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Spoiler: A lot of them are about data centers.

It’s now clear that 2026 will be big for American energy, but it’s going to be incredibly tense.
Over the past 365 days, we at The Fight have closely monitored numerous conflicts over siting and permitting for renewable energy and battery storage projects. As we’ve done so, the data center boom has come into full view, igniting a tinderbox of resentment over land use, local governance and, well, lots more. The future of the U.S. economy and the energy grid may well ride on the outcomes of the very same city council and board of commissioners meetings I’ve been reporting on every day. It’s a scary yet exciting prospect.
To bring us into the new year, I wanted to try something a little different. Readers ask me all the time for advice with questions like, What should I be thinking about right now? And, How do I get this community to support my project? Or my favorite: When will people finally just shut up and let us build things? To try and answer these questions and more, I wanted to give you the top five trends in energy development (and data centers) I’ll be watching next year.
The best thing going for American renewable energy right now is the AI data center boom. But the backlash against developing these projects is spreading incredibly fast.
Do you remember last week when I told you about a national environmental group calling for data center moratoria across the country? On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a nationwide halt to data center construction until regulations are put in place. The next day, the Working Families Party – a progressive third party that fields candidates all over the country for all levels of government – called for its candidates to run in opposition to new data center construction.
On the other end of the political spectrum, major figures in the American right wing have become AI skeptics critical of the nascent data center buildout, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. These figures are clearly following the signals amidst the noise; I have watched in recent months as anti-data center fervor has spread across Facebook, with local community pages and groups once focused on solar and wind projects pivoting instead to focus on data centers in development near them.
In other words, I predicted just one month ago, an anti-data center political movement is forming across the country and quickly gaining steam (ironically aided by the internet and algorithms powered by server farms).
I often hear from the clean energy sector that the data center boom will be a boon for new projects. Renewable energy is the fastest to scale and construct, the thinking goes, and therefore will be the quickest, easiest, and most cost effective way to meet the projected spike in energy demand.
I’m not convinced yet that this line of thinking is correct. But I’m definitely sure that no matter the fuel type, we can expect a lot more transmission development, and nothing sparks a land use fight more easily than new wires.
Past is prologue here. One must look no further than the years-long fight over the Piedmont Reliability Project, a proposed line that would connect a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to data centers in Virginia by crossing a large swathe of Maryland agricultural land. I’ve been covering it closely since we put the project in our inaugural list of the most at-risk projects, and the conflict is now a clear blueprint.
In Wisconsin, a billion-dollar transmission project is proving this thesis true. I highly recommend readers pay close attention to Port Washington, where the release of fresh transmission line routes for a massive new data center this week has aided an effort to recall the city’s mayor for supporting the project. And this isn’t even an interstate project like Piedmont.
While I may not be sure of the renewable energy sector’s longer-term benefits from data center development, I’m far more confident that this Big Tech land use backlash is hitting projects right now.
The short-term issue for renewables developers is that opponents of data centers use arguments and tactics similar to those deployed by anti-solar and anti-wind advocates. Everyone fighting data centers is talking about ending development on farmland, avoiding changes to property values, stopping excess noise and water use, and halting irreparable changes to their ways of life.
Only one factor distinguishes data center fights from renewable energy fights: building the former potentially raises energy bills, while the latter will lower energy costs.
I do fear that as data center fights intensify nationwide, communities will not ban or hyper-regulate the server farms in particular, but rather will pass general bans that also block the energy projects that could potentially power them. Rural counties are already enacting moratoria on solar and wind in tandem with data centers – this is not new. But the problem will worsen as conflicts spread, and it will be incumbent upon the myriad environmentalists boosting data center opponents to not accidentally aid those fighting zero-carbon energy.
This week, the Bureau of Land Management approved its first solar project in months: the Libra facility in Nevada. When this happened, I received a flood of enthusiastic and optimistic emails and texts from sources.
We do not yet know whether the Libra approval is a signal of a thaw inside the Trump administration. The Interior Department’s freeze on renewables permitting decisions continues mostly unabated, and I have seen nothing to indicate that more decisions like this are coming down the pike. What we do know is that ahead of a difficult midterm election, the Trump administration faces outsized pressure to do more to address “affordability,” Democrats plan to go after Republicans for effectively repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and halting permits for solar and wind projects, and there’s a grand bargain to be made in Congress over permitting reform that rides on an end to the permitting freeze.
I anticipate that ahead of the election and further permitting talks in Congress, the Trump administration will mildly ease its chokehold on solar and wind permits because that is the most logical option in front of them. I do not think this will change the circumstances for more than a small handful of projects sited on federal lands that were already deep in the permitting process when Trump took power.
It’s impossible to conclude a conversation about next year’s project fights without ending on the theme that defined 2025: battery fire fears are ablaze, and they’ll only intensify as data centers demand excess energy storage capacity.
The January Moss Landing fire incident was a defining moment for an energy sector struggling to grapple with the effects of the Internet age. Despite bearing little resemblance to the litany of BESS proposals across the country, that one hunk of burning battery wreckage in California inspired countless communities nationwide to ban new battery storage outright.
There is no sign this trend will end any time soon. I expect data centers to only accelerate these concerns, as these facilities can also catch fire in ways that are challenging to address.
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It’s aware of the problem. That doesn’t make it easier to solve.
The data center backlash has metastasized into a full-blown PR crisis, one the tech sector is trying to get out in front of. But it is unclear whether companies are responding effectively enough to avoid a cascading series of local bans and restrictions nationwide.
Our numbers don’t lie: At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year, and nearly 100 projects faced at least some form of opposition, according to Heatmap Pro data. We’ve also recorded more than 60 towns, cities and counties that have enacted some form of moratorium or restrictive ordinance against data center development. We expect these numbers to rise throughout the year, and it won’t be long before the data on data center opposition is rivaling the figures on total wind or solar projects fought in the United States.
I spent this week reviewing the primary motivations for conflict in these numerous data center fights and speaking with representatives of the data center sector and relevant connected enterprises, like electrical manufacturing. I am now convinced that the industry knows it has a profound challenge on its hands. Folks are doing a lot to address it, from good-neighbor promises to lobbying efforts at the state and federal level. But much more work will need to be done to avoid repeating mistakes that have bedeviled other industries that face similar land use backlash cycles, such as fossil fuel extraction, mining, and renewable energy infrastructure development.
Two primary issues undergird the data center mega-backlash we’re seeing today: energy use fears and water consumption confusion.
Starting with energy, it’s important to say that data center development currently correlates with higher electricity rates in areas where projects are being built, but the industry challenges the presumption that it is solely responsible for that phenomenon. In the eyes of opponents, utilities are scrambling to construct new power supplies to meet projected increases in energy demand, and this in turn is sending bills higher.
That’s because, as I’ve previously explained, data centers are getting power in two ways: off the existing regional electric grid or from on-site generation, either from larger new facilities (like new gas plants or solar farms) or diesel generators for baseload, backup purposes. But building new power infrastructure on site takes time, and speed is the name of the game right now in the AI race, so many simply attach to the existing grid.
Areas with rising electricity bills are more likely to ban or restrict data center development. Let’s just take one example: Aurora, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago and the second most-populous city in the state. Aurora instituted a 180-day moratorium on data center development last fall after receiving numerous complaints about data centers from residents, including a litany related to electricity bills. More than 1.5 gigawatts of data center capacity already operate in the surrounding Kane County, where residential electricity rates are at a three-year high and expected to increase over the near term – contributing to a high risk of opposition against new projects.
The second trouble spot is water, which data centers need to cool down their servers. Project developers have face a huge hurdle in the form of viral stories of households near data centers who suddenly lack a drop to drink. Prominent examples activists bring up include this tale of a family living next to a Meta facility in Newton County, Georgia, and this narrative of people living around an Amazon Web Services center in St. Joseph County, Indiana. Unsurprisingly, the St. Joseph County Council rejected a new data center in response to, among other things, very vocal water concerns. (It’s worth noting that the actual harm caused to water systems by data centers is at times both over- and under-stated, depending on the facility and location.)
“I think it’s very important for the industry as a whole to be honest that living next to [a data center] is not an ideal situation,” said Caleb Max, CEO of the National Artificial Intelligence Association, a new D.C.-based trade group launched last year that represents Oracle and myriad AI companies.
Polling shows that data centers are less popular than the use of artificial intelligence overall, Max told me, so more needs to be done to communicate the benefits that come from their development – including empowering AI. “The best thing the industry could start to do is, for the people in these zip codes with the data centers, those people need to more tangibly feel the benefits of it.”
Many in the data center development space are responding quickly to these concerns. Companies are clearly trying to get out ahead on energy, with the biggest example arriving this week from Microsoft, which pledged to pay more for the electricity it uses to power its data centers. “It’s about balancing that demand and market with these concerns. That’s why you're seeing the industry lean in on these issues and more proactively communicating with communities,” said Dan Diorio, state policy director for the Data Center Coalition.
There’s also an effort underway to develop national guidance for data centers led by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, expected to surface publicly by this summer. Some of the guidance has already been published, such as this document on energy storage best practices, which is intended to help data centers know how to properly use solutions that can avoid diesel generators, an environmental concern in communities. But the guidance will ultimately include discussions of cooling, too, which can be a water-intensive practice.
“It’s a great example of an instance where industry is coming together and realizing there’s a need for guidance. There’s a very rapidly developing sector here that uses electricity in a fundamentally different way, that’s almost unprecedented,” Patrick Hughes, senior vice president of strategy, technical, and industry affairs for NEMA, told me in an interview Monday.
Personally, I’m unsure whether these voluntary efforts will be enough to assuage the concerns of local officials. It certainly isn’t convincing folks like Jon Green, a member of the Board of Supervisors in Johnson County, Iowa. Johnson County is a populous area, home to the University of Iowa campus, and Green told me that to date it hasn’t really gotten any interest from data center developers. But that didn’t stop the county from instituting a one-year moratorium in 2025 to block projects and give time for them to develop regulations.
I asked Green if there’s a form of responsible data center development. “I don’t know if there is, at least where they’re going to be economically feasible,” he told me. “If we say they’ve got to erect 40 wind turbines and 160 acres of solar in order to power a data center, I don’t know if when they do their cost analysis that it’ll pencil out.”
Plus a storage success near Springfield, Massachusetts, and more of the week’s biggest renewables fights.
1. Sacramento County, California – A large solar farm might go belly-up thanks to a fickle utility and fears of damage to old growth trees.
2. Hampden County, Massachusetts – The small Commonwealth city of Agawam, just outside of Springfield, is the latest site of a Massachusetts uproar over battery storage…
3. Washtenaw County, Michigan – The city of Saline southwest of Detroit is now banning data centers for at least a year – and also drafting regulations around renewable energy.
4. Dane County, Wisconsin – Another city with a fresh data center moratorium this week: Madison, home of the Wisconsin Badgers.
5. Hood County, Texas – Last but not least, I bring you one final stop on the apparent data center damnation tour: Hood County, south of the Texas city of Fort Worth.
A conversation with San Jose State University researcher Ivano Aiello, who’s been studying the aftermath of the catastrophe at Moss Landing.
This week’s conversation is with Ivano Aiello, a geoscientist at San Jose State University in California. I interviewed Aiello a year ago, when I began investigating the potential harm caused by the battery fire at Vistra’s Moss Landing facility, perhaps the largest battery storage fire of all time. The now-closed battery plant is located near the university, and Aiello happened to be studying a nearby estuary and wildlife habitat when the fire took place. He was therefore able to closely track metals contamination from the site. When we last spoke, he told me that he was working on a comprehensive, peer-reviewed study of the impacts of the fire.
That research was recently published and has a crucial lesson: We might not be tracking the environmental impacts of battery storage fires properly.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Alright let’s start from the top – please tell my readers what your study ultimately found.
The bottom line is that we detected deposition of fine airborne particles, cathode material – nickel, manganese, and cobalt – in the area surrounding the battery storage facility. We found those particles right after the fire, immediately detected them in the field, sampled the soils, and found visible presence of those particles using different techniques. We kept measuring the location in the field over several months after the fire.
The critical thing is, we had baseline data. We had been surveying those areas for much longer before the fire. Those metals were in much higher concentration than they were before, and they were clearly related to the batteries. You can see that. And we were able to see changes in surface concentrations in the soils over time, including from weather – once the rains started, there was a significant decrease in concentrations of the metals, potentially related to runoff. Some of them migrated to the soil.
What we also noticed is that the protocols that have been used to look at soil contamination call for a surface sample of 3 inches. If your sample thickness is that and the layer of metal deposit is 1 millimeter or 5 millimeter, you’re not going to see anything. If you use standard protocols, you’re not going to find anything.
What does that mean for testing areas around big battery storage fires?
That’s exactly what I hope this work helps with. Procedures designed in the past are for different types of disasters and incidents which are more like landslides than ash fallout from a fire. These metal particles are a few microns thick, so they slide easily away.
It means we have to rethink how we go about measuring contamination after industrial fires and, yes, battery fires. Because otherwise it’s just completely useless – you’re diluting everything.
The other thing we learned is that ashfall deposits are very patchy. You can get different samples between a few feet and find huge differences. You can’t just go out there and take three samples in three places, you have to sample at a much higher resolution because otherwise you’ll miss the whole story.
When it comes to the takeaways from this study, what exactly do you think the lessons should be for the battery companies and regulators involved?
There are a lot of lessons we learned from this fire. The first is that having baseline data around a potential fire site is important because then you can better understand the after.
Then, the main way to assess the potential hazards during the fire and after the fire are air quality measurements. That doesn’t tell you what’s in the air. You could have a high concentration of pollen, and then you know the quality of the air, but if you replace that with metal it is different. It’s not just how much you’re breathing, but what you are breathing.
Also, fast response. [Vistra] just released a report on soil saying there was nothing … but the sampling was done eight months after the fire. Our study shows after the fire you have this pulse of dust, and then it moves. Stuff moves to soil, across habitat. So if you don’t go out there right away, you might miss the whole thing.
Finally, what we found was that the fallout from the fire was not a bullseye pattern centered at the facility but rather offset kilometers away because of the wind.
We didn’t know much about this before because we didn’t have a real case study. This is the first real live event in which we can actually see the effects of a large battery burning.