Three Years After Illinois Banned Solar Bans, Counties Are Still Fighting in Court. Virginia Is Next.

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.

What Virginia's July 1 law actually does

Governor Glenn Youngkin signed HB 711 / SB 347 on April 13, 2026, with an effective date of July 1, 2026. The core move is narrow but sharp: outright bans and blanket exclusions on solar facilities of 1 MW or larger in agricultural, commercial, industrial, or institutional zoning districts are now prohibited. Counties that had voted utility-scale solar off the list of allowable uses — Greensville County did exactly that in June 2024 — must begin accepting and processing applications.

For larger projects the law adds a state backstop. A new Virginia Solar Energy and Energy Storage Siting Advisory Board reviews projects over 20 MW sited within seven miles of an interconnection point and must issue a report and opinion within 90 days. A locality then has 30 days from that opinion to approve or deny. If it denies, the developer can appeal to the State Corporation Commission within 21 days; the SCC must approve within 30 days if the project meets the capacity and proximity thresholds. (Source: SitePath's regulatory tracker; Canary Media; VACo; Va. Code § 15.2-2288.7.)

What HB 711 does not do is dictate setbacks, acreage caps, or the day-to-day conditions counties attach to a permit. That gap — the space between "you can't ban it" and "you can still regulate it" — is where the next several years of Virginia solar siting will be decided. And it is exactly the space Illinois has spent three years litigating.

Illinois ran this experiment first

Illinois enacted Public Act 102-1123 on January 27, 2023. Like Virginia's law, it set state-level siting and permitting standards for commercial wind and solar and prohibited counties from banning or imposing moratoriums on them. It went further than Virginia on the procedural mechanics: a 30-hour annual cap on shadow flicker at non-participating residences, a standardized setback framework, a required public meeting within 45 days of an application, and a siting decision within 30 days of the close of the public hearing. Counties were given 120 days — until May 30, 2023 — to bring conflicting ordinances into compliance. (Source: SitePath's regulatory tracker; National Law Review; ISACo; Quarles.)

The deadline did not settle the question. According to the SitePath record, counties that had adopted non-compliant ordinances before May 30, 2023 continued to be challenged in court — with litigation documented in Boone, DeKalb, Ogle, Champaign, and LaSalle counties. Preemption changed what counties were allowed to say "no" to. It did not stop them from trying.

The line the courts eventually drew

The most useful piece of the Illinois story for Virginia is what the courts did with that resistance. On August 1, 2025 — more than two years after the compliance deadline — the Illinois Appellate Court for the Third District clarified the distinction that now governs how counties respond to developer applications: exclusionary zoning is prohibited, but reasonable operational limitations permitted by local ordinance are not (SitePath's regulatory tracker).

That holding is the practical translation of every preemption law. A county cannot zone solar out of existence. It can impose conditions — setbacks, screening, decommissioning bonds, operational limits — and the fight migrates to whether a given condition is a legitimate operational rule or a ban wearing a disguise. Note for the editor: the dataset summarizes this holding but does not include the case caption or docket number, so cite the holding, not a named party, unless an evidence-researcher pass confirms the citation.

Why this is Virginia's near future, not just Illinois's past

The parallels are close enough to be predictive. Both laws bar local bans on utility-scale solar. Both leave reasonable local regulation intact. Both sit inside or adjacent to the PJM footprint, where interconnection access — Virginia's seven-mile trigger is itself a proximity test — shapes which projects move first.

If Illinois is the template, three things are likely in Virginia after July 1:

• The ban-by-another-name fight moves to conditions. Expect counties that opposed solar to test the boundary with aggressive setbacks and acreage caps rather than outright prohibitions — the same playbook seen in Indiana, where Tippecanoe County replaced its moratorium with a 400-acre project cap and a 6,000-acre countywide ceiling (SitePath's regulatory tracker).
• Litigation, not legislation, sets the real rules. Illinois needed an appellate decision two-plus years out to define "exclusionary." Virginia's SCC-appeal mechanism may surface that line faster, but the line still gets drawn case by case.
• The named counties are the ones to watch. In Illinois it was Boone, DeKalb, Ogle, Champaign, and LaSalle. In Virginia, the dataset flags Greensville, Patrick, Franklin, and Page — the counties with blanket bans now forced to accept applications — as the most likely first venues for the same contest.

The takeaway for siting

For developers, the lesson from Illinois is that a preemption law is a starting gun, not a finish line: the projects that move are the ones built to clear the operational bar a county is still allowed to set, not just the legal right to apply. For county officials, it is that the cheapest path is a defensible, standards-based ordinance — because the alternative, as five Illinois counties learned, is years in court. Virginia's counties have 16 days to decide which lesson they want to learn the hard way.

Sources (all already in the SitePath dataset)

• SitePath's regulatory tracker — PA 102-1123, 120-day compliance deadline (May 30, 2023), shadow-flicker/setback/decision-timeline standards, litigation in Boone/DeKalb/Ogle/Champaign/LaSalle, Aug 1 2025 Third District appellate holding. Cited sources: National Law Review; ISACo; Quarles.
• SitePath's regulatory tracker — HB 711/SB 347 signed 2026-04-13, effective 2026-07-01; ≥1 MW ban prohibition; 20 MW / 7-mile advisory-board trigger; 90/30/21/30-day timelines; Greensville June 2024 ban; impacted counties Greensville, Patrick, Franklin, Page. Cited sources: Canary Media; VACo; Va. Code § 15.2-2288.7.
• SitePath's regulatory tracker — 400-acre project cap, 6,000-acre countywide ceiling (illustrative comparison only).