Media: helping developers understand local dynamics earlier, communicate with communities more clearly, and build the trust required to move critical infrastructure forward in these complex environments.
