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Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.

The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.
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Much of California’s biggest county is now off limits to energy storage.
Residents of a tiny unincorporated community outside of Los Angeles have trounced a giant battery project in court — and in the process seem to have blocked energy storage projects in more than half of L.A. County, the biggest county in California.
A band of frustrated homeowners and businesses have for years aggressively fought a Hecate battery storage project proposed in Acton, California, a rural unincorporated community of about 7,000 residents, miles east of the L.A. metro area. As I wrote in my first feature for The Fight over a year ago, this effort was largely motivated by concerns about Acton as a high wildfire risk area. Residents worried that in the event of a large fire, a major battery installation would make an already difficult emergency response situation more dangerous. Acton leaders expressly opposed the project in deliberations before L.A. County planning officials, arguing that BESS facilities in general were not allowed under the existing zoning code in unincorporated areas.
On the other side, county officials maintained that the code was silent on battery storage as such, but said that in their view, these projects were comparable to distribution infrastructure from a land use perspective, and therefore would be allowable under the code.
Last week, the residents of Acton won, getting the courts to toss out the county’s 2021 memorandum allowing battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas – which make up more than 65% of L.A. County.
Judge Curtis Kin wrote in his October 14 ruling that “such expansive use of the interpretation runs contrary to the Zoning Code itself,” and that the “exclusion” of permission for battery storage in the code means it isn’t allowed, plain and simple.
“Consequently, respondents and real parties’ reliance on the existence of other interpretive memos and guidance by the [Planning] Director is beside the point,” Kin stated. “There is no dispute the Director has the authority to issue memos and interpretations for Zoning code provisions subject to interpretation, but, as discussed above, such authority cannot be used in such a way as to violate the provisions of the Zoning Code.”
The court also declared the Hecate project approval void and ordered the company to seek permits under the California Environmental Quality Act if it still wants to build. This will halt the project’s development for the foreseeable future. Alene Taber, the attorney representing Acton residents, told me she has received no indication from Hecate’s legal team about whether they will appeal the ruling.
Hecate declined to comment on the outcome.
Taber’s perspective is unique as a self-described “rural rights” attorney who largely represents unincorporated communities with various legal disputes. She told me this ruling demonstrates a serious risk regulators face in moving too fast for a host community, especially given rising opposition to battery storage in California. Since the Moss Landing fire, opposition to storage projects has escalated rapidly across the state – despite profound tech differences between more modern designs proposed today and the antiquated system that burned up in that incident.
I asked Taber if she thought California enacting a new law last week to beef up battery fire safety oversight could stem the tide of concerns about battery storage. In response, she railed against a separate statute giving energy companies – including battery developers – the ability to work around town ordinances and moratoria targeting their industry.
“Even though the county didn’t consider the community input — which it should’ve — the county process at least still allowed for communities to appeal the project. And they’re also at least supposed to consider what the local zoning code said,” Taber told me. “Local communities are now sidelined all together. They’re saying they don’t care what the concerns are. Where’s the consideration for how these projects are now being sited in high fire zones?”
I was unable to reach Los Angeles County officials before press time for The Fight, but it’s worth noting that, amid the battle over Hecate’s approval, L.A. County planning officials began preparing to update their renewable energy ordinance to include battery storage development regulation – an indication they may need new methods to site and build more battery storage. There’s no timeline for when those changes will take place.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.
2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.
3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.
A conversation with David Gahl of SI2
This week I spoke with David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, or SI2, which is the Solar Energy Industries Association’s independent industry research arm. Usually I’d chat with Gahl about the many different studies and social science efforts they undertake to try and better understand siting conflicts in the U.S.. But SI2 reached out first this time, hoping to talk about how all of that work could be undermined by the Trump administration’s grant funding cuts tied to the government shutdown. (The Energy Department did not immediately get back to me with a request for comment for this story, citing the shutdown.)
The following conversation was edited lightly for clarity.
So what SI2 funding could be cut because of the federal shutdown, and what has it been put toward?
On October 1, the Energy Department put out a list of about $7.5 billion in grants they were terminating. Approximately a week later, another larger list of grants that were slated for termination found its way into the press. There’s an outstanding question about what this other list floating around means, and only DOE can verify the document’s accuracy, but we have two projects that were on that bigger list.
The first was $2.5 million supporting research into how power companies engage communities. We were coming up with a list of community engagement innovations — the idea was to actually test, through rigorous social science research at project sites, which of these innovations produces the best outcomes. We were going to have empirical data that said, If you approach communities in this way you’re more likely to get support, and if you approach communities this other way you wouldn’t.
The second was $3 million to bring diverse stakeholders together to talk about siting and permitting reform, best practices, guidance to make development smoother. The concept there was to bring traditionally warring parties to come up with a framework and tools to help the siting process. If you can get people together to come up with best practices, you can typically move things faster.
This was an “uncommon dialogue” – there was “uncommon dialogue” before on hydropower resources – and this was related to large-scale solar facilities and conservation. It’s not location-specific, more bringing the groups together to talk about a higher level set of issues, not specific projects. Keep in mind, this is relatively small potatoes.
What was the status of that work?
It started earlier in the year and it’s been rolling along. There’s been a lot of progress made so far. People have developed work plans and are working through the issues.
If the funding is canceled, there’s also opportunity for private money to potentially step in, but it puts both initiatives in a precarious place. But to the broader point, the administration has talked about how it wants energy “abundance” and more electrons on the grid to meet growing demand. And these projects funded by the department are addressing key problems to putting electrons onto the grid. Cancellation of these grants is just a complete reversal of what they’re talking about in other forums.
How so? Help me understand how this work actually trickles down to individual project decisions.
One of the challenges with siting any kind of large-scale energy project is getting community buy-in and ensuring the permitting process moves smoothly, that parties aren’t going to be litigating against each other. So if you can come up with ways to make sure the communities feel heard and are designed according to what communities want, you can probably avoid some litigation down the road.
Do you have any indication this government supports the work you’re describing?
What they’ve made clear is they want more electrons to come onto the grid to support data centers and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Canceling grants like these … I mean, we’re talking about potentially canceling projects that make it harder to meet the goal of putting more electricity onto the grid.