Who Holds the Solar Veto Now: Four States, Four Ways of Taking It Back From the County

For most of the last decade, the single most useful sentence in utility-scale solar siting was: the decision is local. Whether a project got built came down to a county board of supervisors, not a governor or a statehouse. The states that permit solar most easily are not the ones with the most ambitious climate targets — the permitting decision lives at the county board.

That sentence is now only half true, and the half that has changed is worth a developer's full attention. Over the last three years a small but growing set of states has taken the veto — the power to say no to solar as an entire category — out of the county's hands and moved it up to the state. Three states now carry a firm solar-siting override on the books — Illinois, Maryland, and now Virginia — and a fourth, Minnesota, reaches a similar place through a softer, state-enabling framework. The newsworthy fact is not just that the list is growing. It is that no two of these states did it the same way — and the legal design of each override decides exactly how much recourse a developer actually gains.

This is the deeper trend beneath the July headlines: preemption is arriving as a typology, not a template. Here are the four models, from the most permissive to the most constrained.

Model 1 — Virginia: ban the blanket ban, keep the case-by-case no

Virginia is the freshest and the clearest. Governor Glenn Youngkin signed HB 711 / SB 347 on April 13, 2026; it took effect July 1, 2026. The law prohibits outright bans and blanket exclusions on solar facilities of 1 MW or more in agricultural, commercial, industrial, or institutional zoning districts. Counties that had voted to remove utility-scale solar from their list of allowable uses — Greensville in June 2024, and Patrick, Franklin, and Page as well — must now accept and process applications. The law also builds a state review track: a Solar Energy and Energy Storage Siting Advisory Board weighs projects over 20 MW within seven miles of an interconnection point, the locality must decide within 30 days of the board's opinion, and a denied developer can appeal to the State Corporation Commission within 21 days. The rewrite is codified at Virginia Code § 15.2-2288.7.

But this is deliberately partial preemption: it bans blanket exclusions and preserves case-by-case denial. The category veto is gone; the project-by-project no is not. And with the law only weeks old, the permissible grounds for a lawful denial are still an actively developing question — the Virginia Association of Counties has already run an implementation webinar for local governments. Virginia did not end the fight. It moved it from whether solar is allowed at all to what counts as a lawful reason to deny this one — a narrower, more expensive, more lawyer-intensive fight for both sides.

Model 2 — Illinois: the tested version, three years on

Illinois is what Virginia looks like after the litigation runs. Public Act 102-1123, signed January 27, 2023, barred counties from banning or enacting moratoriums on wind and solar, and gave them 120 days to conform their ordinances. Three years later the statute is settled but its edges are not. On August 1, 2025, the Illinois Appellate Court for the Third District drew the line that Virginia is only now approaching — distinguishing exclusionary zoning (prohibited) from reasonable operational limitations (permitted). Counties that adopted non-compliant ordinances before the 2023 deadline — Boone, DeKalb, Ogle, Champaign, LaSalle — have faced court challenges over them.

The lesson for every state that follows: a preemption statute does not end local resistance on its effective date. It converts a political fight into a legal one, and the setback and operational provisions become the new battleground. Virginia developers reading their own HB 711 should read Illinois's docket first.

Model 3 — Maryland: a quota, not a ban on bans

Maryland took a different lever entirely. Its Renewable Energy Certainty Act (RECA, HB 1036), enacted in the 2025 session, does not forbid county prohibitions outright — it caps ground-mounted solar at 5% of the acreage inside a county's designated Priority Preservation Areas. It is preemption expressed as a farmland-preservation ceiling rather than a floor on development, and the fight has already moved to the size of the number: a follow-on bill, HB 460, would cut the cap from 5% to 2%, which county officials estimate would eliminate one-third to one-half of currently solar-eligible acreage in those areas. Maryland shows that "state preemption" can just as easily be a tool the preservation side uses to lock in a limit as one the industry uses to force a door open. The direction depends entirely on who writes the percentage.

Model 4 — Minnesota, and the county that reopens itself

The fourth model is the softest: Minnesota's solar-siting framework is state enabling — the override varies by PUC and local structure rather than imposing a single statewide rule. And running underneath all four is a fifth path that is not preemption at all: the county that simply changes its own mind. Yakima County, Washington, ended a moratorium that had stood since 2022 by adopting a new ordinance that permits medium- and large-scale solar on some farmland while limiting where and how. No state made Yakima do it. That matters, because it is the outcome preemption is trying to manufacture — and it shows the same balance, farmland preservation against development, can be struck locally without a statehouse forcing the issue.

The counter-current: where nobody took the veto away

The reason this typology is a trend and not a wave is the map's other half. In the states with no preemption statute, the county veto is not just intact — it is hardening. Indiana's Tippecanoe County let a moratorium lapse only to replace it with a restrictive ordinance (a 400-acre project cap, a 6,000-acre countywide cap); Marshall County is advancing an ordinance to ban large farm-scale solar; and Kansas's Jackson County is weighing an 18-month moratorium aimed at NextEra's Jeffrey Solar project. Nationally, the Sabin Center counts hundreds of municipalities and counties with renewable-energy siting restrictions. Preemption is spreading; so is its opposite.

Why the model — not the fact — is the story for developers

All of this lands during a record build cycle: the EIA projects 86 GW of new utility-scale capacity in 2026, with solar alone at 43.4 GW — a 60% jump over the prior year. Every one of those projects has to clear a siting decision, and where that decision now sits is no longer a single answer.

So the practical takeaway is a checklist question, not a headline. Before a developer treats a state as "friendly," the useful question is which model of preemption, if any, applies — because each one hands back a different tool:

• Illinois-style (ban on prohibitions plus a state setback floor): the category is safe, but the operational limits are litigated — budget for the court fight.
• Virginia-style (bans blanket exclusions, keeps case-by-case denial plus an SCC appeal): you get a door and a formal appeal, but you still have to win the project-specific hearing on lawful grounds nobody has fully defined yet.
• Maryland-style (an acreage cap): the constraint is arithmetic — the only question that matters is the percentage, and it can move against you.
• No preemption: the county still holds the whole veto, and in Indiana and Kansas it is using it.

The old sentence — the decision is local — was a good rule of thumb for a decade. Its replacement is longer and less quotable, but it is the one worth carrying into 2027: the decision is local until a state takes part of it back, and the part it takes back — the category, the acreage, or nothing at all — tells you exactly what recourse you have left.