At least 31 states consider overhauling renewable energy siting
EXCLUSIVE: As Trump’s agenda pushes clean-energy plans back to the states, a new report highlights ways forward.
By the end of last year, 15% of counties across the United States had banned or blocked wind or solar energy development.
In response to this wave of moratoria barring construction of turbines or local ordinances restricting where solar panels can be built, a majority of U.S. states this year will consider updating how renewable energy projects are located.
In just the first three months of this year, at least 31 states proposed legislation to change siting regimes for renewable energy projects, according to new data from the nonprofit research outfit Clean Tomorrow.
The findings of the analysis, set to be published Thursday in a 28-page paper, were first shared exclusively with this newsletter.
The report identified five existing approaches to siting wind and solar plants:
Predominantly state siting – States such as Connecticut, Vermont, and West Virginia make decisions on siting projects.
State and local siting hybrid – States such as Arkansas, Rhode Island, and Washington follow a process that blends state and local authority.
State guardrails on local siting – States such as Arizona, New York, and South Carolina prohibit “local government restrictions on clean energy siting that are deemed unreasonable or not in service of some legitimate public good like health and safety.”
Predominantly local siting – States such as Georgia, Kansas, and Pennsylvania grant localities exclusive siting authority.
Minimal siting regulations – States such as Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas give landowners nearly complete control over projects built on their property.
The research also lays out an array of different policy ideas to enact reforms, including rules allowing developers to choose between obtaining permits at the state or local level; giving states the power to override municipalities that revert to not-in-my-backyard obstructionism; and granting county governments more technical resources to speed up the local approval process.
Not all the bills introduced this year would ease the process for energy developers.
“Some states are moving toward more permissive siting reforms, and some states are moving toward more restrictive siting policy,” Nelson Falkenburg, Clean Tomorrow’s siting policy manager and the report’s co-author, told me by phone on Tuesday.
But with electricity demand growing from data centers powering artificial intelligence software, Falkenburg said the report aims to guide states on the pathways to speed up construction of the energy sources that – once approved – typically take the shortest amount of time to get electrons on the grid.
“We’re seeing energy demand of almost five times driven by AI and increases in manufacturing. That’s going to lead to higher energy costs,” he said. “The best way to address higher energy costs is to build renewable energy projects that are less capital intensive and are quicker to get off the ground than a natural gas plant.”
The Trump administration’s restrictions on renewables and the push by Republicans in Congress to gut key tax credits to support solar and wind development show “that state energy policy is the current pathway for decarbonization right now,” he added.
“If we’re going to address climate change,” Falkenburg said, “this is our route.”
PROGRAMMING NOTES: Over at Canary Media last week, I had a story digging into the stakes of the Trump administration's looming cuts to the Department of Energy’s Industrial Demonstrations Program – a tightly managed funding mechanism that bolstered industrial projects in places including an Exxon Mobil plant and a steel upgrade in Vice President JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio.
I went back on Renewable Energy World’s podcast “This Week in Cleantech” to talk about my recent story in The Atlantic on the contradictions in the White House’s approach to reshoring U.S. production of critical minerals.
The soundtrack to this edition of the newsletter is “mostpreciousblood,” a collaboration between two Los Angeles artists: the singer Michellita and the shoegaze band Salt+. When I was a depressed teenager in high school on Long Island, I yearned for rainy days when I could stare out the window of the bus and blast fuzzy, dark, angsty songs from bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, American Analog Set, and Mineral on the headphones of my white-and-orange Sony walkman CD player. This track expertly recreates that sound.
Signing off from a stormy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where an absolutely hustler of a 12-year-old from the neighborhood just beat out all the other Girl Scouts in the five boroughs to sell the most cookies in the city.