By Alexandra Fasulo at The House of Green substack, May 4, 2026
It certainly wasn’t a headline many of us were expecting to see on April 28, 2026. By mid-morning, the New York Department of Public Service (DPS), which houses the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES), published a press released that stated the current executive director of ORES, Zeryai Hagos, had officially stepped down. The deputy executive director, Jason Zehr, was appointed interim executive director while the DPS conducts a “nationwide search” to find a replacement.
ORES was created in 2020, hidden inside a budget bill that was passed on April 2, 2020 while the world sheltered in place at home. The first executive director, Houtan Moaveni, was installed to lead the agency that began its unchecked unilateral buildout of commercial solar and wind the following year.
So why did Hagos suddenly resign from his position overseeing ORES? Why didn’t he complete his time as executive director like Moaveni before him? In the months following up to his resignation, Hagos was regularly posting to LinkedIn, bragging about the permits he had issued for major renewable complexes in Upstate New York. Why the change of heart?
On Monday, April 27, 2026, three different lawsuits out of Montgomery County, New York were filed against ORES, the DPS, New York State, and ConnectGen Montgomery County.
The first was Montgomery County itself versus ORES, filed by the county attorney, Meghan Manion… This lawsuit points out the cumulative loss Montgomery County will shoulder if all ORES projects sited for the county are allowed to be built. The economic ruin, catastrophic impacts to the Amish, and destruction of the pastoral way of life will cause the county, in many ways, to collapse.
The GlenFARMLand lawsuit calls out the disgusting behavior by ORES against the Amish, as well as their continued ignorance of expert testimonies, studies, and reports submitted to the ORES docket. Montgomery County is where the Amish community who built my farm resides.
The final lawsuit filed in conjunction with the two mentioned above included the Town of Glen versus ORES…. This lawsuit attacks ORES’s denial of local participation, waiver of local laws, and refusal to hold a hearing. The Town of Glen was shut out of weighing in on Mill Point Solar completely.
Read the full substack here.
Wind Concerns is a collaboration of citizens of the Lakeland Alberta region against proposed wind turbine projects.