Virtual Briefing – The State of Siting: 2026 Legislative Round-Up

Alex Breckel, Senior Director: Hello and welcome. Good afternoon for those on the east coast and central and good morning for the rest of you. Really excited to have you today to talk about one of our recent reports and some trends on the siting policy landscape area that we love working on very much and excited to share with you.

My name is Alex Breckel. I am the senior director at Clean Tomorrow. We’re a nonpartisan innovation and clean energy policy think tank, and we host what’s called the Siting Solutions Project.

Siting Solutions Project is a nationwide initiative focused on addressing barriers to clean energy siting and permitting by providing policy analysis and insight to those who are at the front lines of these policy issues, providing technical assistance and generally trying to cultivate a field of practitioners on the siting policy issue.

Today we’ll be talking about our 2026 Legislative Round-Up. So every year, as state legislatures wind down, we publish a State of Siting Round-Up report. It outlines some key findings and national trends, what we’re watching and seeing on siting policy in 2026, a little peek ahead to 2027. We published a report in July, so if you haven’t read it, please go check it out. But in the meantime, we will cover the highlights today in the presentation.

Just one housekeeping note, a couple housekeeping notes. We will try to distribute slides that we did in the presentation. Thanks for that question. And we’ll try to keep the presentation to just half an hour. We want to save a lot of time for questions from you all. Some folks have submitted questions in advance. We have those ready, but feel free to submit questions via the Q&A button. It should be at the bottom of your screen. You may have to click the little “more” three dots button to find it. It’ll say Q&A. When you do, we’ll queue those up and we’ll revisit them roughly at the half hour.

So now I will introduce my esteemed colleagues who will be doing all the work here today. Zona Martin is our siting solutions analyst. She conducts a lot of our research and analysis at the Siting Solutions Project, and will led the work on this report. And Nelson Falkenburg is our director of the Siting Solutions Project, and he’s focused on our state engagement and helping states and advocates design and craft policies, siting policies at work in their context.

So I will now hand it off to Zona and be back for the Q&A. Thanks, Zona.

Zona Martin, Analyst: Thanks, Alex. Hi everyone. Happy to be here and share these results. First off, I just want to introduce the kind of lay of the land, the act of states.

So renewable energy legislation continues to be hotly contested in statehouses across the country. So we tracked around 201 bills across 40 of the 45 active state legislatures during the 2026 session. So in even numbered years most states have shorter sessions and Arkansas, Texas, Nevada, Montana, and North Dakota don’t hold regular sessions. So even though it was an active year, the number of bills introduced is about a third less than in 2025.

So this year, as you can see in this map, the most active legislatures were in New York, Virginia, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Oklahoma. The map basically shows the number of siting bills each state introduced in 2026. So, like last year, most siting bills introduced sought to restrict renewable deployment. But this year the share of permissive legislation actually increased.

So based on our analysis of the tracked bills, 43% of them were restrictive and would have negatively impacted renewable deployment in their state. And 36% of them were permissive. This is a big improvement from last year, where restrictive bills greatly outnumbered permissive. But we should still keep in mind that we’re missing a few states. So including Texas, which was the most active state for siting policy last year and disproportionately introduced restrictive bills.

Another point that I found interesting in this data is where we’re seeing the increase in permissive legislation. So it’s mostly entirely in that somewhat permissive bucket, which is where we assign bills that make those minor improvements to the status quo, but are not proposing the major siting reform that’s going to substantially move the needle on deployment.

And when we compare that to the restrictive side, you can see that the significantly restrictive bills are still outnumbering the somewhat restrictive bills. So restrictive legislation is taking bigger swings to slow and block deployment, whereas the more permissive bills are having the more incremental progress approach. So there were a handful of states that were particularly active in proposing restrictive legislation.

And here you can see on this map the potential deployment impact in each state. The color assignment to each state is determined by the type of policy that was most proposed in the state. So if you had one very permissive bill and one very restrictive bill introduced in a state, those sort of cancel each other out and that state was then graded as neutral. So you really only have an assigned color if one policy type is overwhelmingly being proposed over the others.

So we identified a few categories for these states where restrictive policies were concentrated. First, we have states with state level siting regimes already. So this includes New York Illinois, Maryland, Vermont, Wisconsin. Here the policymakers introduced bills seeking to reestablish local control over renewables or repeal key provisions that grant that state level authority over permitting decisions.

And then you had that second category where they’re southern states with Republican trifecta, as these states have historically not ranked very high in renewable energy capacity, but we’re seeing developments start to ramp up. And so this includes Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, all of whom introduced statewide moratorium bills this session. And lastly, we have the high renewable deployment states that are experiencing backlash to build out.

So those include Oklahoma, Arizona and Iowa, who all rank in the top five for annual wind or solar generation. These states focused their strategies on establishing restrictive statewide standards, capping development in the name of farmland preservation, and introducing provisions to expand local control. So, on the permissive side of legislation, we saw bills introduced in Democrat trifecta states who are just struggling to meet their climate commitments.

These states either attempted to improve their existing state siting regimes, so that would be California, Oregon, Washington, or they attempted to address barriers to the existing local siting process. So that would be through creating incentives, setting statewide standards, or just preempting local control. So these states that attempted that was Washington again, Virginia and Maine.

So last year, Republicans greatly outnumbered Democrats in siting policy activity. This year, Democrats actually introduced slightly more siting bills than Republicans in 2026.  To what I alluded to a couple slides ago, they did tend to stick to those minor permissive reforms compared to Republicans taking those bigger swings at restriction. Only 19% of their total introduced permissive bills attempted to make significant progress, whereas 61% of Republican restrictive bills proposed those extreme barriers.

And this really hints at the difficulty of advancing comprehensive permissive siting reform in state legislatures. A reason for this might be the types of bills legislators are willing to introduce and sponsor prior to facing reelections. Republicans just may be more willing to sponsor the restrictive bills, kind of as a messaging tactic to constituents who are upset about development in their area.

While Democrats don’t really want to sponsor anything too controversial that would upset local governments as they go to the polls. So when we break it down to the technologies, there’s only one that comes out with a net positive impact score and that’s battery storage. So of the 76 battery storage bills introduced this session, 42 were permissive and ten had just a neutral impact.

And this is a notable contrast from the other technologies, particularly wind. Solar came out a little bit more even. But restrictive policies still did dominate, and most of the battery storage policies focused on preempting local ordinances that were regulating energy storage safety standards. So basically establishing NFPA 855 as the statewide standard and not allowing local governments to establish anything further than that in their ordinances.

There were a few bills that streamlined permitting of co-located battery storage as accessory uses. We don’t think that this is kind of signaling a broader support of battery storage. Our guess is that it’s more of a reflection of states updating their policies to get more up to date on new technology. And lastly, I want to point out that, you know, in purple or red states, tech neutral policies can be an effective tool for advancing siting and permitting reform.

But these kind of bills were pretty much absent in 2026, with only 12 being introduced and none of them passing  as of this study. Whereas last year we saw them be a little bit more successful with some of them passing.

Okay. So that’s it for the introduced bills section and now I’m going to —

Nelson Falkenburg, Director: Great. Thanks, Zona.

So Zona walked us through all of the introduced legislation. And I’ll talk now about the bills that actually passed and what was enacted into law.

Interestingly, despite the large numbers of restrictive bills introduced, only two restrictive bills passed, one in Utah and one in Kentucky. Otherwise, all restrictive siting and permitting legislation failed in committee or even before assignment. To me, this really signals two things. One is that defensive strategies in states are really adept and strong at blocking these restrictive bills from advancing.

And two, it’s possible that many of the restrictive bills introduced in 2026 were messaging bills where legislators were scoring political wins for their constituents by beating up on wind and solar. And in reality, those bills have very little chance of advancing. This is also borne out by some of our analysis, which shows that most of the restrictive bills failed at the initial committee hearing, or even prior to committee hearing at introduction.

It’s also interesting to note that all the states that passed legislation in 2026 have trifecta governments, which is an indicator of two things again. First is how hard it is to pass anything through a divided government these days when you have to work across the aisle. And then the second is how complicated it is to find common ground on this particular subject.

And so that’s one of the reasons that all of the legislation that actually passed came through trifecta governments where one party controls the House, the Senate and the governor’s seat. The bills that were enacted in states. I’m just going to rattle through these really quickly and then spend a little more time on the next couple of slides going into detail.

In Virginia, statewide solar standards and by right, co-located battery energy storage passed. In Oregon, there was a temporary exemption from the state permitting process and a surplus interconnection bill. In Washington, a new excise tax treatment paired with a community investment matching grant program passed. In Utah, one of the restrictive bills removes incentives for solar on agricultural lands and takes a restrictive approach to decommissioning standards.

And then in Kentucky, another restrictive bill creates punitive siting standards and decommissioning requirements in some counties in the state for renewable energy. Mississippi adopted a permissive solar decommissioning bill that follows industry standards, and Alabama enacted legislation to simplify permitting to convert oil and gas wells into other energy facilities, which includes renewables.

And finally, we highlight Illinois, too. Even though this bill surge passed in 2025, it wasn’t captured in our earlier State of Siting report. So we’re highlighting it here in this report. Illinois improved their statewide siting standards to include battery energy storage and clarify the appeals process. Next slide please.

So going into a little more detail. In Virginia, there were solar and storage wins. SB 347 establishes uniform statewide criteria for solar special exceptions and makes by right ground mounted solar the default on AG, commercial, industrial and mixed use lands. The bill sets setback ranges, fencing requirements, height limits, decommissioning requirements and other design standards.

But notably, the bill does not preempt local permitting decisions, only the ordinance standards, so local governments can still deny projects. But local governments then have to report and justify denials to the State Corporation Commission. HB 891 in Virginia designates battery storage as a permitted accessory use at approved solar project sites across all zoning districts if the storage capacity doesn’t exceed 100% of the solar project’s nameplate capacity. So this allows any solar project in the state to carve out a portion of the project for battery energy storage.

HB 4031, in Oregon provides a temporary exemption from the state’s energy facility siting council permitting process, which is one of the more onerous, time intensive state permitting processes in the country and allows developers to route projects through local approvals in order to access expiring federal tax credits. So this exemption is only in place while those federal tax credits are available.

And then HP 4076 directs the Energy Facility Siting Council to consider satisfied standards for land use goal exceptions. If a project uses existing facility surplus interconnection capacity.

And then in Washington, there’s an interesting bill that was introduced or that was enacted that establishes a new excise tax treatment as a sweetener that gets paired with a community investment matching grant program conditional on a county adopting an ordinance that is no more restrictive than the state model that was developed by the Department of Commerce. Next slide please.

Great. So on the restrictive side, Utah introduced and passed legislation that removes incentives for solar lands, which were actually already  scheduled to phase out in 2028. So it just bumps up the timeline there for those incentives to expire. And it requires this bill. HB 16 requires developers to submit a decommissioning plan with restrictive financial assurance and restoration requirements.

The original version of this bill was a statewide standards bill that would have served as a de facto ban in Utah, but those standards were stripped from the bill in the version that passed. So it started much worse than it ended up, proving again that the defense was effective in Utah as well.

Alabama and Arizona all attempted to pass outright and de facto moratorium legislation. None of them were able to. I think of these that Arizona bill was especially punitive. HB2 2267 would have declared any utility scale wind or solar farm within four miles of a residence, a public nuisance, and therefore a crime, unless the developer obtained a special state certificate.

And in Oklahoma, which for the last several years has been a hotbed for anti renewables legislation, including county level restrictions, local referendum bills and punitive tax bills, we’ve found that Governor Stitt has really, who is currently closing in his final term, has been a crucial backstop against restrictive legislation, frequently exercising his veto authority.

And that was the case again this year. One restrictive bill passed in Oklahoma, and Governor Stitt vetoed it. Interestingly, though, in Oklahoma, a reasonable statewide standards bill passed the Senate but didn’t end up advancing through the House. So there was progress, surprising progress in Oklahoma, but it didn’t result in a win. Next slide please.

And then after publishing our report, we learned of a few other bills that passed in states that we wanted to brief you on as well. And this is just a little plug that if you’re reading through our report or our tracker and you know of a bill that we’ve missed, please reach out to us, let us know. We are constantly updating our information and we are fallible beings, so let us know if we’ve missed something, we’ll add it.

There’s a lot of bills moving all the time, so the first bill that I want to highlight here is in Kentucky. It was a restrictive legislation that was introduced and passed this year. We missed it because it was initially a carbon sequestration bill that was amended to have restrictive statewide standards for unknown counties for renewable energy projects. And you can see here what those setbacks look like.

They’re pretty punitive. And the turbine height limits are pretty short. And there’s also some overly burdensome decommissioning and financial assurance requirements. In Kentucky, this only applies to unzoned counties, which is about half of the counties in the state.

Pennsylvania also passed decommissioning standards, which are reasonable decommissioning standards, but it’s worth paying attention to how local governments interpret those standards, because it may set a floor rather than a ceiling on what local governments are able to enact in their ordinances.

Rhode Island streamlined battery storage on brownfields and North Carolina passed an omnibus land use reform that impacts renewable energy, so it extends vested rights to five years and restricts local governments from imposing additional regulations on projects that have those vested rights.

So just some updates. We wanted to make sure that you all were aware of that, of some of these we missed, and some of them were part of bills that passed after our publication date.

So now switching gears a little bit, I want to talk about what we’re anticipating in 2027. So 2026 was a busy legislative session. But as Zona noted at the top, five states didn’t have legislative sessions in the even numbered year. All 50 states have a legislative session in 2027. So for that reason, it’s going to be a big year. Also, as I’m sure everyone on this call is well aware, data center energy demand is skyrocketing, and it’s going to become a crucial factor in this next legislative cycle in 2027.

And there’s increasing debates about affordability and how to bring down electricity bills for average Americans. And legislators and governors are grappling with that as well. And we anticipate that that’s also going to lead to potential siting reforms introduced in 2027. So we just wanted to highlight a few states where we’re forecasting likely legislation in the upcoming year.

In Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro introduced a suite of bills in his lightning plan. One of them was a RESET proposal that would have provided reasonable standards for energy siting and permitting in the state. That bill didn’t end up advancing, but a new piece of legislation has emerged in Pennsylvania. That’s a HB 2651.

It’s a guardrails style of bill Illinois style and its possible that this bill could be heard this fall, but it’s more likely that this bill will be reintroduced in 2027 and advance through the legislative process, especially if some of the numbers on the Senate side flip in the upcoming election. But we think that 2027 is a likely window for siting reform in Pennsylvania.

In Virginia, its advocates are likely to build on the momentum of House bill 711. So as I mentioned, that bill adopts some voluntary siting standards that local governments should incorporate into their zoning ordinances. The follow on legislation in 2027 will try to induce local governments to do more of that, through technical assistance and other incentives, and more comprehensive reforms that are likely to emerge in 2028,  depending on how effectively local governments do adopt the standards into their ordinances.

And then in Iowa, advocates were really effective at moving comprehensive siting reforms through the legislative process. Two bills made it to conference in Iowa, but right at the finish line, the utility, the Iowa Utilities Commission, affirmed their authority to preempt local zoning ordinances, and this decision nullified the need for any comprehensive siting reform.

And this means that going into 2027, rather than pursuing a more offensive posture and trying to advance permissive reforms, it’s likely that advocates in the state will shift to defense and try to preserve this new authority that the IOC has affirmed the right to. And it’s possible there will be other clarifications to make sure that this authority is maintained. Next slide please.

Great. And then Texas is going to be a big one in 2027. The Texas Senate especially for the last couple legislative cycles, has taken a really punitive approach to rural energy siting and permitting, introducing legislation that would regulate those energy technologies at the state level. And currently Texas is basically a total free market, no regulations on any energy development at the moment.

And in 2025, the Senate introduced a lot of restrictive signing bills that failed to pass the House, which was kind of a bulwark. It’s likely that more restrictive proposals will be introduced in 2027, and advocates will try to hold the line in the House, and advocates are also considering introducing permissive legislation that could counteract some of the more restrictive bills that are being introduced in the state.

Indiana is another high profile state that is going to be pursuing permissive reforms in 2027. Indiana is seeing immense energy load growth and is at the forefront of a lot of affordability debates, too. And advocates and coalition members in the state are really making a push to make sure that renewable energy reforms are part of the solution to address both of those concerns in the state, and some potential shifts in the Indiana Senate and the makeup of the PUC could lead to an opening for advocates in Indiana. Next slide please.

Great. So I just want to wrap everything up with a bow here. This year in 2026, almost every state considered siting legislation, those states that were in session, and the gap between restrictive and permissive bills really narrowed. And yet restrictive bills are still outnumbering permissive proposals. And so advocates should continue their defensive campaigns and these defensive campaigns so far have been really effective in states that are introducing restrictive bills.

Enacted bills also broke decisively in favor of clean energy deployment in 2026, with only two restrictive bills moving to enactment. But as Zona mentioned early on, comprehensive siting reform was rarely attempted. A lot of the bills that passed tend to be more incremental. And then lastly, 2027 is going to be the biggest tier yet for renewable energy siting and permitting legislation.

Considering both the trends of data center build out and the rising electricity bills that Americans are seeing that are affecting their wallets. Next slide please.

Great. And moving into 2027, we wanted to make sure that you all are aware that we’ve published all of our legislative tracking information on a publicly available website where you can go and explore what’s advancing in states and compare and contrast and look at all of our analyses. And I think Zona is going to give a little example of our legislative tracker in progress.

Martin: Okay. So this is our tracker. If you go to our Siting Solutions website and just toggle here to the Legislative Tracker tab, that’s where you’ll find it. I’m just going to scroll first of all up here in this top right corner. Like Nelson said you know we’re tracking these but sometimes we miss things. So if you find, you know, an analysis that seems incorrect or a bill that’s not included in this data set, please just click this contact button and you know, let us know.

Okay. So you can scroll down through our tracker and see, you know, the number of bills that we’re tracking right now, the number of states that are currently active  or were active this year. And then we have the number of bills that were enacted, the number of bills currently  being debated on the floor in a chamber, and then restrictive bills specifically that are that are moving in a chamber.

You can also toggle here to look at the different legislative years and how kind of bills moved through the pipeline,  as well as how they look in the map. So you can see here like a breakdown in bill technologies. Past 2023, we’re only going to be able to show you enacted bills because that’s just how far our analysis goes. But if you scroll down here to our map, this is kind of where the fun starts.

Here you can have three different options of kind of what you want to look at in this map. The first one is kind of how these policies are trending in each state. So like the number of bills that are being introduced and what their impact to deployment is, and then we have if you toggle to the enacted policy tab, you can see the bills that are enacted and their deployment impact potential there.

And then lastly we have a policy framework. So basically just a layout of the state policy approaches to renewable energy siting in each state. And that is based on our state policy approaches report that we published last year. If you click on any of these states, it will pull up a state profile, which basically details everything that you need to know about siting in their state, as well as it’ll list everything, all of the bills that they have introduced this year and just in history that we have in our data set.

And then if you finally scroll down here, you can basically see all of the bills. And if you click on them it’ll take you to LegiScan. But you can also just filter for any bill that you want to see. So what if I want to see the enacted bills that were significantly permissive and then it’ll just filter out everything that  I want to see there based on my filters. And we have technology filters, state filters, and then also  what we call policy features.

So the different characteristics of a bill okay. Go check it out.

Breckel: I’ll be checking it out! I love it. Thank you. Thank you, Nelson.

And now for some audience questions. If you haven’t already, drop your questions in the Q&A and we will try to get to as many as we can.

First, Nelson: So in the siting policy world, we hear a lot about restrictive local ordinances making it more difficult to build clean energy. And so it kind of implies the importance of a state role. Yet in Oregon, they exempted projects from the state process and sent them back to the locals. Can you tell me what’s that about, and how should that make us think about state versus local siting authorities? You’re muted also.

Falkenburg: Like that. Great question.

So yeah the Oregon case is really interesting. Siting approvals in Oregon can, at the state level, can take more than a year. And that’s just not tenable in the current permitting environment with federal tax credits expiring. And so the Oregon case gives a pressure relief valve where developers can kind of pick their pathway whether they want to permit through the local government or the state government.

And from our perspective, that’s kind of a best practice where developers should have the opportunity to go to the local level. If there’s a local government that is interested and willing, to site and permit projects, but there also still needs to be and should be a state level backstop. If a local government has restrictive ordinances or is otherwise blocking development in their locality, there should be a pathway for developers to sign permit projects through a state level authority.

Yeah. So that’s getting at some of that tension. And legislators to their credit in Oregon are recognizing that. And I think there’s more opportunities in states that have state authorities to improve upon that kind of framework.

Breckel: Sounds like it’s complicated and nuanced. And thanks for that, Nelson.

Zona, I noticed you mentioned that Mississippi and Alabama both passed permissive bills. I would not have put them on my permissible bingo card for 2026. So can you help us understand what happened there?

Martin: Yeah. Okay. So starting with Mississippi, that is SB 2527. It’s a solar decommissioning bill that preempts local governments from setting more restrictive requirements in their ordinance. There’s not a lot of info out there on this bill. It kind of snuck through. I think the chair of the Senate Energy Committee sponsored the bill, and he has come out in support of solar specifically.

He’s quoted as saying it’s necessary to increase grid capacity, kind of in all of the above approach, though he is kind of negative on wind. And I think this year specifically grid reliability was top of mind. Mississippi experienced some power outages during a February ice storm. And they also had some industry  engagement on the bill. So Silicon Ranch Corporation, which is a solar developer, they spoke out in support of the bill, communicated it very much as a consumer protection, landowner protection bill, preventing a patchwork of ordinances that will undermine landowner autonomy, and also protecting the collective reputation of the solar industry.

So that passed with relatively little opposition. And then Alabama was SB 174. And that basically authorized the state to lease state lands for energy sources very broadly. So I think the intent of the legislation was primarily for geothermal. So enabling geothermal development for oil and gas well, abandoned wells. And the implementation of the bill will likely be pretty much for that.

But the language of the bill does still have some broad language around the state being able to lease any lands for the purpose of energy generation, which includes energy storage and solar. So and that, interestingly, was proposed or sponsored by the same senator who sponsored the moratoriums. So it’s very weird.

Breckel: I love that. I also love the point that in Mississippi, sometimes statewide regulations and even enforcing regulations where there were none before, it can be better for an industry than the patchwork of local, even when in some cases they have little to no local regulations on a subject.

We had a question about what defense might look like in Iowa, and I think I’m curious specifically in Iowa. But I wonder, too, if you can kind of help understand what can advocates do generally when siting policy is being introduced that would be restrictive on the deployment of energy resources. What are the tools in the toolbox from a policy perspective there?

Falkenburg: Yeah. Good question. So defense in Iowa like I mentioned is really going to focus on maintaining the IOC’s authority to preempt local decisions around siting and permitting solar and wind projects. And I think a couple things are important here.

That means that advocates are going to have to be really closely tracking any renewable energy legislation that’s introduced or advancing in the state and making the case to the IOC, to Iowans and to the legislature that this, the energy, the projects that are coming online in Iowa, are addressing the needs of Iowans and the business community, especially in Iowa, which is a Republican trifecta state, but also has a long history of wind and solar development.

It’s a great state to make the business case to Republicans, to conservative legislators that this economically– when solar and battery energy storage is the right call in states. And so I think that’s the  defense that needs to be done in states. So that’s part of it. And then the other piece is expanding and bringing in these broad, diverse coalitions. Zona mentioned this on a proactive side just in Mississippi and Alabama.

But these broad coalitions in states that are advancing restrictive bills should include the business community, chambers of commerce, landowners as much as possible and where possible. It should also include local governments that are receiving– that have sited and permitted, and are willing and happy hosts of energy projects, and that group can be a really effective bulwark and barrier to these restrictive bills advancing.

So I think it’s kind of that one-two punch of coalition and really effective messaging on  the need for these projects in states. Does that answer that question?

Breckel: Yeah, that’s great. And I also think another tactic that I’ve seen be deployed, and I’m curious if you agree, is transforming those bills from kind of blanket disruptive bills to more narrowly targeted, useful regulatory frameworks that still allow projects to get built. But with addressing the concerns that originally animated the kind of more blunt policy instruments as they were originally introduced as well.

Falkenburg: Yeah, I would say that has been effective in the past. Louisiana did that last year effectively and has kept the state open, especially for solar development. I would say, though, that there’s some bills that advance that there’s just no way to fix it. Yeah. To parlay them into something potentially useful. And a lot of it depends on the dynamics of the legislature and whether or not legislators are actually negotiating in good faith or are really entrenched and ideologically opposed.

So those tactics are, yeah, very context dependent. But can, yeah, that can be a really effective approach.

Breckel: So I have a two parter. First for Zona: What’s the correlation between the kind of permissive or restrictive policy trending that you have found in your research and we see on the dashboard, and the quality or permissiveness of the policy in those states as it stands? Is it bad getting worse in many states? Is it all over the map? And hard to say which direction they’re going, like what’s the correlation there if any?

Martin: Yeah. So I mean our trending maps don’t kind of– they’re not a reflection of the kind of state of the existing, I guess, process. So I guess the best example is like in Oregon and Washington this year we had some very permissive bills get passed, but those processes are still really slow and, you know, difficult for and costly for developers to permit projects. And so while they are making positive progress, I think that, you know, legislators do maybe understand a little bit that there needs to be, you know, solutions.

And they’re passing these different policies to try and address that. Yeah. There’s still a lot to be done. And, you know, a lot of these, especially like in in Oregon this year, they were more like temporary fixes or like little minor  solutions here and there. So I would recommend going and reading Houtan Moaveni’s gap analysis of the existing state siting processes and kind of the gaps there that still need to be fixed as well as there’s a LBNL report on kind of permitting timelines and kind of just outlining like state siting regimes. Sometimes they’re still very slow. So yeah.

Breckel: Well, and one other thing that’s come up from your comments now and from the work that we’ve done before, is that there’s really a very poor correlation, or at least the partisanship of the state tells you very little about the quality of the wind, solar, battery siting policy regime. And I’m curious, Nelson, like, what are flavors of permissive blue state, permissive red state and maybe the opposite.

Are there any kind of trends that fall on political lines? We definitely know that it’s possible to have a very permissive or a very restrictive policy framework in either context, but do you see any systematic trends or directions?

Falkenburg: Yeah, absolutely. Great. Great question. So in red states, the trend seems to be the less regulation at the local level is better. So Texas is the prime example of this, the gold standard where Texas is free market. There’s no county level or municipal ability to regulate siting and permitting of renewable energy projects. It’s kind of like the most extreme example of that.

And it’s worked very well for Texas. They are far and away the leader in solar, wind and battery energy storage deployment. And that will hopefully continue to be the case in other red states. Kind of trying to constrain local governments’ ability to adopt restrictive zoning ordinances is where those states that are leaders, have been most effective. And then on the blue state side, it’s more so creating effective state siting regimes.

So one example of this is Michigan. They have created a really strong  safety net framework in that state that allows the pathway for projects to be cited at the state level through the PSC. Another example is New York with their Office of Renewable Energy Siting. It’s like a one stop shop approach. So I think both of these different approaches represent like the political cultural flavors of those states where in some of these blue states there’s more of a tendency or a willingness to invest authority in a state agency.

Whereas more of the conservative  Republican states tend to be a little more libertarian and want to hold those authorities closer and are less trusting of state agencies to have more authority over these processes. So that’s some of the flavor. But again, it is totally, totally context and state dependent. Iowa is a good example of that.

Breckel: I have two more questions and then we’ll wrap up here. Zona, I was home last weekend and all of my family were talking about these things I think called data centers? I don’t know if this is familiar or has come up in your work, but I’m curious how data centers show up in this type of analysis, if at all, for us.

Martin: So in the Round-Up it didn’t. But you know, as we’re launching this tracker and this topic becomes more and more interfaced with clean energy and and energy siting, I think we are interested in tracking, but only as it pertains to energy generation. So if there are any bills that are requiring you bring your own new energy, new clean energy policies around data center development.

If states are introducing things like that, I think we’re definitely going to try and track those and include those in our legislative tracker. Outside of that kind of vein where, you know, energy generation is not included in the provision, that is kind of out of scope for us, though. Yeah, it’s becoming ever more salient.

Falkenburg: So yeah, we’re also hearing about some bills that may put some tariffs on data centers and then dedicate the funding of those tariffs to renewable energy siting and permitting and clean energy development generally. So that’s the kind of thing that we would also be tracking. And I’m sure there are other orgs that are tracking data center legislation. But yeah, that’s not going to be our bread and butter.

Breckel: That’s great. So that was a helpful look ahead.

What else should folks be looking to from Siting Solutions Project? What do we have on the horizon, Nelson, that folks should be keeping an eye out on the newsletter for?

Falkenburg: Great question. I think the big one is actually a project that Zona is leading. Zona does, as you can see, a lot of our analysis and research, we are conducting an analysis and study of renewable energy tax policy across the U.S. and identify those approaches that allow for certainty and predictability for developers in tax code and deliver benefits for communities.

So that includes– we have an advisory group we’ve stood up that’s giving us insights and information. We’re conducting interviews via a consultant. And all of that will be wrapped up in a report that Zona, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s coming out in late September?

Martin: Mid October.

Falkenburg: Okay, great. Yeah, just pushing up the date a little bit there on here. In mid-October that is going to highlight the renewable energy tax policies that are enabling clean energy development. So that’s something to keep an eye out for.

Breckel: Great.

Martin: And PJM. Do you want to talk about PJM, Nelson?

Falkenburg: Yeah, we’re also launching a project with Grid Strategies and Houtan Moaveni and Citizens Utility Board that will be looking at the PJM region specifically and the siting and permitting approaches in that region and scoring those different states on their effectiveness for building renewable energy projects. Sorry, building energy projects generally and identifying those barriers and providing recommendations to states to improve their their energy policies.

Breckel: Great. Thank you for that. Thank you, Nelson and Zona, and thank you for the audience members who turned out today and spent an hour with us. We really appreciate it. If you ever want to get a hold of us, you know where to find us. Talk siting policy, permitting, renewable energy tax policy, anything else, please reach out and we hope to see you around. Thank you.

Martin: Thank you.

Falkenburg: Thanks, everyone.