“One of our assumptions is that legislators may be introducing more of these restrictive and punitive bills as signals to their constituents or to the broader politics of the time,” Falkenburg said, nodding to the role that clean energy opposition has taken as part of broader “culture war” politics. “But even in conservative states, legislators and governors’ offices are looking at how to get as much energy on the grid as possible.”
The pro-renewables laws that passed
That imperative has driven an impressive showing for what Siting Solutions describes as “permissive” clean-energy siting and permitting policies this legislative season. These provisions include simplifying state permitting processes and setting criteria for how local governments manage project siting.
Siting Solutions chalked up significant wins in Illinois, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington state, as well as moderate policy gains in Maryland and New Jersey — all states controlled by Democrats.
But it also highlighted some positive policies passed in the Republican-controlled states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. For example, Oklahoma approved what Falkenburg described as a “really reasonable” bill that sets best practices for closing down and cleaning up old solar and battery projects without putting unreasonable burdens on developers.
That record of success comes with a caveat, however: The permissive legislation that passed isn’t as heavily tilted in clean energy developers’ favor as the restrictive bills that failed were tilted against it. If anything, the report notes, “Democrats tended to introduce and advance bills that provide minor improvements to the status quo, rather than proposing changes that will substantially move the needle on clean energy deployment.”
One big reason for this is that pro-renewables legislation tends to focus on giving state bodies more control over how local governments manage siting and permitting — and that’s a political challenge. Local opposition has become a primary cause of failure for solar, wind, and battery projects across much of the country. But residents of counties, cities, and townships slated for clean-energy development don’t like having authority taken away from them.
Over the past half decade or so, Democratic-controlled states including Illinois and Michigan have passed laws limiting local governments’ ability to block energy projects on private land. This year, Virginia joined their ranks, passing a law that prevents local governments from instituting community-wide bans on solar projects.
To be clear, Virginia’s law doesn’t bar local governments from denying permits to solar developers. Rather, it prohibits blanket bans on all solar projects, sets statewide guidelines for assessing individual projects, and requires local governments to tell state regulators their reasons for rejecting proposals.
That law was something of a compromise between solar advocates and local officials, said Jim Purekal, a director at Advanced Energy United who heads the trade group’s legislative work in Virginia. “The dealbreaker was taking authority away from localities,” he said. “Once you move off that, I think the bill was structured in a very reasonable fashion. It just said, ‘You don’t have to accept these projects — but this is what a good project looks like, for those who are asking.’”
Illinois took up its own revisions to state versus local control over solar and battery siting in a major energy bill passed in late 2025, which Siting Solutions included in the 2026 roundup because its provisions will go into effect this year. In Pennsylvania, which has a year-round legislative session, a proposal remains in play that would take a state-level standard-setting approach similar to Virginia’s.
The 2026 laws passed in Oregon and Washington aim to streamline slow and cumbersome state permitting processes, Falkenburg said. The intention is to lower costs for clean-energy developers and, in Oregon’s case, allow projects to get done fast enough to earn federal tax credits set to expire under the megabill passed by Republicans in Congress last year.
Clean energy still faces major barriers. Despite the progress tracked by Siting Solutions, lots of jurisdictions still make it very difficult for renewables to get approved. Plus, several states have backslid on clean energy policy in recent months, including New York, which rolled back its emissions-reduction targets, and California, which made major changes to its carbon cap-and-invest program that critics say will threaten the state’s ability to meet its climate goals. Siting Solutions’ report does not account for those measures because it purely focuses on siting and permitting issues.
Those barriers highlight the fact that it’s almost always easier to block clean energy projects than it is to craft laws that smooth their way to being built, Falkenburg said.
“Local governments should have some authority over the projects being proposed in their jurisdictions, absolutely,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a need to balance the energy goals of the state, the climate goals of the state if they exist, and the private landowner rights to be able to develop their land as they see fit. … This is a tough nut to crack.”
