The pile driver showed up first.
Before a single panel touched the ground in Elba, New York, flat Genesee County fields were already being pierced by steel posts, row by row, acre by acre.
Two and a half thousand acres of it.
That is about three Central Parks laid side by side, and nearly all of it is being fitted for solar panels.
So how does a crew actually build something this large from bare dirt?
How you build a farm this big from nothing
The opening phase of major construction focused on one job above all others: placing steel piling and racking for the solar modules, alongside heavy civil site work. That sounds simple. Across 2,500 acres it is a long industrial grind, with pile drivers moving in straight lines over what was, until recently, working farmland north of Elba and Oakfield.
Once the piling and racking were advancing, the remaining phases were set to follow, including electrical wiring and the high voltage utility interconnection. Cable crews, conduit installers and substation builders arrive behind the pile drivers in sequence, like a slow wave moving across the land.
The nearly 1 million solar modules going onto those racks sit on galvanized steel single axis tracker frames that tilt through the day, following the sun from morning to dusk. Across a site this size, that daily tracking gain adds up to serious power.
What the farm is for and what the permit took
The Cider Solar Farm will generate up to 500 megawatts of photovoltaic power, roughly enough to supply around 120,000 New York households and push about 1 million megawatt hours of renewable electricity onto the state grid annually. That output helps New York chase a climate law requiring the bulk of its electricity to come from renewable sources by the end of this decade.
Getting here took years of permitting work, and the permit itself was a milestone. Cider was the first project of its kind to win a siting permit from the state’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission under the Section 94-c rules, a streamlined review built to replace the older, slower Article 10 process.
Earlier applicants had transferred in from that older track. Cider came through the new door.
The numbers behind the build
The owner secured $950 million in aggregate financing covering the acquisition, construction and operation of the farm, later adding a $440 million tax equity commitment closed in February 2026. That is a substantial bet on a single stretch of upstate New York field, and it is the owner’s largest clean energy project to date.
State regulators issued a conditional notice to proceed on November 18, 2024, and major construction followed about six months later, in May 2025. The site will support hundreds of construction jobs, with craft labor recruiting prioritized in Western New York, running through an expected completion in late 2026.
In its first year of operation the farm is expected to offset roughly 680,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which the developer equates, using EPA figures, to the annual emissions of more than 150,000 passenger vehicles.
The sheep that will share the land
A farm this large does not simply close off the countryside. The design includes agrivoltaics, with rotational sheep grazing planned on more than 300 acres beneath the panels and the potential for more acreage over the project’s operating life. The animals keep vegetation down between the rows without mowers, and the panels throw shade the flock can use on hot days.
Solar grazing is now the most common livestock practice on US solar sites, largely because sheep handle the terrain, do little damage to equipment and cut mowing costs. Cider’s flat, open Genesee County ground suits both uses at once. Project filings describe 34 fenced array areas, 56 miles of perimeter fencing, 23 miles of access roads and about 73 miles of buried medium voltage collection line feeding a collection substation and interconnection point.
It also matters to neighboring land. Work on native bees at Minnesota solar sites has looked at whether habitat under and around panels supports pollinators in nearby crop fields. Rain and runoff on large solar builds draw scrutiny too, given how much bare ground construction temporarily exposes, and drainage behavior at other solar sites has been measured storm by storm.
What still has to happen before the lights come on
The steel piling phase is the beginning, not the end. Once the racks are up, nearly 1 million panels have to be lifted, clipped and wired in sequence across those 2,500 acres, a task that will keep large crews working through the better part of a year. The developer said all phases of construction would be fully under way by midsummer.
Then the substation has to be commissioned, the interconnection tested and the metering certified before a single watt reaches a home. Commercial operation is expected by late 2026, and any slippage in that final electrical work could move the date. That is not a small window.
Still, the piling is in the ground. The largest solar farm New York has attempted is no longer a permit or a plan. It is a pile driver moving across a field in Genesee County, post by post.
