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Plus, what a Texas energy veteran thinks is behind the surprising turn against solar and wind.

I couldn’t have a single conversation with a developer this week without talking about Texas.
In case you’re unaware, the Texas Senate two days ago passed legislation — SB 819 — that would require all solar and wind projects over 10 megawatts to receive a certification from the state Public Utilities Commission — a process fossil fuel generation doesn’t have to go through. The bill, which one renewables group CEO testified would “kill” the industry in Texas, was approved by the legislature’s GOP majority despite a large number of landowners and ranchers testifying against the bill, an ongoing solar and wind boom in the state, and a need to quickly provide energy to Texas’ growing number of data centers and battery manufacturing facilities.
But that’s not all: On the same day, the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee approved a bill — SB 715 — that would target solar and wind by requiring generation facilities to be able to produce power whenever called upon by grid operators or otherwise pay a fine. Critics of the bill, which as written does not differentiate between new and existing facilities, say it could constrain the growth of Texas’ energy grid, not to mention impose penalties on solar and wind facilities that lack sufficient energy storage on site.
Renewable energy trades are in freak-out mode, mobilizing to try and scuttlebutt bills that could stifle what otherwise would be a perfect state for the sector. As we’ve previously explained, a big reason why Texas is so good for development is because, despite its ruby red nature, there is scant regulation letting towns or counties get in the way of energy development generally.
Seeking to best understand why anti-renewables bills are sailing through the Lone Star State, I phoned Doug Lewin, a Texas energy sector veteran, on the morning of the votes in the Texas Senate. Lewin said he believes that unlike other circumstances we’ve written about, like Oklahoma and Arizona, there really isn’t a groundswell of Texans against renewable energy development. This aligns with our data in Heatmap Pro, which shows 76% of counties being more welcoming than average to a utility-scale wind or solar farm. This is seen even in the author of the 24/7 power bill – state Senator Kevin Sparks – who represents the city of Midland, which is in a county that Heatmap Pro modeling indicates has a low risk of opposition. The Midland area is home to several wind and solar projects; German renewables giant RWE last month announced it would expand into the county to power oil and gas extraction with renewables.
But Lewin told me there’s another factor: He believes the legislation is largely motivated by legislators’ conservative voters suffering from a “misinformation” and “algorithm” problem. It’s their information diets, he believes, which are producing fears about the environmental impacts of developing renewable energy.
“He’s actively working against the interests of his district,” Lewin said of Sparks. “It’s algorithms. I don’t know what folks think is going on. People are just getting a lot of bad information.”
One prominent example came from a hailstorm during Hurricane Uri last year. Ice rocks described like golfballs rained down upon south-east Texas, striking, among other things, a utility-scale solar farm called Fighting Jays overseen by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The incident went viral on Facebook and was seized upon by large conservative advocacy organizations including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
What’s next? Honestly, the only thing standing between these bills and becoming law is a sliver of hope in the renewables world that the millions of dollars flowing into Texas House members’ districts via project investments and tax benefits outweigh the conservative cultural animus against their product. But if the past is prologue, things aren’t looking great.
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The Army Corps of Engineers is out to protect “the beauty of the Nation’s natural landscape.”
A new Trump administration policy is indefinitely delaying necessary water permits for solar and wind projects across the country, including those located entirely on private land.
The Army Corps of Engineers published a brief notice to its website in September stating that Adam Telle, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, had directed the agency to consider whether it should weigh a project’s “energy density” – as in the ratio of acres used for a project compared to its power generation capacity – when issuing permits and approvals. The notice ended on a vague note, stating that the Corps would also consider whether the projects “denigrate the aesthetics of America’s natural landscape.”
Prioritizing the amount of energy generation per acre will naturally benefit fossil fuel projects and diminish renewable energy, which requires larger amounts of land to provide the same level of power. The Department of the Interior used this same tactic earlier in the year to delay permits.
Now we know the full extent of the delays wrought by that notice thanks to a copy of the Army Corps’ formal guidance on issuing permits under the Clean Water Act or approvals related to the Rivers and Harbors Act, a 1899 law governing discharges into navigable waters. That guidance was made public for the first time in a lawsuit filed in December by renewable trade associations against Trump’s actions to delay, pause, or deny renewables permits.
The guidance submitted in court by the trade groups states that the Corps will scrutinize the potential energy generation per acre of any permit request from an energy project developer, as well as whether an “alternative energy generation source can deliver the same amount of generation” while making less of an impact on the “aquatic environment.” The Corps is now also prioritizing permit applications for projects “that would generate the most annual potential energy generation per acre over projects with low potential generation per acre.”
Lastly, the Corps will also scrutinize “whether activities related to the projects denigrate the beauty of the Nation’s natural landscape” when deciding whether to issue these permits. That last factor – aesthetics – is in fact a part of the Army Corps’ permitting regulations, but I have not seen any previous administration halt renewable energy permits because officials think solar farms and wind turbines are an eyesore.
Jennifer Neumann, a former career Justice Department attorney who oversaw the agency’s water-related casework with the Army Corps for a decade, told me she had never seen the Corps cite aesthetics in this way. The issue has “never really been litigated,” she said. “I have never seen a situation where the Corps has applied [this].”
The renewable energy industry’s amended complaint in the lawsuit, which is slowly proceeding in federal court, claims the Corps’ guidance will lead to “many costly project redesigns” and delays, “resulting in contract penalties, cost hikes, and deferred revenue.” Other projects “may never get their Corps individual permits and thus will need to be canceled altogether.”
In addition, executives for the trade associations submitted a sworn declaration laying out how they’re being harmed by the Corps guidance, as well as a host of other federal actions against the renewable energy sector. To illustrate those harms they laid out an example: French energy developer ENGIE, they said, was required to “re-engineer” its Empire Prairie wind and solar farm in Missouri because the guidance “effectively precludes” it from getting a permit from the Army Corps. This cost ENGIE millions of dollars, per the declaration, and extended the construction timeline while ultimately also making the project less efficient.
Notably, Empire Prairie is located entirely on private land. It isn’t entirely clear from the declaration why the project had to be redesigned, and there is scant publicly available information about it aside from a basic website. The area where Empire Prairie is being built, however, is tricky for development; segments of the project are located in counties – DeKalb and Andrew – that have 88 and 99 opposition risk scores, respectively, per Heatmap Pro.
Renewable energy developers require these water permits from the Army Corps when their construction zone includes more than half an acre of federally designated wetlands or bodies of water protected under the Rivers and Harbors Act. Neumann told me that developers with impacts of half an acre or less may skirt the need for a permit application if their project qualifies for what’s known as a “nationwide permit,” which only requires verification from the Corps that a company complies with the requirements.
Even the simple verification process for Corps permits has been short-circuited by other actions from the administration. Developers are currently unable to access a crucial database overseen by the Fish and Wildlife Service to determine whether their projects impacts species protected under the Endangered Species Act, which in turn effectively “prevents wind and solar developers from (among other things) obtaining Corps nationwide permits for their projects,” according to the declaration from trade group executives.
But hey, look on the bright side. At least the Trump administration is in the initial phases of trying to pare back federal wetlands protections. So there’s a chance that eliminating federal environmental protections might benefit some solar and wind companies out there. How many? It’s quite unclear given the ever-changing nature of wetlands designations and opaque data available on how many projects are being built within those areas.
Dane County, Wisconsin – The QTS data center project we’ve been tracking closely is now dead, after town staff in the host community of DeForest declared its plans “unfeasible.”
Marathon County, Wisconsin – Elsewhere in Wisconsin, this county just voted to lobby the state’s association of counties to fight for more local control over renewable energy development.
Huntington County, Indiana – Meanwhile in Indiana, we have yet another loud-and-proud county banning data centers.
DeKalb County, Georgia – This populous Atlanta-adjacent county is also on the precipice of a data center moratorium, but is waiting for pending state legislation before making a move.
New York – Multiple localities in the Empire State are yet again clamping down on battery storage. Let’s go over the damage for the battery bros.
A conversation with Georgia Conservation Voters’ Connie Di Cicco.
This week’s conversation is with Connie Di Cicco, legislative director for Georgia Conservation Voters. I reached out to Connie because I wanted to best understand last November’s Public Service Commission elections which, as I explained at the time, focused almost exclusively on data center development. I’ve been hearing from some of you that you want to hear more about how and why opposition to these projects has become so entrenched so quickly. Connie argues it’s because data centers are a multi-hit combo of issues at the top of voters’ minds right now.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
So to start off Connie, how did we get here? What’s the tale of the tape on how data centers became a statewide election issue?
This has been about a year and a half-long evolution to where we are now. I started with GCV in about June of 2024 and I worked both the electoral and political sides. That meant I was working with PSC candidates.
People in other states have been dealing with data centers longer than we have and we’ve been taking our learnings from what they’ve been dealing with. We’ve been fortunate to be able to have them as resources.
There has been a coalition that has developed nationally and we have several groups that have developed within that coalition space who have helped us develop our site fight organizing, policy guidebooks, and legislative resources. It has been a tremendous assist to what we’re doing on the ground, because this is an ever-evolving situation. Almost like dealing with a virus or bacteria because it keeps mutating; as soon as you develop a tactic, the data centers react to that and you have to pivot, think of something else, and come up with a new strategy or tactic.
That’s been the last year and a half from the past summer to now. We worked on the Public Service Commission, flipping two seats this past legislative session. Now we have two more seats on the PSC looming in this next electoral year.
The next question I would ask is related to the role you view data centers will play in the coming election. Why do you think data centers are coming up? Help me understand what it is about data centers that has turned it into a potent political subject?
Georgia was in a really unique position in 2025 to have data centers at the forefront of the election. They were the only thing state-wide on the ballot because the PSC election was the only thing on the ballot. For the most part, Georgia has set up what is unique to Georgia: districted seats that the entire state can vote on. You have to live in the district to run for it but the entire state votes on it. And that meant we could message to the entire state what the PSC was, why it was important, and how it was going to affect people. Once you did that you were inevitably talking about data centers because that messaging became focused on affordability.
Once people understand what a PSC commissioner is, they know they regulate what you pay on your utility bill. If your bills are too high now, because the current PSC commissioners raised your rates six times in the past two years, there are more rate hikes looming in the future because of data centers. This is what’s coming.
Those were dots that were very easy for voters to connect.
We also had in the background and then the foreground data centers coming to people’s communities. Suddenly, random people were educated. They knew about closed-loop versus open-loop systems. They were asking questions suddenly about where water was coming from and why they didn’t know about these projects before they’re at the next local commission meeting. They’re telling me its only 50 decibels of noise. Are they going to cause cancer? The number of questions were tremendous and extremely sophisticated. People had been hearing about them, reading about them, and were knowledgeable until they connected all the dots.
You’re bringing up a really important phenomenon that, I’ll say, I’ve noticed when it comes to renewable energy projects and the opposition to projects: the populism I’ve seen in communities I’ve covered for the last year and a half here at Heatmap. So as someone who is trying to communicate against data center development but still trying to promote renewable energy, how do you walk that tightrope from a canvassing standpoint?
It’s a good question. Data centers are already coming. How we talk about data centers is, if they’re going to be here they need to be good neighbors.
We have made it open season here in Georgia. We left our credit card on the counter and said don’t do anything stupid only for us to come home and see there’s nothing left. What did you expect? There’s tax incentives for the data centers, there are no ordinances, they’ve allowed them to use our resources. They’ve come here because of our resources and our land and our access to fiber optics. Until we wrap our arms around it and put up some safeguards, and create rules for our teenagers when we go on Spring Break, then we can’t get a handle on how many of these are even going to be here and how much energy will be needed to power them.
We need to make limits. If you want incentives, okay – 30% of it needs to be green. If you want to build in a community, then okay – part of a CBA means you have to put up solar. They can be clean but we have to get a handle on protecting our resources, protecting the land and protecting our communities.
Do you see a change in the near-term when it comes to bringing data center development towards what you’d like to see, as opposed to just outright moratoria? Where is this opposition movement heading in Georgia?
We are just in the beginning phases of this. We see a lot of local opposition to data centers – 900 people coming out to county commissions. Like, we’re seeing unprecedented numbers.
What’s important is that power still rests with the elected officials. Unless they’re scared of losing power, it’s hard to actually change the rules. I think this state legislative session is going to be really important–
So how involved do you get at the local level on these data center fights?
So, those elected officials are on different schedules but people are showing up to meetings. We’re currently helping them organize and showing them best practices.
Now, I can’t dictate their messaging for them, because that’s county by county and the best people to do that are the people who live there, but we help coach them, tell them to pick a personal story, say how to show up, and wear bright-colored shirts. We have an entire tool kit that shows them the ABCs and 123s of organizing. What has worked in the past from other groups around the country for other groups to fight back.
But each county is different. Some counties may need the tax revenue. There’s a chance you may need one. So we say Georgians need to value Georgia and their resources need to be protected. We say, you need a solid community benefits agreement, this is what you should ask for and you need a lawyer.
Our position here is to help them get the resources and get connected. We pull from a lot of different sources and places who have been in this fight a lot longer.