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Everything The Scoop has run, newest first. For this week's edition — lead story, the wire and the section fronts — start at the front page.
Standing tracker
Every U.S. county with an active utility-scale solar moratorium, each traced to the ordinance behind it. Kansas, Indiana and Iowa lead the list. Updated within 24 hours of a new filing.
Standing tracker
Every state by median county risk score. Vermont leads with a 32.6 median; Delaware has the smallest share of A/B-graded counties — none of its counties graded A or B.
Standing tracker
The 50 most permitting-friendly counties by risk score. Colorado leads the top five, and Texas is well represented further down.
Data centers · Field Note · October 9, 2026
On October 6 a central Illinois city council voted 5-0 to stop accepting any application for a data center or a battery energy storage system until October 2027. The definition of 'battery use' is wider than the headline suggests.
Data centers · Market Trend · September 26, 2026
In one September week, three towns in three states wrote data centers out of every zoning district, permanently. None of them had a project in front of them. The one town that did, in upstate New York, voted against pausing anything.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · September 26, 2026
In one September week a county council refused to pause solar, a county that banned it moved to undo the ban, one state regulator approved 1,137 megawatts and another killed 440 megawatts over price. The place where solar gets told no is changing.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · September 25, 2026
On July 14 the town of Newcomb banned battery storage nobody had proposed. Nine weeks later, the state signed $3.7 billion in contracts for it. Both happened in New York. Only one tells you where the industry is actually headed.
Policy & courts · Field Note · September 22, 2026
Lexington's council spent 14 months writing a solar ordinance with a hard 1% land cap and mandatory agrivoltaics — then watched the mayor veto it anyway. The override needs one vote the ordinance didn't have, and the council isn't back in session until October 6.
Data centers · Market Trend · September 18, 2026
New Hampshire has spent two years watching county boards and township meetings pass data-center moratoria one at a time. On September 2, the state's own governor asked for one that covers all of it — and she framed it as a electric bill, not a zoning fight.
Data centers · Market Trend · September 11, 2026
In the same week a rural California county voted to stop every data center cold, the state legislature sent Governor Newsom four bills that do the opposite: let the projects come, but make Big Tech, not the ratepayer next door, cover the grid.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · September 8, 2026
On August 26 the White House declared a national emergency over the equipment inside the grid — inverters, transformers, batteries. The rules that define the ban won't exist until December. The manufacturers aren't waiting for them.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · September 1, 2026
State preemption of local solar siting is arriving as a typology, not a template — Virginia, Illinois, Maryland and Minnesota each take the county veto back a different way, and the legal design decides how much recourse a developer gains.
Data centers · Market Trend · August 28, 2026
Provo, East Vincent, Naperville, San Marcos, Rochelle. Every recent data-center refusal we can point to was handed down by a city council or a township — inside counties that look unremarkable from a county-level screen.
Data centers · Field Note · August 28, 2026
In three days in August, boards in Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wisconsin adopted or extended data-center moratoria covering 674,579 residents. The instrument has changed: these are pre-emptive pauses, written before anyone knocks on the door.
Data centers · Market Trend · August 21, 2026
In eighteen months the instrument went from a township's 180-day pause to a governor freezing an interconnection queue and a bill in both chambers of Congress. Each rung up the ladder is harder to route around than the one below it.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · August 21, 2026
Nine Massachusetts towns voted to block solar or battery storage. The Attorney General struck down the bylaws, one at a time, under a statute most developers have never read. It is the quietest preemption mechanism in the country and nobody has to pass a law to use it.
Markets & grid · Market Trend · August 20, 2026
Governor Abbott froze roughly 250–300 grid-connection requests representing about 200 GW — more than twice ERCOT's record peak. For the first time the binding constraint on a data center isn't a county board. It's the queue.
Data centers · Market Trend · August 19, 2026
Ask where data centers get blocked in America and most people still say Northern Virginia. Georgia, Michigan and the Carolinas now hold the overwhelming majority of restricted counties. Virginia holds one.
Policy & courts · Market Trend · August 18, 2026
Five counties in the country hold a restrictive posture on battery storage. Far more have written a standalone BESS ordinance, and more still point their ordinance at NFPA 855. Storage stopped being a political question and became a code question — right as the data-center backlash started reaching for it.
Policy & courts · Weekly Analysis · July 21, 2026
When a Virginia county wanted to keep utility-scale solar out, the state legislature took the decision away from it.
Opposition · Field Note · July 21, 2026
SitePath merged several county-cluster research dossiers into the canonical store, covering a dozen or more Massachusetts counties and the BESS-related ordinance records behind them. Two things stand out for siting professionals:
Data centers · Field Note · July 15, 2026
On May 19, 2026 the O'Brien County Board of Supervisors adopted Resolution 2026-17, a county-wide moratorium pausing the construction of data centers while the Board develops standards for noise, power, and water impacts.
Markets & grid · Quarterly Recap · July 4, 2026
The second quarter of 2026 was the quarter Virginia stopped being a county-by-county story and became a statewide one.
Markets & grid · Weekly Analysis · July 4, 2026
If you develop utility-scale solar, two dates have been circled on your calendar all year. This week, both of them passed within seventy-two hours of each other — and they push you in opposite directions.
Data centers · Field Note · June 28, 2026
A coordinated wave of local data-center restrictions surfaced in SitePath's news layer this cycle. The trigger headline (GovTech, 2026-06-22, in SitePath's news index) was "Data Center Bans Emerge in 4 More New Jersey Communities." The…
Data centers · Field Note · June 27, 2026
The Woodbury County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to impose a one-year moratorium on data-center development in the unincorporated parts of the county.
Data centers · Field Note · June 25, 2026
Butler County, Ohio — the Cincinnati–Dayton-corridor county of roughly 390,000 people — has approved a moratorium on data centers (WYSO, 17 June 2026).
Policy & courts · Weekly Analysis · June 22, 2026
On July 1, Virginia counties lose a power most of them never expected to lose: the power to say no to a battery.
Data centers · Field Note · June 22, 2026
In a single week, three more local governments moved to slam the door on data centers, and Virginia lawmakers — who can't ban them — moved instead to tax them.
Policy & courts · Field Note · June 21, 2026
Virginia's state budget — normally a fight about schools and Medicaid — has become, this month, a fight about data centers. Two threads are converging on the same deadline:
Opposition · Field Note · June 19, 2026
On June 15, 2026 (6–8 PM), roughly 230 residents packed a data-center listening session at the Best Western Battlefield Inn, Manassas (unincorporated Prince William County), hosted by state Sen. L.
Policy & courts · Weekly Analysis · June 15, 2026
On July 1, Virginia becomes the next state to tell its counties they can no longer ban utility-scale solar. The instinct is to treat that date as the end of a fight. Illinois suggests it is closer to the beginning of one.
Policy & courts · Policy Brief · June 14, 2026
For three years, the most important fact about utility-scale solar in the United States has been that the action is local.
Policy & courts · Weekly Analysis · June 8, 2026
On July 1, 2026, the ground rules for siting utility-scale solar in Virginia change for the first time since the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
Policy & courts · Weekly Analysis · June 4, 2026
On July 1, a handful of Virginia counties that spent the last two years writing utility-scale solar out of their zoning codes will have to start saying yes again — or at least stop saying a flat no.
What The Scoop is. A weekly read on where energy and data-center projects are getting waved through, slowed down, or stopped cold — written from the ordinances, board votes, dockets and filings themselves. Every figure traces to a primary document. If a value cannot be verified against one, it does not run.
Think we got something wrong? Say so — hello@sitepathintel.com. We print corrections; we do not quietly edit. Tips about a hearing, a vote or a filing are always welcome, and we will not name you unless you ask us to.