The influencer teaching millions to fear solar
Alexandra Fasulo says she’s protecting farms and wildlife. How much of her rhetoric is actually true?
On Instagram, a young woman with dark hair stares intensely into the camera. “We’re losing our country,” the text reads.
The video cuts to fields of solar panels.
“This is what their ‘clean energy’ looks like,” the caption says, as footage flashes between barren trees and wire fences. “This is what it has done to our nature. Our countryside.”
The April post, which has more than 32,000 likes, belongs to Alexandra Fasulo, a 33-year-old influencer in upstate New York who has created one of the most prolific anti-solar campaigns on the Internet.
This year alone, Fasulo has posted about solar more than 500 times, portraying U.S. utility-scale renewable development as a foreign-backed corporate Trojan horse designed to grab American farmland and harm the environment. She has over 2 million followers across platforms.
Part of what makes Fasulo’s campaign so effective is that it begins with a concern many progressives and environmentalists share: that a cleaner energy system should not be built carelessly on the ecosystems it is meant to help protect.
But on Fasulo’s accounts, that concern has ballooned into a larger, more conspiratorial argument: one that makes the renewable energy industry seem far more sinister than the fossil fuel industry it is supposed to replace.
Her arguments are now being echoed by the fossil-fueled Trump administration. In late June, the EPA and USDA accused New York of “fast-[tracking] industrial solar projects on some of America’s most productive farmland,” and demanded answers from Gov. Kathy Hochul. Days later, Fasulo appeared in Washington for Trump’s “Lawfare Partnership,” was cited and pictured in its press materials, and later cheered Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s move to end new wind and solar subsidies, calling it a “huge step in solar and wind destroying the U.S.”
So who is Alexandra Fasulo? How much of what she tells her millions of followers is true? And how did one local fight over one solar project become a blueprint for the next phase of climate obstruction nationwide?
The answer begins where her case is strongest: Fort Edward, New York.
From homesteading influencer to anti-solar crusader
Before becoming one of the most prominent anti-solar voices online, Fasulo was living in Florida, running a successful freelance writing business which CNBC profiled as earning $378,000 a year.
She told HEATED that, in 2023, Hurricane Ian destroyed her home. So she moved back to upstate New York, where she’s from, and took out a loan to buy just under six acres of undeveloped land in Schuylerville.
Fasulo then started a pollinator farm and became a homesteading influencer. She documented the land’s transformation: hiring Amish builders to put up her barn, planting garlic, selling eggs and dried herbs. She published how-to videos about finding affordable farmland, buying land with loans, and the costs of starting a farm. It was wholesome, financially transparent, highly watchable content.
Soon after, however, her attention turned to solar: specifically, a proposed 100-megawatt solar project about 12 miles away from her farm—and alongside protected habitat for the fastest-declining group of birds in North America.
The issues with Fort Edward Solar
Fasulo was hardly the only person alarmed by the location of Fort Edward Solar.
Formally proposed by Canadian energy company Boralex in 2024, the original site covered roughly 750 acres near the Washington County Grasslands Wildlife Management Area, a former farm site managed by the state for grassland bird habitat, and a National Audubon Society-designated Important Bird Area.
By September 2025, Boralex had cut the proposed footprint to approximately 527 acres, partly in response to concerns from Audubon. But that did little to quiet the opposition. The project’s public comment docket drew more than 250 submissions, the vast majority opposed.
Among the critics was Grassland Bird Trust, a New York nonprofit that has spent more than a decade protecting habitat for declining birds. Mark Di Ianni, a Trust volunteer, wrote that Boralex representatives had acknowledged the site’s ecological importance but selected it because its “flat, open terrain and proximity to transmission lines” made it economically attractive.
Solar development runs into this problem again and again. The landscapes that are easiest to build on—large, flat, treeless fields—are often valuable to birds and wildlife for precisely the same reasons. And transmission lines do not run everywhere, so developers look for places where the electricity can be connected to the grid without making the project prohibitively expensive.
The tension is also hardly unique to renewable energy. It is a familiar feature of capitalism: The cheapest place for a company to build is often one where some of the true costs can be passed on to communities and ecosystems.
This was the conflict Fasulo walked into in September 2025, when she attended a public hearing about the project. “I brought my mom and my best friend with me,” she said, hoping they could make a difference.
Instead, they left convinced the process was theater. “It was very apparent that this was a done deal before they held this hearing,” she said. “So why waste the public’s time?”
A social media campaign emerges
In the months that followed, Fasulo turned Fort Edward into the center of a new social media campaign against Big Solar.
She began posting prolifically about the project and founded the American Land Rescue Fund, a nonprofit now funding legal challenges against the state Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission, or ORES, the agency overseeing Fort Edward.
She also commissioned Hudsonia, an environmental nonprofit based at Bard College, to conduct an independent study of the site. The resulting report bolstered the strongest part of her case, concluding that Fort Edward was too biologically diverse to sacrifice for utility-scale solar and that state regulations had failed to protect it.
Audubon leaders agreed. “The project area is not simply good habitat; it is priority habitat repeatedly identified in conservation plans,” Michael Burger and Matt Roos wrote in a March 2026 op-ed. “Few landscapes in New York carry this level of ecological significance.”
But even as the environmental case against the location grew stronger, the project continued to advance. Eventually, the Grassland Bird Trust mounted a legal challenge to the project.
Then, on May 19, the Trust and Boralex announced an agreement: In exchange for dropping the legal challenge, Boralex would acquire and permanently protect a comparable piece of grassland bird habitat nearby.
One week later, ORES gave Fort Edward Solar its final approval.
To Fasulo, the outcome confirmed what she had believed since the hearing: The system was rigged. She saw the Grassland Bird Trust’s agreement as further evidence that the institutions involved in the process could not be trusted. Because the Trust accepts money from New York State, she argued, it was always going to accommodate a project meant to advance the state’s climate goals. (About 30 percent of the Trust’s 2024 budget came from a state grant.)
The conservationists who shared Fasulo’s alarm, however, did not follow her to the same conclusion. For Audubon, the lesson of Fort Edward was that New York needed stronger environmental rules—ones that could advance solar development without sacrificing priority grassland-bird habitat. Erik Kiviat, the Hudsonia executive director whose report Fasulo had commissioned, likewise told HEATED that his organization remained “strong supporters of solar energy generation” due to climate change, a serious threat to birds across the world.
The conservation groups, in other words, see Fort Edward as a reason to build solar differently.
Fasulo, however, does not appear to accept why solar needs to be built at all.
The climate elephant in the room
The reason New York and other states are trying to build so much solar is simple: to replace the fossil fuels overheating the planet. Climate change is already intensifying heat, drought, fires, floods, and ecological collapse—damaging the same farms, birds, forests, wetlands, and endangered species Fasulo says she wants to protect.
But Fasulo says New York has done enough on climate. “Upstate New York is already nearly an emissions-free grid thanks to hydro and nuclear,” she said. “So upstate New York isn’t contributing to global warming currently.”
The Upstate grid is indeed roughly 90 percent emissions-free. But fossil fuel plants still help power the region, and electricity demand is rising rapidly. Every time New York adds new demand—a housing development, a factory, a data center—that electricity has to come from somewhere. If there is not enough new renewable power available, the gap gets filled by methane gas.
That raised a central question: if Fasulo rejects New York’s climate rationale for solar, does she accept the scientific consensus that fossil fuels are driving dangerous planetary warming?
When I asked, she said fossil fuels were outside her expertise. “I’d like to stick to speaking about ORES, solar, and wind,” she said.
But fossil fuels are the primary reason for the renewable buildout she so fiercely opposes, now at the national level. So I pressed her. “Come on,” I said. “Do you believe fossil fuels cause climate change?”
Fasulo did not answer the question.
“I believe that grassland, forests, and wetlands are our planet’s built-in ability to sequester excess carbon out of the atmosphere and regulate the planet’s temperature,” she said. “And I think clearing all of them off of the planet for [solar] panels made in China makes a lot less sense than allowing our planet’s habitat to take care of the atmosphere as it always has for thousands of years.”
She continued: “I believe that if all of these corporations were to leave our forests and grasslands and wetlands alone … it would lower the temperatures on our planet more effectively than mining and destroying the environment. They’re mining to create these panels. They’re manufactured in China and they’re sent here 4,000 or 8,000 miles, whatever it is, using fossil fuels. That’s what’s ironic to me.”
She’s right that forests, wetlands, and grasslands are crucial carbon sinks. And solar panels do require mining, manufacturing, and shipping.
But Fasulo is mistaken that the planet can simply “take care of the atmosphere”—at least, not while humans keep pumping heat-trapping chemicals into it at an unprecedented rate. Natural carbon sinks can slow the buildup of climate pollution. They cannot cancel out an energy system that keeps adding more and more.
In addition, the climate pollution from making and transporting solar panels is tiny compared to the emissions they avoid once operating. According to the International Energy Agency, shipping accounts for about 3 percent of a solar panel’s total carbon footprint, and panels typically offset their manufacturing emissions within four to eight months. A fossil fuel plant, by contrast, requires fuel to be extracted, transported, and burned for as long as it operates.
Her answer also turns a real dispute over one ecologically sensitive solar project into a vision of corporations clearing “all” the planet’s forests, grasslands, and wetlands for panels. No proposed solar buildout remotely resembles that scenario.
Fasulo’s misleading arguments
I began to see this as a pattern in some of Fasulo’s arguments against industrial solar: Legitimate concerns were often inflated into sweeping conclusions with shaky evidence.
Take, for example, Fasulo’s rhetoric about solar fueling “one of the biggest land grabs in US history.” She often warns that $24 trillion worth of farmland is going to change hands as farmers retire, and that renewables will be a major part of that transfer. “I would argue that solar is at the front of the land grab,” she wrote.
A large generational transfer of farmland is certainly underway, but the $24 trillion figure is inaccurate. The statistic, which she told HEATED came from The Farmers’ Almanac, does not refer to farmland, but all U.S. real estate. It originates with a real estate brokerage.
The available data also do not support the idea that solar is poised to swallow American agriculture. The USDA Economic Research Service says wind and solar directly affected less than 0.05 percent of U.S. farmland in 2020. Six years later, that figure has risen—solar development currently occupies 0.07 percent of U.S. farmland, according to a June analysis from the Solar Energy Industries Association, the solar industry trade group.
Even under the Department of Energy’s ambitious target of supplying 40 to 45 percent of U.S. electricity with solar by 2050, solar would require roughly 1.15 percent of U.S. farmland, according to the DOE. By comparison, corn grown for ethanol already uses 4.5 percent.
Fasulo has also claimed that solar is not just eating up farmland, but prime farmland for food and grazing. “When all of the available arable farmland hosts windmills and solar panels, where will the animals go?” she wrote. “Where will our food come from?” But SEIA asserts that no state has more than 0.5 percent of its prime farmland in solar. And nationally, abandoned prime farmland outnumbers prime farmland used for solar by 43 to one.
Fasulo also frequently portrays solar panels on farmland as synonymous with barren, permanently destroyed soil. That can happen, particularly during construction. Heavy machinery can compact soil and disrupt drainage. Poorly managed projects can remove vegetation, increase erosion, or make it harder to return the land to agricultural use. A conventional utility-scale solar project will also generally remove that land from crop production for its operating life, often 25 years or longer.
But installing solar panels does not automatically destroy farmland. In some cases, especially on intensively managed fields, solar projects can give soil a rest by replacing annual crop production with grasses, pollinator habitat, or native vegetation that helps retain moisture, build organic carbon, and reduce erosion.
A rapidly growing sector known as agrivoltaics—which at its most basic is simply growing crops or grazing livestock beneath solar panels—proves that cleaner energy and agriculture can coexist. By elevating the arrays or using tracking panels that shift with the sun, farmers can create a partial-shade ecosystem that functions like an open-air greenhouse. Importantly, agrivoltaics will not work for every crop, climate, or project—and the practice is not currently the norm. But it does show that the choice is not always as simple as solar or farming.
Then there are the panels themselves. Fasulo has repeatedly warned that panels broken by hail or other extreme weather will poison the soil. “That’s right on Google,” she told me. “There’s cadmium and microplastics and all that.”
This claim also begins with a grain of truth. Some solar panels contain hazardous materials. Cadmium, however, is associated primarily with a particular kind of thin-film panel, while crystalline-silicon panels make up approximately 95 percent of the market.
Dustin Mulvaney, who teaches energy and sustainability at San José State University, said most panels are composed primarily of silicon, aluminum, and glass. Depending on the technology, they can contain small amounts of lead or cadmium, but those materials are generally sealed inside and unlikely to leach into the soil when a panel cracks.
Mulvaney estimated that a large solar farm containing 44,000 panels would contain about 44 kilograms of lead across the entire project—roughly the amount found in three or four standard car batteries.
That does not eliminate the need for careful cleanup, disposal, and recycling, particularly as the first generation of large solar projects reaches the end of its life. But it does put the viral image of a cracked panel poisoning an entire field into perspective.
Solar permitting as the new deep state
Fasulo has turned her experience with ORES into a much broader theory of how renewable energy gets approved in New York. She has described the agency as “bureaucratic evil of the purest sense,” accused it of “regulatory capture,” and claimed it has been “compromised by foreign developers.” In April, she wrote that ORES “rubber-stamps” projects “nearly 100% of the time.”
ORES is indeed a controversial agency. New York created it in 2020 to speed up large renewable projects and make them harder for towns to block, as the state sought to replace fossil fuels at the pace scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming. To anyone who rejects that science, handing the state that kind of power would understandably seem outrageous.
Still, claims of rubber-stamping and corruption require more than objections to the agency’s mandate. Fasulo has an obvious statistic to point to: ORES has reviewed 37 complete applications since it was created, approving 36 and denying one.
That record is striking. But rubber-stamping implies approval without meaningful scrutiny, and the history is more complicated. According to ORES, every project that has completed the process first received at least one notice that its application was incomplete. Every approved project also underwent multiple modifications, with some revised as many as 50 times.
The lone denial also shows that ORES will stop a project under some circumstances, although it turned on site control rather than environmental harm. In 2024, ORES rejected Hecate Energy’s Shepherd’s Run project after the town of Copake showed that the developer no longer controlled a nearly 60-acre parcel—about 20 percent of the proposed footprint. When Hecate tried to amend the project after its application had been deemed complete, ORES refused, saying an exception would undermine the integrity of the permitting process.
Fasulo has also pointed to redacted documents as proof of a cover-up. In one post, she wrote that “ORES and Boralex are hiding behind” state laws protecting sensitive information about endangered species, allowing the agency to “understate or obscure” habitat destruction.
Indeed, New Yorkers are being asked to trust an environmental review they cannot fully see. Fasulo requested the unredacted records and tried to join the siting case, where she could have sought access to confidential material under a protective order. Her petition arrived a month after the deadline, and judges rejected it. Fasulo is now suing ORES for access to the records; the case remains ongoing. HEATED has filed its own request for them.
There is plenty to scrutinize. New York created ORES to accelerate the renewable buildout required by its climate targets. Concentrating that much authority in one state agency raises legitimate questions about local control, public participation, and how environmental tradeoffs are decided.
Fasulo treats the existence of that power as evidence of corruption. That interpretation fits into a much longer pattern.
A history of conspiratorial, MAGA politics
The claims Fasulo makes are not unique. Across the country, anti-renewables campaigns have used strikingly similar scripts to fight solar and wind energy. In some cases, those campaigns have been directly connected to fossil fuel interests.
Public records do not reveal who donated to Fasulo’s nonprofit. In its first federal tax filing, submitted in May, the American Land Rescue Fund reported receiving $65,917 in contributions in 2025. Federal disclosure rules generally keep public charities’ contributor identities private. Fasulo told HEATED that she has never taken fossil fuel money. “Not one cent,” she said.
While the funding question remains open, her political history is easier to trace. Before becoming an anti-solar influencer, Fasulo was a self-identified MAGA Republican who expressed fierce loyalty to Donald Trump, and conspiratorial views on everything from the COVID vaccine to the 2020 election.
On a since-deleted Twitter account, Fasulo cheered the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol. She referenced Q, the anonymous figurehead of the QAnon conspiracy theory. She posted about The Great Reset, a conspiracy that claims the coronavirus was an excuse to dismantle capitalism. She falsely claimed that the most violent insurrectionists were secretly members of antifa, and that the COVID-19 vaccine used nanoparticles to alter human DNA.
When HEATED asked Fasulo about those posts, she dismissed the relevance.
“I just think that has nothing to do with this current solar battle,” she said. “It’s like if we brought up your diary from when you were 18.”
These posts matter, however, because they show a longstanding conspiratorial way of interpreting the world. That same logic now runs through Fasulo’s solar campaign.
“My belief is when some people very, very pompously hold their science above other people’s science, I say to them, there’s actually no way of knowing if yours is the right science,” she told me.
When I said that I had spoken with a scientist who disputed her claim that solar panels could poison the environment with lead, Fasulo suggested that he must be paid by the renewable energy industry. (There is no evidence that he is; Mulvaney’s disclosed research funding comes primarily from government and institutional sources. He is also known for helping create the Solar Scorecard, which scrutinizes photovoltaic manufacturers’ sustainability practices).
“Every single scientist is bought in this country,” she said. “Every single scientist has an agenda.”
This creates a self-sealing argument. No scientific evidence can disprove Fasulo’s claims, because any scientist who disagrees can simply be declared corrupt.
Fasulo recently liked a comment on her Substack portraying climate change as a lie and a conspiracy. She told HEATED that she is not a climate denier.
She does not necessarily need to be one. Climate change can remain nominally real in Fasulo’s worldview, so long as the scientists studying it cannot be trusted, the environmental groups responding to it are compromised, and the technologies proposed to address it are more dangerous than fossil fuels.
The real world toll of the anti-solar playbook
In a Facebook Reel last October, Fasulo denounced ORES and Boralex while displaying the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of employees.
“I refuse to allow these people to live in the dark and do what they do anymore,” she said.
When Fasulo posted a photograph of former ORES executive director Zeryai Hagos, one person wrote, “Where’s our Luigi?”—an apparent reference to Luigi Mangione, the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On TikTok, another commenter wrote, “Sounds like a case for Luigi 💯.”
A former ORES employee told HEATED that a staff member had been threatened with hanging. Nathan Stone, an independent media consultant who until recently worked in communications for ORES, said the threats became severe enough that state police had to be involved.
The pattern is not limited to ORES. In July 2025, Outdoor Life documented a clash between Fasulo and Alabama-based conservationist Kyle Lybarger, who had publicly challenged misinformation in her posts. A surge of harassment from Fasulo’s audience, including credible death threats, eventually forced Lybarger to scrub all mention of her from his digital platforms.
Asked about the threats, Fasulo denied responsibility. “I can’t possibly see what all two million people are doing on the Internet,” she told HEATED. “I have never once posted anything that calls for physical violent interactions.”
She said she hides or deletes comments that cross the line, and noted that she has also experienced doxing and trespassing on her own farm.
But the greater power of Fasulo’s campaign lies in its ability to reach far beyond the people posting violent comments—to people who would never think of themselves as extremists at all.
When I first found Fasulo’s social channels, I noticed some friends followed her. Progressive friends who I knew believed and worried about a changing climate. I asked one why. “Good question,” he said. “Maybe it started with backyard gardening / homestead stuff. Then it turned into a woman’s fight against the system.”
And that’s the point—why it’s so worrying that modern climate obstruction no longer loudly denies global warming, but avoids it entirely, and co-opts the language of environmentalism instead.
By inflating legitimate local conservation debates into a conspiratorial war against renewable energy, Fasulo does the political work of the fossil fuel industry without ever apparently taking a dime of their money.
And by convincing millions that the tools needed to fight climate change are worse than the crisis itself, the very wildlife and farmland she claims to protect are caught in the crossfire.
 | A guest post by
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I used to have a paid subscription. I just resubscribed for one year. I cannot afford to maintain a regular subscription but reporting of this caliber should be rewarded and this is the best I can do. Thank you, Alex Hannaford and thank you, Emily for your important work.
My first thought was, "Who is bankrolling this propaganda?" That it's apparently not a grift and instead the result of Fasulo being an ideologue is perhaps more concerning. She can play dumb all she wants, but it definitely seems like she's practiced in tailoring her perspective so as not to alienate members of her follower base, coopting progressive language in the progress. Unsettling business.