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This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories, visit dailyyonder.com.
When Chad Raines took over his family’s Texas cotton farm in 2008, he thought the going would be easy. That’s because their first year was relatively profitable — but the success was short-lived.
“The next 11 years was just loss after loss after loss,” Raines said in a Daily Yonder interview. “We just kept digging our hole deeper.” Raines soon began to question whether he should continue running the farm or pivot to something else.
Then came a third option, one in the form of solar panels and sheep: a type of farming called agrivoltaics. Now, he raises 3,000 head of sheep on about 8,000 acres throughout West Texas, and all under solar panels.
Raines is contracted by the solar companies to graze his sheep under their panels, keeping the vegetation short and feeding his sheep at the same time. He is one of a growing number of farmers leasing out their own land to renewable energy companies or grazing livestock on land already in use for solar or wind.
Scientists say widespread renewable energy development — the vast majority of which will be located in rural America — plays a key part in decreasing the country’s carbon emissions, but pushback from the Trump administration has stalled progress on many solar and wind projects.
In August 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ended funding to loan programs that supported solar projects on farmland. The agency pointed to rising farmland prices as the primary reason for shutting down these projects.
“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a press release. The USDA defines prime farmland as land with the “best combination of physical and chemical characteristics for producing food, feed, forage, fiber, and oilseed crops.” These characteristics include a region’s growing season, soil properties, and water supply.
“Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available,” Rollins said.
Whether this claim is true is up for debate. Land use experts say the real threat to farmland is urban sprawl into rural areas, not solar development.
“Thousands of acres [of farmland] are going to [urban development], and that’s completely taking it out of commission,” said Jeff Risley, executive director of a new organization called the Renewable Energy Farmers of America. The group helps farmers negotiate land leases with solar and wind companies.
Once an area is turned from farmland into parking lots or apartment buildings, the likelihood of it returning to agricultural land is extremely low. “Solar and wind, it’s a 30- to 40-year commitment, but it can also go back to agriculture land at the end of that time,” Risley said.
Over the next two years, solar is projected to be the fastest-growing power generator in the country, according to a recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. An estimated 83% of solar projects are expected to be built on farmland, according to projections from the American Farmland Trust.
While the estimated amount of farmland to be converted to solar is just a small fraction of the total farmland available in the U.S., for some rural residents, the transition is an unwelcome wave on the horizon.
In upstate New York, Alex Fasulo has spent the last year organizing against a solar project in the town of Fort Edward that would have an estimated 530-acre footprint with solar arrays, access roads, power lines, and a substation. She’s garnered more than 650,000 followers on Instagram alone, posting videos opposing the project, which is being conducted by the Canadian energy company Boralex.
For Fasulo, the solar development threatens the rural way of life she was looking for when she first moved to the area in 2023.
“I knew I was going to be surrounded by houses, farmhouses, and farms,” Fasulo said. “But [had I known] a commercial industrial complex would be able to come into this rural zoning, I would’ve bought land next to a Walmart [instead]. I didn’t sign up for this.”
This sentiment is shared by many neighbors of utility-scale solar projects, especially in states like New York, where there are more small communities interspersed with farmland, making solar development a lot more noticeable than in a state like Texas, where hundreds of acres of contiguous land can be developed far from any town.
“When solar comes into a place like that, it can feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s taking over all of our land,’” Risley said. He tries to encourage the communities he works with to see solar projects as an opportunity rather than a threat to rural lifestyles. Risley recommends the use of a community benefit agreement, which is a contract between the solar developer and the town that can guarantee the building of a new grocery store or community center.
“On top of taxes that they might earn locally, you can also think about: What does our community need, and could this development help us achieve it?” Risley said.
Solar development on farmland could also help mitigate rural America’s carbon footprint. A 2025 report by the philanthropy organization Rural Climate Partnership found that 38% of the country’s total carbon emissions come from rural America, despite being home to less than 20% of the total population.
That’s because carbon-intensive industries are located in rural places — like agriculture, which accounts for 10.5% of total U.S. emissions. One way to shrink this footprint is through the widescale deployment of renewable energy projects, which the report said could create more rural jobs, provide tax revenue to local communities, and diversify farmers’ incomes.
“If you are used to looking at farmland that’s been growing corn or soybeans, I will not deny that replacing those crops with solar panels is a significant aesthetic change,” said Scott Laeser, senior working lands adviser for the Rural Climate Partnership.
“It’s a concern that we see raised, but I think that also assumes that our farmland has always been used the way that it’s used today, even though we used to have much more pasture and crop diversity in our agricultural landscape.”
To Laeser, introducing solar panels into the mix is just the latest in an ever-changing farm landscape.
“I think that as we build more solar projects and as developers incorporate design efforts … like trees and bushes along the edges of the projects to reduce the abrupt visual change, and people design projects based on topography as well, it can help minimize some of those concerns,” Laeser said.
But progress could be slow for at least the next three years because of the Trump administration’s attempts to limit solar development on farmland. This includes halting funding to the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which provides grants to farmers and rural small-business owners to install solar panels and make energy efficiency improvements to their operations.
“It’s really unfortunate because many of those [REAP] projects are not large, and so they’re not being built on prime farmland generally,” said Alex Delworth, senior clean energy policy associate at the Center for Rural Affairs. “They’re taking up a pretty small project size.”
The current status of REAP funding is unclear. In the same August announcement about ending funding to renewable energy loan programs, the USDA said it would ensure that “American farmers, ranchers and producers utilizing wind and solar energy sources” could install units that are “right-sized for their facilities.” No explanation was provided for how the USDA decides what is “right-sized” or not, and as of Jan. 19, 2026, there’s been no announcement for a new REAP grant cycle.
Regardless of what happens at the federal level, solar development is still underway in many parts of the country. Texas, where Chad Raines grazes his sheep, is projected to overtake California in solar production by 2030, according to research from the Solar Energy Industries Association. Much of this development will happen on farmland if current trends continue — and it could be one of the only ways farmers can make a living.
“If you want farmers or landowners to stop taking farmland out of agriculture and putting it into renewable energy, then the first thing that needs to be fixed is the farming landscape,” he said. Competing with large agribusiness has become a nearly impossible venture for most small and midsize producers.
“It needs to be more profitable for farmers to be able to make it,” Raines said.
It’s a tough time for U.S. companies trying to make a go of green hydrogen.
The Trump administration is threatening to cut billions of dollars in funding for hydrogen hubs and rapidly phasing out key tax incentives for the fuel. Major projects are getting canceled. Companies banking on the sector are struggling. And the wholesale abandonment of U.S. climate policy has undermined confidence in market prospects for low-carbon hydrogen that were already shaky before President Donald Trump won a second term.
Even so, Raffi Garabedian, CEO of U.S.-based electrolyzer manufacturer Electric Hydrogen, sees a path forward for his firm — and the industry as a whole.
It won’t be nearly as smooth or as fast as he had hoped. And much of it will take place in Europe, where climate policy and fossil fuel costs make green hydrogen more viable. But even in the U.S., there are still some promising prospects for projects that can get built quickly enough, capture ever-cheaper renewable energy, and find motivated buyers, he said.
Take Project Roadrunner, which is being built in West Texas by alternative-fuels startup Infinium to produce “e-fuels” — drop-in replacements for jet fuel and other fossil fuels made by combining low-carbon hydrogen with waste carbon captured from industrial emissions. Infinium plans to start commercial production at the site in 2027. Last May, Infinium selected Electric Hydrogen’s 100-megawatt HYPRPlant electrolyzer system, which uses water and electricity to make the hydrogen.
Infinium is contracting for clean electricity for the site, including 150 megawatts of wind power from NextEra Energy. It has also won long-term offtake commitments from American Airlines, Citibank, and International Airlines Group to pay for Project Roadrunner’s sustainable aviation fuels made with renewable electricity — “eSAF” in industry jargon. That’s a vital step for securing the stable financing required to build first-of-a-kind facilities, particularly in the nascent green-hydrogen field.
To wit, Brookfield Asset Management and Breakthrough Energy Catalyst are providing funding.
“We’re superexcited about eSAF in particular, because there’s strong policy support. And even at the voluntary level, there seems to be strong corporate willingness to pay for air-travel decarbonization,” Garabedian said.
Other orders have followed for his firm. In September, HIF Global announced it will use Electric Hydrogen’s electrolyzers for a plant in Texas that will produce e-fuels. And in December, Synergen Green Energy said it would install two 120-megawatt HYPRPlants for a green ammonia plant it’s developing on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The HIF Global and Synergen projects are in the early stages of development, and seeing them through will depend on securing financing, permits, and buyers for their e-fuels. In today’s post-boom green-hydrogen market, that’s far from a sure thing.
But in Texas, several factors work in their favor. The Gulf Coast has the infrastructure, from its oil and gas industries, to make, store, and transport hydrogen at large scale. It has access to large and growing amounts of solar and wind power to supply electrolyzers that need affordable clean electricity to compete with fossil fuels.
Another key factor in driving down green-hydrogen costs is making cheaper electrolyzers and supporting equipment. And on that front, Electric Hydrogen is relying on proving out its lower-cost claims to win advantage.
The company, which has raised over $600 million, has built a factory in Devens, Massachusetts, to make its electrolyzer stacks — the core parts of the proton exchange membrane (PEM) systems that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It has also partnered with other component manufacturers and engineering firms to streamline and standardize building the many other working parts of a green hydrogen plant — including power conversion, gas processing, water treatment, and thermal management — in a more modular way, Garabedian said.
Overall, Electric Hydrogen claims its total installed costs are less than half those of systems using electrolyzers from PEM competitors such as Germany’s Siemens Energy and Thyssenkrupp Nucera, as well as those of lower-cost alkaline electrolysis systems built by Chinese companies, which make up the majority of installed capacity today.
“The most important thing in our business is cost,” Garabedian said, but “it doesn’t matter what your electrolyzer costs — it’s what your total installed plant costs.”
However, cost comparisons between different electrolyzer manufacturers and fully built green-hydrogen facilities are far from an exact science in this industry, said Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James.
The world had approximately 2 gigawatts of hydrogen electrolyzers in operation at the end of 2024, according to the International Energy Agency’s “Global 2025 Hydrogen Review.” That amount, Molchanov said, is “a rounding error” compared with global fossil fuel–based hydrogen capacity.
Electrolyzer companies face a tough market, Molchanov added. The International Energy Agency reports that global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity expanded from just over 10 gigawatts in 2022 to more than 50 gigawatts in 2025. But in that time, forecasted demand for green hydrogen has plummeted, which leaves “far more manufacturing capacity available than what’s getting deployed,” Molchanov said. “That’s a lot of underutilized factories.”
That imbalance between electrolyzer supply and demand has taken its toll. Last week, major U.S. engine and generator manufacturer Cummins announced it was halting commercial efforts for its electrolyzer business, which constitutes about 1 gigawatt of manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and Spain. Demand for electrolyzers has “dried up,” Chief Financial Officer Mark Smith said in a November earnings call.
Garabedian conceded that challenge: “We definitely built the company for growth, and we’ve seen growth slower than we anticipated and hoped. As I look at the market, I think we’re looking at another year and a half of muted activity.”
But he also stressed that buyers for green hydrogen and products made from it aren’t likely to be found in the U.S., at least not in the near term. Neither the politics under Trump nor the economics are in its favor.
The country’s cheap and abundant supply of fossil gas means that green hydrogen remains roughly three times more expensive than “gray hydrogen,” which is derived from fossil gas. This is true even for projects that secure the 45V hydrogen tax credits, which expire at the end of next year.
“No one in the U.S. is thinking about deep decarbonization these days,” Garabedian said. “And the price of natural gas is such in the U.S. that it’s hard to impossible for green hydrogen to compete head-to-head economically.”
In Europe, by contrast, gas prices are regularly three to four times as high as they are in the U.S., making green hydrogen more cost competitive, Molchanov noted. And policies set by the European Union and adopted by national governments require major industries to meet carbon-cutting targets, which are expected to spur demand for clean hydrogen.
That’s why the HIF Global and Synergen projects that Electric Hydrogen is supplying electrolyzers to in the U.S. are aimed at exporting their products, primarily to Europe, Garabedian said.
It also explains Electric Hydrogen’s push into Europe for its next wave of electrolyzer deals. In 2024, Germany-based energy company Uniper picked Electric Hydrogen for a 200-megawatt green hydrogen and ammonia plant, set to start production in 2028. Garabedian said the company will soon announce a similarly scaled German project, though he declined to provide more details.
“It is a complicated global market. And we, as an American supplier, have a strategy to address that,” he said. “Unfortunately, it does mean moving a lot of our supply chain to Europe for European suppliers.”
It’s not just federal headwinds that threaten to constrain renewable energy development. State and local restrictions on solar and wind are spreading across the United States, too.
Few states highlight this fact as well as Ohio does. The Buckeye State makes solar and wind farms go through extra hurdles that don’t apply to fossil-fueled or nuclear power plants, including counties’ ability to ban projects. Its siting authorities have also deferred to local opposition for renewable energy while granting opponents little say over where petroleum drilling rigs and fracking waste can go.
A bill now working its way through the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature threatens to raise even more barriers for wind power and solar farms. On Tuesday, the Ohio Senate’s Energy Committee held its third hearing on Senate Bill 294. It’s unclear whether the committee will hear additional testimony, so under state law the bill could pass out of committee as soon as its next meeting.
The bill would declare it to be state policy “in all cases” for new electricity-generation facilities to “employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” But the bill’s definitions not only veer from common usage in ways that would exclude renewables but also threaten to block wind and solar development altogether.
“If Senate Bill 294 were enacted, the Ohio Power Siting Board would be unable to support renewable energy projects under the bill’s restrictive definition. This would place Ohio at a disadvantage,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, in joint testimony for that group and fellow industry organization MAREC Action. “At precisely the moment when Ohio needs every available energy source, this bill would tie the state’s hands.”
Based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, SB 294 is sponsored by Republicans George Lang of West Chester and Mark Romanchuk of Ontario.
Louisiana passed a similar bill last year that prioritized natural gas. A pending bill in New Hampshire says that energy sources “shall” be reliable, meaning not subject to routine daily weather variations.
Lang praised natural gas during his Oct. 28 proponent testimony, noting the bill is designed to take advantage of the fossil fuel. In contrast, he claimed renewable energy “doesn’t meet those qualifications of being cheap. It misses the reliability … And it doesn’t really meet clean yet.” During the Feb. 10 hearing, however, he claimed solar and wind were not really excluded and stressed that “there are definitions that have to be met.”
Those definitions, however, uniformly ding renewables.
SB 294’s definition of a reliable energy source would require it to be “readily available” with minimal interruptions during high-usage times and for it to have a 50% capacity factor. That’s the ratio of its actual power output to the potential maximum. This condition would exclude virtually all land-based wind and solar generation.
A high capacity factor “does not mean that an energy source will be available during extreme weather, or even generally available at peak times,” said Michelle Solomon, manager of electricity for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank. In practice, grid operators “consider how combinations of resources on the grid can work together to meet needs.”
Instead of ensuring systemwide reliability, a single-minded focus on a high capacity factor will distort markets and raise costs for consumers, noted Brendan Pierpont, Energy Innovation’s director of electricity.
In fact, a high penetration of renewables can reduce the intensity of blackouts and vulnerability to extreme weather, according to a 2024 peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy. And, in general, a portfolio of energy-generation resources is more reliable than dependence on only a few sources.
“Reliability is really not a characteristic of a certain technology,” said Diane Cherry, MAREC Action’s deputy director. “And so taking things out of the ‘all-of-the-above’ is a problem.”
SB 294’s perspective on what counts as clean energy is even more questionable than its definition of “reliability.”
Under the legislation, natural gas is called “clean energy,” and language in the bill could potentially even count some coal plants as clean. Meanwhile, solar and wind are only implied to be clean, by way of the bill’s reference to a federal law that deems them so. Nuclear power, which is carbon-free when generated but produces radioactive wastes before and after that point, is also dubbed “clean.”
The definition of “affordable energy source” likewise diverges from the common meaning of those words.
Data released by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie last October shows land-based solar and wind having lower average lifetime costs, called their “levelized cost,” compared with those of other types of power. Storage costs have also dropped substantially since 2020, and will likely fall even more.
Yet “the bill seems to want energy that is cheaper than renewable energy, which really does not exist,” Solomon said.
Ultimately, consumers would pay under the legislation, at a time when utility bills are already rising fast. Failure to add more clean energy sources to the PJM Interconnection region will cost the average Ohio customer roughly $6,500 more by 2035 than they would otherwise pay, American Clean Power reported in a Feb. 6 fact sheet.
Overall, SB 294 adds uncertainty for the industry and investors at a time when they want to build projects, Cherry said. Many companies are under the gun to start construction by July 4 or place projects in service by the end of 2027 in order to get federal tax credits.
The bill also does not mention energy storage, which can require permits from the power siting board. Pairing storage with renewables can raise their capacity factor.
“Energy storage will be increasingly critical to grid reliability and cost control,” said Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, calling for the bill to be amended to include storage so that the board “has the full toolbox to evaluate projects that can deliver reliability without increasing fuel-price volatility or long-term customer costs.”
For their part, representatives of ALEC and the Heartland Institute gave proponent testimony on the bill last fall.
Both are “among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there that have been funded by fossil fuel interests,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute. Yet they also “claim to be totally free-market and libertarian,” he added, an ironic point given the bill’s potential to distort the market in favor of fossil fuels.
To that end, SB 294 “will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers,” said Janine Migden-Ostrander, who formerly served as the Ohio consumers’ counsel and is a fellow at the Pace Energy and Climate Center. “The legislature should not be deciding this. Let the market decide. If projects are uneconomical, they will not be built.”
Bone-chilling cold and Arctic winds gripped the northeastern U.S. over the past few weeks, straining electricity systems and raising power prices as people cranked up their heat. Now, as the region finally starts to thaw, early data shows how America’s offshore wind farms helped keep electricity flowing during the extreme-weather stretch.
The results demonstrate the bitter irony of the Trump administration’s ongoing — and potentially unlawful — battle against U.S. offshore wind development. Federal officials are calling for additional fossil-fueled power to prevent future winter blackouts, all while trying to block the build-out of offshore wind, one of the most valuable resources for cold-climate coastal states.
“Performance data is showing in real time that offshore wind delivers reliable power when the grid needs it the most … at the scale this region and our country need,” said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of Oceantic Network, which advocates for marine renewable energy sectors.
Burdock was speaking on Tuesday in New York City at the group’s annual International Partnering Forum, where hundreds of offshore wind developers, policy experts, and labor leaders gathered to regroup following President Donald Trump’s yearlong attacks on five in-progress offshore wind farms.
For years, independent energy experts have forecast that offshore wind could deliver substantial amounts of power to densely populated, land-constrained communities along America’s east coast — particularly during winter cold spells, when demand for fossil gas exceeds supply. And grid operators in the region have been banking on offshore wind capacity to come online to meet the rising electricity needs of data centers and electrified homes and vehicles.
The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities, including during last month’s Winter Storm Fern, experts said at the event.
The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island, New York, had a “capacity factor” of 52% last month. The metric reflects how much electricity the project actually generated compared with the maximum amount it could generate in a given period. That puts South Fork Wind on par with New York state’s most efficient gas plants.
“The wind capacity in the Northeast is absolutely amazing, particularly over the winter,” said Mikkel Mæhlisen, vice president of the Americas Generation division for Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables.
The 12-turbine project became America’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm in 2024, when it started providing power to some 70,000 homes. Last winter, it was also a beacon of reliability, notching a 54% capacity factor between December 2024 and March 2025.
Vineyard Wind, meanwhile, can already produce as much as 600 MW of clean electricity off the coast of Massachusetts. The project, which is 95% complete, is one of the five offshore wind farms that were forced to halt construction late last year in response to Trump’s stop-work orders, which cited ambiguous “national security” concerns. Federal judges have allowed all five projects to proceed as the developers’ complaints move through the legal system.
However, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says the Trump administration plans to appeal those court rulings, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
During Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind had a 75% capacity factor, Burdock said. Once fully operational, the project will deliver power at a price of $84.23 per megawatt-hour to the New England grid. That’s markedly less than spot wholesale prices during the storm, which spiked to over $870 per MWh on Jan. 25.
Soaring gas prices and limited supplies pushed utilities in New England to fire up oil-burning power plants in order to avert blackouts, assets that are typically too expensive to justify running. The result will be even higher bills for the region’s residents, who have historically faced some of the highest energy costs in the nation — in part because New England lacks recoverable resources like oil and gas, said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Having a more diverse energy mix would help states reduce their reliance on firm, dispatchable, but also costly and dirty power plants during such challenging periods.
“Variable resources like wind and solar, when they’re operating during these cold weather periods, they’re actually helping to keep a lid on prices,” Dykes said during a panel. “It means we can reduce the runtimes of those more expensive oil units. It also means that we can preserve the runtime of those [fossil] resources that are relying on stored fuel.”
Proponents of America’s nascent offshore wind industry said they’re hopeful the five in-progress projects will be completed as planned. In New York, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind and Equinor’s Empire Wind would together provide 1.7 gigawatts of new capacity — enough to meet more than 10% of the electricity needs in New York City and Long Island.
“The last few weeks have been extremely stressful,” Gary Stephenson, a senior vice president for the Long Island Power Authority, said about the region’s cold snap. The municipal utility, which serves 1.2 million customers, purchases power from South Fork Wind and will connect its grid to Sunrise Wind, which is expected to start operating in 2027.
“I really wish we had that Sunrise facility online. That would have taken so much pressure off the natural gas system,” Stephenson said at the event. “So we’re looking forward to that [coming online] towards the end of next year.”
A correction was made on Feb. 12, 2026: This story originally said Vineyard Wind delivered power at $84.23 per megawatt-hour during Winter Storm Fern, but that is the price the installation will deliver once fully operational.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column.
Not convinced the energy transition is actually happening? Take a look at how much cash is flowing toward fossil fuel–free technologies.
Investors poured a record amount of money into the energy transition last year: $2.3 trillion worldwide, according to new figures from research firm BloombergNEF. That number represents spending on everything from renewables and batteries to power grids and electric vehicles.
Global investment in the energy transition has broken records over and over again in recent years, and for good reason. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries are fast and increasingly cheap to install. Grid operators are scrambling to build out their systems as the world’s demand for electricity skyrockets, driven in large part by the AI data center boom. Meanwhile, electric cars are becoming hugely popular in places like China, where they are often cheaper than gas-fueled vehicles, and Norway, which has long-standing policies incentivizing car buyers to go electric.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers on spending. Investment in clean energy and the grid outpaced the amount spent on fossil fuel supply in 2025 — marking the second year in a row that has happened. And investment in fossil fuel supply dropped last year for the first time since 2020, with BNEF reporting a $9 billion decline from 2024.
Now for the less-great news. Investment in the energy transition is growing overall, but more slowly than it used to —and right when the world needs it to accelerate.
Last year, it rose by only 8% — less than the 12% jump in 2024 and much less than the 22% one in 2023. Plus, while investment in sectors like clean industry and energy storage increased, the amount for renewable energy specifically declined by nearly 10%, something BNEF attributes to uncertainty caused by new power market rules in China. Even so, the Asian country is by far the largest market for energy transition investment, followed by the European Union and then the U.S.
Despite those slips, growth is growth — and the global shift to cleaner energy isn’t stopping just because of recent headwinds in the U.S. and beyond.
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
The ostensibly barren Mojave Desert is in fact teeming with plants and animals, including a rare species known as the threecorner milkvetch. It’s a member of the pea family, splaying across the ground instead of climbing up a garden trellis. Given the harsh desert conditions, it waits until the arrival of rains to burst from the earth — flowering, fruiting, and reproducing.
Though hardy, the threecorner milkvetch — which is under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act — and its fellow species in the Mojave are still sensitive to disturbance, like when solar farms literally break ground. Traditionally, energy companies “blade and grade” habitats, meaning they cut out vegetation and even out the soil, which disrupts the seed banks stored within the ground.
In the desert outside Las Vegas, the Gemini Solar Project took a gentler approach, instead trying to preserve the ecosystem. According to a new study, that paid off for the threecorner milkvetch: Before the development, scientists found 12 plants on the site; afterward, in 2024, they found 93, signifying that the seeds survived construction. Compared with those at a nearby plot of land, the plants at Gemini grew wider and taller, and produced more flowers and fruits. That might be because the solar panels shade the soil, slowing evaporation, which makes more water available to the plants to grow big and strong. “So you just have the potential for a lot more plants,” said Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the paper, which was published late last year. “There’s seedlings of so many other species coming up as well. And so the fact that seed bank survived is phenomenal.”
It’s yet more evidence that solar farms can be built in ways that minimize disturbances to ecosystems. (The company behind the Gemini project, Primergy, did not respond to requests for comment.) This technique is called ecovoltaics: Instead of blade-and-grade, facilities are built with native species in mind. To give the ecosystem a boost, for instance, a crew can seed the soils with native grasses and flowers. “Some of those seed mixes do quite well at solar facilities, and they attract pollinators, birds, and other wildlife as a result,” said Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Sort of asking that umbrella, ‘Field of Dreams’ question, right: If you build it, will they come?”
In Minnesota, at least, the answer is yes. Walston led a study of two solar sites on converted cropland there, observing the growth of biodiversity over the course of five years. The researchers found that the number of unique flowering plant species increased sevenfold, and the abundance of insect pollinators tripled. Native bees alone increased by 20 times. In a follow-on study across a dozen solar sites, grassland birds flocked to the areas, likely attracted by the abundance of insects — same goes for bats. Birds could also nest among the panels, hiding from predators. “We’ve seen positive outcomes, sort of across the board,” Walston said. “Anytime that you’re seeing increases in insect prey, you’ve got at least a really strong potential for also seeing greater bird activity and bat activity, as they are attracted to those sites.”
Such a significant boost to biodiversity is not a given, though. Certain plant species will need more or less shade from the panels: In the Mojave, Pereira found only one threecorner milkvetch, for example, growing directly under a panel. The rest were popping up in the sunnier spaces between them. Young plants of other species, by contrast, might prefer shadier spots, because too much sunlight can stress them.
Panel height is a major factor, too: Taller ones let bigger plant species grow to their full potential — but the higher the supports, the more a solar company must spend on materials. A facility might also set a specific height to accommodate livestock like sheep and goats, used for “conservation grazing” to clear out invasive weeds, which in turn reduces the fire risk of dead plants. “We’re trying to work with developers,” Walston said, “to say, ‘OK, well, if all you can do is 2 feet, what might be the best mix of seed mixes and management styles that could really optimize the habitat?’”
That mowing might sound destructive, but it mimics the natural order of things, as grazers like deer and buffalo, in addition to wildfires, have historically served the same purpose. Ecovoltaics can also return former agricultural fields to more of their natural state. “I think there is real potential for solar farms to be especially good for biodiversity in prairie ecosystems, since prairies evolved over time to require repeated disturbance,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at the nonprofit Environment America, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
The blade-and-grade alternative, on the other hand, doesn’t just disrupt a habitat. With native plant species cleared out, the earth loses the root structures that keep soils from blowing away. Then, opportunistic and fast-growing invasive species can take over, muscling out the natives. And their flowers might not be as enticing for indigenous pollinators, like bumblebees.
Just as endemic plants can grow among solar panels, so too can crops, a technique known as agrivoltaics. Researchers are finding, for example, that things like cucumbers grow like crazy on rooftops. The panels create a unique microclimate that keeps crops from getting too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and uses about one-third of the water compared with growing in full sun. Now, scientists are trying to figure out which crops — especially high-value ones that can make up the cost of installing solar — will do the best growing under panels, both on rooftops and on the ground. “If you’re going to grow something, you want to grow something that a potential farmer could sell for decent profit,” said horticulturist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies rooftop agrivoltaics at Colorado State University but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “You name the crop, and there’s interest.”
All told, ecovoltaics and agrivoltaics have the potential to bolster biodiversity and the food supply while generating clean electricity. “Rather than a moonscape of invasive species and dust blowing into cities, why not strive for something better?” Pereira said. “It’s a wild and beautiful place that we live in, and it’s our job to look out for these species as well.”
In December, the Trump administration issued a sweeping stop-work order to every single offshore wind installation underway in America. But, as of today, all five projects have either resumed construction or received the green light from judges to do so.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the 924-megawatt Sunrise Wind project, located off the coast of New York, can resume construction. The wind farm is nearly halfway complete and, before the stop-work order, was expected to begin producing electricity this year.
Ørsted said in a statement that it will “restart impacted activities immediately.”
The December order had cited ambiguous national security concerns in halting construction of Sunrise Wind and the other offshore wind farms. But Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found this justification insufficient after reviewing the classified report detailing those threats. He granted project developer Ørsted a preliminary injunction that allows work to proceed as the complaint moves through the legal system.
It’s the fifth such court order in recent weeks, and a welcome reprieve for a sector that promises to provide huge amounts of clean electricity to the East Coast in a time of surging demand.
In mid-January, the 704-MW Revolution Wind project, which is being developed off the coast of Rhode Island by Ørsted, became the first to receive an injunction. By the end of the month, every project aside from Sunrise Wind had secured a similar ruling and restarted work. Vineyard Wind, an installation so close to completion that it is already partially supplying power to the New England grid, was the latest to do so. Its final turbine tower left the New Bedford, Massachusetts, port last Wednesday.
The December order from the Trump administration ground construction of the megaprojects to a halt, costing developers millions of dollars, delaying the arrival of much-needed new electricity, and threatening the outright cancellation of the multibillion-dollar developments.
It also capped off a yearlong assault from the Trump administration against the emerging sector.
That assault has largely been successful. Offshore wind was once seen as the future cornerstone of Northeastern grids, but now only a fraction of what was once planned for the next decade is likely to get built: Research firm BloombergNEF slashed its forecast for 2035 offshore wind capacity by a staggering 85% between November 2024 and October 2025.
But the Trump administration has, so far, failed to permanently stop the construction of the five projects already underway. It’s not for lack of trying.
Last April, the administration issued a stop-work order to New York’s Empire Wind, one of the five projects that was halted by the December order as well.
The developer, Norway’s partially state-owned energy firm Equinor, declined to sue over the April order and instead lobbied the Trump administration behind the scenes. The administration lifted the order after about one month, which White House officials said was the result of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) agreeing to support new gas pipelines in the state. Hochul denied those allegations, but her administration green-lit one such project in November.
The Trump administration issued another stop-work order in August — this time to Revolution Wind. Ørsted immediately challenged the directive in court and was granted relief a month later.
Rather than targeting any individual project, the December order took a dragnet approach, citing still-unclear national security risks. The Trump administration has yet to publicly release details regarding the alleged threats.
Similarly, the administration has refused to share a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that it said justified the April stop-work order on the Empire Wind project.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from E&E News, the administration last year released a copy of the report that was almost entirely redacted. Instead of providing damning evidence that the Biden administration had rushed the project’s approval or relied on flawed science, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had claimed at the time, the file contains a cover sheet and research references — and about two dozen pages of black rectangles.
It’s unclear where the administration will go from here. Several of the five now-unpaused projects will be complete, or at least begin producing power, if they can continue unabated for even a few more months.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the prospects for the energy source are very different.
Last Monday, 10 European nations banded together to announce a plan to install 100 gigawatts of offshore wind in the North Sea. The agreement was motivated in part by Europe’s desire to forge its own path on energy as it grows less comfortable with relying on natural gas imports from an increasingly erratic and hostile United States.
Just days before, in fact, President Donald Trump took time out of his World Economic Forum speech in Davos, Switzerland, to complain about wind turbines — and to call European nations “losers” for installing them.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
SHENANDOAH, Iowa — First viewed from a pickup truck driving south on U.S. 59, the wind turbines seem small and delicate.
The newly constructed wind farm is a matter of pride for Gregg Connell, the man behind the wheel of the truck. He is a former two-term mayor of this southwestern Iowa city and an official with the local chamber of commerce.
The turbines are “beautiful,” Connell said, looking out the driver’s-side window. “You’re capturing energy, you’re helping the environment.”
But the sight of a new wind farm is increasingly rare, even in Iowa, a state that trails only Texas in electricity production from wind.
Wind energy development has all but ground to a halt in the face of community opposition, a phaseout of federal tax credits, and the Trump administration’s actions to slow the approval of federal permits.
Some of the administration’s most notable moves on wind power have been attacks on offshore development, including a stop-work order in December that halted construction on five projects. But land-based wind projects — often described in the industry as “onshore wind” — are a much larger contributor to the nation’s electricity supply and are struggling to make even modest gains. Without robust growth in onshore wind, the United States will be severely limited in its ability to build enough power-generation capacity to meet rising demand and combat climate change.
One of Iowa’s few new developments, the Shenandoah Hills wind farm, illustrates what it takes to build in the current political and regulatory environment.
The developer, Chicago-based Invenergy, faced years of blowback from residents who raised concerns about damage to the visual landscape along with concerns about potential harm to human and animal health and effects on property values. The opposition campaign dragged on into court cases and led to one county supervisor losing his reelection bid.
Though controversial, Shenandoah Hills still had the advantage of obtaining all its federal permits before the Trump administration returned to office in January and began using federal agencies to slow or halt new projects.
If the Shenandoah Hills ordeal is what success looks like for the wind industry, then it’s understandable that investors, developers, and others see few reasons to pursue new projects.
“U.S. onshore wind is in its weakest shape in about a decade, not because the technology has stopped being competitive, but because the policy and, to an extent, the macro-environment have turned sharply against it,” Atin Jain, an energy analyst for the research firm BloombergNEF, said in an email.
In 2024, the most recent full year for which data is available, wind energy produced 7.7 percent of the nation’s electricity, more than any other renewable source, according to the Energy Information Administration. Since the country has only three operational offshore wind farms, onshore wind accounts for nearly all this production.
New projects peaked in 2020, when 14,878 megawatts of onshore wind farms came online in the United States, according to the EIA. This number has decreased steadily since then, bottoming out at 5,026 megawatts in 2024.
The industry had a slight rebound in 2025, with 7,804 new megawatts of capacity — including completed projects and those that were projected to be operational by Dec. 31 — and will grow more in 2026, with 10,044 megawatts listed by EIA as planned for completion.
After that, things are likely to get much worse. Developers and analysts expect a drop-off in 2027 and beyond, when the current chill in development stemming from the Trump administration’s actions will lead to fewer completed projects.
Meanwhile, electricity demand is soaring as utilities and grid operators determine how to meet the needs of large users such as AI data centers.
There is a disconnect in the market when demand is surging while wind power development is slowing, a situation that bodes poorly for the future of clean energy in the U.S., said Michael Thomas, CEO of Cleanview, a market intelligence platform focused on power plants and data centers.
“The decline in wind energy development is one of the trends that I’m most concerned about when it comes to climate progress in the United States,” Thomas said in an email. “I’m not aware of a single model that shows us meeting our climate targets or avoiding significant warming without a huge buildout out of wind power.”
Connell, 76, parked his truck on the gravel lot that the wind farm’s construction crew has used as a staging ground for the past year. Workers installed the last of 54 turbines in November, bringing the total generating capacity to 214 megawatts.
Acting as a tour guide for two reporters, Connell had spent much of the day discussing his work as mayor and now as executive vice president of the chamber of commerce to attract jobs and investment to Shenandoah.
A city of about 4,900 residents, Shenandoah was the childhood home of the Everly Brothers, the musical duo behind hits such as “Wake Up Little Susie.” The main street has a vitality that many other cities of this size would envy, with a first-run movie theater and a recently renovated mill that now hosts an indoor farmers market.
Still, such vibrance is a challenge to maintain.
The median age in Page County, which includes much of Shenandoah, is 45 years, the 12th highest of Iowa’s 99 counties. To grow and prosper, the community needs to attract new residents, and to do so, it needs to maintain and expand a tax base that can support schools and government services.
“We need more young people,” Connell said.
The Shenandoah Hills wind farm is one of the largest investments in the county’s history. Payments to landowners and local governments are projected to total $234 million over the life of the project, according to Invenergy.
For context, the Shenandoah school district has an annual budget of $28.4 million, with $6.2 million from local property taxes. The wind farm is expected to generate an additional $1.3 million in property taxes annually for the district, based on a 2022 estimate from a consulting firm on behalf of Invenergy.
Invenergy’s plans for a wind farm in the area had been underway since the mid-2010s. The company already had the support of landowners willing to lease their property and of government officials who were moving forward with permit approval.
Then, in the late 2010s, something changed. In both Iowa and nationwide, wind energy projects began to face local opposition that was more aggressive and better organized than before.
Some of the shift was due to the boom in wind energy, which had already changed the landscape in parts of Iowa, contributing to backlash from residents who disliked the look of the turbines.
Some of the changing tide was partisan, fueled by the hardening of beliefs that Democrats support renewable energy and Republicans — the large majority in rural Iowa — support fossil fuels. President Donald Trump helped popularize this view with his use of the unfounded term “wind cancer” and other criticism of wind and solar energy.
The upshot was that the development of Shenandoah Hills turned bitter.
The opposition organized on social media, including a Facebook group, Page County Horizons, which served as a forum to encourage attendance at public meetings and to share video clips and articles portraying wind energy as dangerous and unreliable.
Todd Maher, who lives within view of the wind farm, opposed the project and decided in 2022 to run for the county Board of Supervisors because he felt that officials weren’t listening to concerns. He won in the Republican primary, defeating the incumbent, who supported the wind farm, and then ran unopposed in the general election.
“A lot of people want to live where they can see the sunrise and sunset without having to look at a wind turbine,” he said in a recent interview.
Maher, 55, lives on an acreage with a donkey, chickens, cats, and dogs. He has worked for most of his adult life at the Pella Corp. window plant in Shenandoah.
One of his main concerns with the wind farm was the disconnect he observed between the landowners who would receive lease payments and residents who would actually see the turbines every day. Most of the owners don’t live near the turbines, and many of them don’t live in the county or the state, he said.
This isn’t unusual, with the heirs of farmers and investment companies owning a large share of U.S. farmland. But it’s frustrating, said Maher, that people who live in the area will have their views spoiled while somebody else is paid for the leases.
Once Maher took office, he found it wasn’t easy to stop the project. The board passed a moratorium on wind energy development that was to include Shenandoah Hills. Invenergy responded by suing the county, arguing that the sudden change should require taxpayers to reimburse the company for the money it had already spent.
Legal counsel warned county officials that there was a decent chance of losing in court and then facing a judgment so large that the government might need to file for bankruptcy.
Maher was unwilling to take that risk. In November 2024, he was in the majority in a 2–1 vote to accept a settlement with Invenergy that would allow the project to move forward.
“It was the toughest vote I’ve ever made,” he said. “I lost a lot of friends over it. I lost a lot of people that supported me.”
Iowa, especially its western half, has some of the richest wind resources in the country.
Early developers capitalized on this, with the completion of Storm Lake 1 in northwestern Iowa in 1999, the first wind farm in the state, with a capacity exceeding 100 megawatts. By 2010, wind farms were a familiar part of the landscape, with more than 3,500 megawatts of capacity, including some large installations along Interstate 80, the major east–west highway that bisects the state, connecting California to New Jersey.
For years, Iowa’s leadership in wind energy was a point of pride, with the silhouette of a wind turbine appearing on the state’s license plate next to images of city skylines and farm buildings.
Wind power enjoyed bipartisan support in the state, with proponents including Democrats such as former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and former Gov. Tom Vilsack and Republicans such as former Gov. Terry Branstad and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. They viewed wind farms as an opportunity to increase incomes in rural counties.
Their vision paid off. As of 2024, Iowa led the country in the share of electricity produced by wind farms, with 63 percent.
But the era of growth in Iowa’s wind industry is almost certainly nearing its end. Shenandoah Hills was one of just three wind farms to be completed in the state in 2025, and only one was completed in 2024, according to the EIA. The last significant year of development was 2020, when 12 projects went online.
The contraction of the industry is a grave concern for Jeff Danielson, a Democrat who served four terms in the Iowa Senate and now is vice president of advocacy for Clean Grid Alliance, a clean energy business group.
“Iowa is essentially closed for business when it comes to wind development,” he said.
The resistance comes almost entirely from the local level. His organization lists 58 of Iowa’s 99 counties as having rules designed to limit wind power development, including many of the counties with the strongest wind resources.
He described the opposition as formidable in its ability to organize at the local level and then throw out a large number of objections in the hope that one of them will stick. It’s not a fair fight, with one side repeating a litany of claims found on anti-wind websites, and the wind power companies obligated to stick to facts that will stand up in court, said Danielson.
“It’s not even really an adult conversation anymore,” he said.
If Iowa’s legislature and governor wanted to encourage wind energy development, they could pass a law to expand state authority to approve projects, limiting the ability of local governments to pass restrictions. The state has previously done this on hot-button issues such as regulating large animal-feeding operations, but there’s little indication they’ll intervene when it comes to wind.
“One thing you find out about legislators is they like local control when they like it, and they don’t always like it,” said Iowa Rep. Brent Siegrist, a Republican whose district is a short drive from Shenandoah.
Siegrist supports wind energy and thinks it is important for making Iowa an attractive location for providing plentiful, affordable electricity for data centers. But he doesn’t expect any push at the state level to make it easier to build wind farms. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.
“I’m not sure that we would step into that,” he said.
If Iowa isn’t building much wind power, it’s a bad sign for the industry as a whole.
But local opposition in rural areas is just one of several obstacles for wind developers.
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July included a rapid phaseout of the production tax credit, an important federal policy that had helped encourage development.
Developers are now on a tight deadline. Projects must be completed by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify for the tax credit.
Amid the rush to begin construction, the Trump administration has issued executive orders to slow development of wind and solar. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken additional steps, requiring that he personally sign off on new wind or solar projects subject to his agency’s jurisdiction.
Jain, the BloombergNEF analyst, said the global wind energy market faces challenges tied to local acceptance and slow progress in building enough power lines to serve new projects.
The United States deals with those same problems, as well as the obstacles created by its federal policies.
The U.S. outlook, Jain said, “now looks so much weaker than the global picture.”
In Shenandoah, the wind farm is up and running, but the debate over its approval has left scars.
In February 2025, Invenergy sold the project to MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s largest electricity utility. Invenergy quietly walked away from the wind farm while MidAmerican inherited a community relations crisis.
MidAmerican has attempted to smooth things over, hosting events for landowners and community members and meeting with supervisors and engineers of Page and Fremont counties.
Outside the two counties, MidAmerican’s publicity for the wind farm has been scant. However, in recent correspondence with Inside Climate News, the company expressed no regrets over its decision to take on the project.
“The Shenandoah Hills wind farm is an economic success story for both Page and Fremont counties,” Geoff Greenwood, media relations manager for MidAmerican, wrote in an email. The company projects paying nearly $87 million to Fremont County and $65 million to Page County in property taxes over the life of the project, said Greenwood.
“Wind energy has helped us create relationships with partner landowners and helps Iowa attract new companies to the state. It also provides direct, long-term economic benefits to our rural areas,” Greenwood added.
But as the very last turbines were erected outside Shenandoah, the atmosphere hardly felt triumphant.
The closest thing to a celebration was a ribbon-cutting held in September 2024 when Invenergy opened an office in downtown Shenandoah to manage the construction and community relations.
Connell, who has been unabashed in his support for the project since the beginning, was one of the people holding the ribbon. But his words that day didn’t feel like a victory lap.
“This has been a difficult project,” he said, quoted by KMA, the local radio station. “There are people that oppose wind, and there are people for wind. But I admire the fact that Invenergy, in my estimation, has taken the high ground on everything.”
The office closed a few months later, around the time of the sale to MidAmerican.
Maher, the county supervisor, wishes the wind farm had never happened. But since it’s here, he is hopeful that he and his neighbors can learn to live with the change.
“Maybe things will not be as bad [as we fear, and] we can find a good common ground to where we can coexist.”
This story was first published by the Missouri Independent.
The conversion of Missouri farmland from food to solar power production creates feuds among neighbors, pits residents against developers, and raises questions about property rights.
Those tensions were on full display Tuesday in the Missouri Senate commerce committee, which held hearings on two bills aimed at halting solar power development and a third that would impose new regulations and taxes on large-scale development.
No votes were held on any of the bills.
Laura Stinson told the committee her parents’ Callaway County home, once a peaceful respite, is now plagued with construction noise, dust, and blinding glare from a new development surrounding their 16 acres.
“They are running full steam ahead, and they don’t care who they run over,” Stinson said, pleading with members to pass the bills.
But Dane Reed of Vernon County said his decision to lease land to a solar developer is the best use of his property.
A moratorium, he said, “strips landowners of our fundamental right to choose our most profitable crop. And right now, solar energy generates twice the revenue of any other crop we can produce.”
Thousands of acres across the state are being used to construct large-scale solar projects, some for commercial sale of power and others that will be dedicated to supply other new developments like data centers.
State Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin, a Shelbina Republican, and state Sen. Sandy Crawford, a Republican from Buffalo, are sponsoring the moratorium bills. The bills would halt all work on commercial-scale solar power installations and direct the state Department of Natural Resources to issue rules on their “construction, placement and operation.”
The moratorium would expire Dec. 31, 2027, or when regulations become effective, whichever is later.
The goal of the moratorium, O’Laughlin said, is to force developers to make their plans known so residents can judge for themselves whether the project will benefit the community. Currently, she said, the public becomes aware of projects only after contracts are signed with landowners and the result seems predetermined.
“Communities become divided as the neighbors are pitted against one another, those who signed and those who don’t, and those who bear the environmental, visual, and infrastructure impact versus those who are being paid and receiving compensation,” O’Laughlin said.
The bill establishing regulations, sponsored by state Sen. Travis Fitzwater, a Republican from Holts Summit, would not halt current construction.
Instead, it creates a process for public notice and local approval at the county level that must take place before an application to proceed with a project is submitted to the Public Service Commission.
Without approval from a county commission, the application could not move forward.
Fitzwater’s bill would also tax solar power equipment, currently exempt from property taxes, as personal property. The land would also be taxed as commercial real estate instead of the cheaper designation as farmland.
The bill would cap the amount of land used for solar power production to 2% of the cropland in a county and block the Public Service Commission from granting solar power developers the right to condemn property for energy generation.
“I’m passionate about my constituents that come to my office that are crying over the fact their American dream is being stunted, and I want to provide a solution,” Fitzwater said.
There are 36 states that currently regulate new commercial solar power projects, said Kurt Schaefer, director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Because the Public Service Commission regulates only investor-owned utilities, he said, his agency could be the regulatory agency because its authority can also be extended to electric cooperatives and municipal utilities.
The rules should govern both the setup and operation of solar facilities and what happens when their useful life is over, Schaefer said.
“In the state of Missouri, we require financial assurance for a whole lot of things — land reclamation, for mining activities, wastewater systems,” Schaefer said. “You really can’t even put in a small wastewater system for a trailer park without posting a bond.”
One of the most controversial projects is in Henry County, where there is a 5,000-acre solar farm under construction. The project was developed over several years but only revealed publicly at the start of 2024.
In December 2024, after two incumbent commissioners were defeated for reelection, the Henry County Commission approved an incentive package for the solar project that included $650 million in public-sponsored financing.
With the filing of the moratorium bills, construction has picked up pace, said former Henry County Prosecuting Attorney Richard Shields.
“These moratorium bills would give the state the opportunity to tap the brakes on these projects and get some rules in place,” Shields said.
A moratorium would end solar development in Missouri for years, said David Bunge of Azimuth Renewables, a solar energy development company in St. Louis.
“That’s not stability, that’s not good governance, and it’s not fair to the communities of Missouri that have engaged with developers like Azimuth,” he said.
And Mark Walter, a consultant for solar developers, said the moratorium bill is so broad it would prevent individuals from installing new solar panels on their home. The need for regulation is real, he said, but must be targeted against bad practices.
“There are plenty of bad developers out there,” Walter said. “I joked for a long time that I had a job in policy because of those folks, and I had to clean up their messes when they would make bad projects that upset local people and end up with state legislation like this.”
As large solar fields proliferate across America, pushback to them in rural communities is growing, fueled by a mix of disinformation and genuine concern about losing open land to development.
The tension is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Virginia, which has ambitious clean energy goals but is also the land of Thomas Jefferson — where many residents take pride in their rolling hills, winding rivers, and agrarian roots.
Today, nearly two-thirds of Virginia’s counties effectively prohibit utility-scale solar, according to the renewables industry. But legislation rocketing through the state’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly would help change that, preventing outright bans while still allowing localities to reject large-scale solar projects on an individual basis.
Senate and House versions of the measure have already cleared their respective chambers, with most Democrats for and most Republicans against. The proposal is backed by solar developers and a powerful government advisory commission on energy policy, and is poised to reach the desk of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in the coming weeks.
Still, most environmental and climate advocacy groups in Virginia have no position on the bill, and some conservationists are opposed — exposing the conflicts that can arise even among interests that all support the clean energy transition.
And the renewables industry acknowledges that if the bill does become law, wary local governments will still need to be convinced that solar fields are a net positive.
“This bill is a relative light touch to address solar siting in a way that we hope will result in more projects getting to make their case to a community, while preserving local control,” said Evan Vaughan, executive director of Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, a nonprofit that represents over 50 large-scale solar, storage, and wind developers and manufacturers.
In many ways, Virginia is primed for utility-scale solar development. The state is the data center capital of the world, with a growing number of facilities needing more and more electricity. Large solar is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to satisfy that demand.
There’s also the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Adopted in 2020, the law requires both of the state’s investor-owned utilities to decarbonize by midcentury and sets a target of at least 16 gigawatts of solar and land-based wind farms to help them do so. Already on the uptick, utility-scale solar exploded after the law was adopted, with the state averaging more than 1 gigawatt of installations each year through 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Virginia now ranks ninth on the group’s list of states with the most utility-scale solar.
But in tandem with this explosion, county resistance to solar has risen — spurred in part by solar developers that fail to control sediment runoff during construction and operation, contributing to pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways.
Local project approvals peaked in 2022 and declined after that, according to the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. The group says that 64% of Virginia counties now bar large-scale solar in practice, either through outright bans or unworkable and costly restrictions.
For instance, Greenville County allows solar only on industrial or business property. Accomack, Appomattox, and Powhatan counties prohibit solar on agricultural land. Washington County bans solar on land that has been clear-cut or heavily timbered in the last five years and land within five miles of an airport.
“Virginia should be an attractive market, and it certainly has attracted a lot of development interests in the past,” Vaughan said. But the prohibitions are helping to change that. “We are seeing many solar companies looking at Virginia and saying, ‘We don’t see a lot of opportunity here anymore.’”
Indeed, large solar in the state has stalled dramatically, with new installations plummeting in 2025. The slowdown is especially salient as already-high electricity rates continue to push upward, Vaughan said.
“Utility-scale solar is still the cheapest source of new electricity generation, period,” he added. “So, this difficulty of bringing new solar projects online does have a direct link to affordability.”
The legislation nearing Spanberger’s desk builds on an unsuccessful measure introduced two years ago by Democratic Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg of Henrico County, just outside Richmond. That proposal would have simply outlawed blanket bans on solar, along with size and density restrictions, while retaining local authority over permitting. It was approved by the Senate but languished in the House.
Since then, VanValkenburg explained to colleagues in committee last month, he’s endeavored to address the proposal’s critics. This year’s bill, backed by the state’s influential Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, would still prevent outright and de facto bans. But it would also establish a host of statewide standards for solar farms, including setbacks from roads and wetlands, height limitations, and measures to limit water pollution during construction. Plus, it would require solar developers to pay for equipment removal and land restoration when a project is decommissioned.
“Local governments complained — correctly, by the way — about bad solar projects and bad solar developers coming in,” VanValkenburg said. The edited legislation, he said, gives locales guidelines for stopping those bad actors.
Even if the criteria are met, the bill wouldn’t force approval of solar fields, VanValkenburg stressed in committee. Developers would still need a special-use permit or siting agreement from local governments.
“They can reject every single project that comes before them,” VanValkenburg said. “They just need to take them up one at a time. They can’t outright ban solar.”
Utility-scale renewable developers in Virginia have made the proposal one of their top priorities: It is not a silver bullet, they say, but an important foot in the door with some locales. And though communities may still rebuff large solar fields, they would have to submit their reasons for doing so to state utility regulators, keyed to the new siting standards.
“The bill improves transparency and fairness,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, “by requiring that project denials be documented and publicly explained.”
VanValkenburg’s efforts at compromise, meanwhile, seem to have borne fruit. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for instance, testified in favor of the new legislation last month, despite having had “reservations” about the bill in the past.
“The draft that we’re moving towards incorporates more robust boundaries for our wetlands and tributaries,” Jay Ford, Virginia policy manager for the group, said in remarks to the committee. “This is a really important step.”
“Groups like us,” Ford continued, “we’re always in an awkward place here because we know we need to accelerate the clean energy deployment. And we also know we need to take care of our natural resources. We don’t think it should be an either-or proposition. And we’re really grateful to the senator for helping us get to that point.”
Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents rapidly developing Prince William County and has prioritized tree conservation, also praised VanValkenburg.
“He’s worked in good faith with me repeatedly on legislation … willing to try to meet me halfway,” she said. “The local option part of this,” she said, whereby governments still have the ability to reject projects, “is a pretty non-offensive way to go about dealing with the issue.”
VanValkenburg’s bill, Senate Bill 347, cleared committee and the full Senate last week. A similar proposal by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, a Democrat representing parts of Alexandria and Fairfax County, passed committee last week and the House of Delegates yesterday. That measure, House Bill 711, includes stricter setbacks from Chesapeake Bay wetlands.
At least one of the versions must clear the other chamber to reach the governor’s desk — though no more action is expected until at least the latter half of the month.
Not everyone is on board with VanValkenburg’s and Herring’s proposals. The Virginia Farm Bureau, which advocates for farmers and the agricultural industry, and the Virginia Association of Counties oppose the legislation, representatives said during the Senate committee debate last week.
Most environmental advocacy groups haven’t prioritized the legislation one way or another: It’s not part of the community’s shared list of priorities before the General Assembly.
Two conservation organizations, meanwhile, spoke against the bill in committee: Friends of the Rappahannock, a river protection group, and The Piedmont Environmental Council, a promoter of solar panels paired with crops.
“We fully recognize and agree that we must not allow a patchwork of local ordinances to become a de facto ban on solar energy development,” the council said in an email to Canary Media. “If we desire science-based best management practices, and we absolutely should, we must initiate a process through our state agencies,” the statement continued, one that is “inclusive” of environmental advocates, subject matter experts, and local governments.
This continued skepticism is one reason the solar industry isn’t 100% sanguine, even as the legislation looks primed for passage by the General Assembly. Spanberger could try to amend it before signing it into law — her prerogative under the Virginia legislative process.
And no matter what, the solar industry knows it has to earn back trust from some locals.
“Developers are always going to have to do the hard work of convincing a community that their project is a good addition,” Vaughan said. “That’s not going to change.”
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