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Sometimes a political or environmental fight begins not in a courtroom or a government office, but across a fence line. And sometimes the hero didn’t plan to be.
For Alexandra Fasulo, it began when she returned to upstate New York and bought a few acres with a very different dream. She wanted to build a farm, establish a pollinator habitat, work with Amish farmers, and create a small piece of land where agriculture and nature could coexist. She was not, by her own account, an activist campaigning against renewable energy. An idealist? Maybe. She even owned a portable solar panel for her own use. Then she learned that a neighboring farmer had been approached about leasing roughly 100 acres to a solar company. That didn’t fit her vision for the community.
Fasulo began attending town meetings and studying New York’s renewable-energy siting laws. Her initial response was remarkably local: she supported a town Solar Facilities Law intended to establish rules for solar development. The law passed. She thought the issue had been resolved. It wasn’t. Her education accelerated when she attended a hearing concerning the proposed Fort Edward Solar project in Washington County.
The project was a proposed 100-megawatt solar facility. State records show that the project ultimately received its final siting permit from New York’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission, or ORES, on May 26, 2026. The state proceeding identifies the project as being in the Town of Fort Edward.
What Fasulo encountered at the hearing convinced her that this was no longer simply a question about solar panels. She became concerned about the larger questions surrounding farmland, wildlife habitat, local government authority, and the state’s renewable-energy permitting system.
The Fort Edward site is particularly controversial because of its ecological characteristics. The area includes grassland habitat associated with the Washington County Grasslands Wildlife Management Area and an Important Bird Area. Critics of the project have raised concerns about impacts to grassland birds and other species. The Grassland Bird Trust has separately challenged aspects of the project’s habitat mitigation but quit when the company agreed to fund the purchase of more habitat for threatened and endangered birds and reduce the acreage from the 750 acres it originally proposed to 530 acres.
Fasulo responded by doing something that few ordinary citizens would have the time, money, or determination to do: she learned the system. She studied ORES proceedings. She examined environmental documents. She filed Freedom of Information Law requests. When she believed publicly available environmental information was excessively redacted, she sought outside expertise.
She eventually commissioned Hudsonia Ltd. to conduct an environmental assessment of the proposed Fort Edward project. The resulting February 2026 report examined biodiversity and potential impacts on the Washington County grasslands.
She went a step further. Fasulo founded the American Land Rescue Fund, a nonprofit devoted to using legal action to defend farmland, wildlife habitat and rural communities. According to the organization, Fort Edward Solar became its first major legal case against New York’s renewable-energy siting system.
By late 2025, Fasulo had become an official participant in the Fort Edward proceeding. In March 2026, she participated in oral argument before ORES concerning the organization’s status in the proceeding. The state’s official notice lists Fasulo as appearing for the American Land Rescue Fund alongside attorneys representing the project, ORES, and other parties. That was quite a transformation for someone who, only about a year earlier, had essentially no opinion about industrial solar. But here is where the story gets more complicated, and more interesting.
Calling Fasulo’s campaign an outright victory over the Fort Edward solar project would be inaccurate. The project received its state siting permit in May 2026. In other words, the central project she opposed was not stopped. Yet there is another way to measure success.
Fasulo went from being a private landowner trying to establish a farm to becoming a participant in a complicated state regulatory proceeding. She created a nonprofit, assembled environmental research, participated in litigation, and helped turn a local dispute into part of a much larger public discussion about renewable-energy development in rural New York.
Her organization says that in its first year, it filed two lawsuits, commissioned environmental research, and helped fund another municipality’s legal challenge. That may ultimately be the most important part of the Fasulo story.
The debate over renewable energy is often presented as a simple choice: clean energy versus fossil fuels. But communities frequently confront a different question: Where should that energy infrastructure go? Solar power can reduce reliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, large-scale installations can create conflicts over agricultural land, wildlife habitat, landscape character, local taxation, infrastructure, and community control. The Fort Edward controversy demonstrates how difficult those competing interests can become.
Alexandra Fasulo did not begin her campaign as an energy activist. She began as a farmer who wanted to protect the place she lived in. Whatever one’s position on the Fort Edward project, one thing is undeniable: a citizen decided that understanding the system was not enough; she had to enter it. She learned the laws. She learned the agencies. She learned the environmental science. She learned how administrative proceedings worked. And when she concluded that ordinary citizens needed stronger representation, she built an organization to provide it.
Recently, the project developer surrendered its permit.
But Alexandra Fasulo’s fight demonstrates that success in a community battle isn’t always measured by whether you stop the bulldozers. Sometimes it is measured by whether you force people to pay attention, put evidence into the record, challenge government decisions, organize your neighbors, and make sure the public conversation cannot simply be ignored.
And that fight, unlike a solar project, is nowhere near finished.
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