Massachusetts Doesn't Argue With Its Towns About Batteries. It Overrules Them.

When a Virginia county wanted utility-scale solar gone, it took an act of the legislature to bring it back. One statute, one effective date, every county reopened at once. That is what preemption looks like when a state does it loudly.

Massachusetts gets to nearly the same place and almost nobody outside the state has noticed, because Massachusetts does not use a law. It uses a lawyer.

Here is the part that should interest you: it has been doing this since 2022, and it works.

The mechanism

In Massachusetts, a town cannot simply adopt a zoning bylaw and have it take effect. Every bylaw a town meeting passes goes to the Attorney General's Municipal Law Unit for review, and the AG can disapprove it. Not appeal it. Not sue over it. Disapprove it, in a written decision, before it ever binds anybody.

The statute doing the work is M.G.L. c. 40A, § 3, which limits how far a municipality may restrict solar energy systems. When the Municipal Law Unit disapproved the Town of Carver's moratoria on large-scale solar and battery storage — Case #10526, decided November 14, 2022 — it found the town had restricted these systems "with no articulated evidence of an important municipal interest, grounded in protecting the public health, safety, or welfare [...] sufficient to outweigh the public need for solar energy systems." (Massachusetts Attorney General, Municipal Law Unit decision)

Read that standard closely, because it is the whole game. The town does not lose because it dislikes batteries. It loses because it could not produce evidence of a public-health or safety interest big enough to outweigh the public need. Feeling is not enough. A packed hearing room is not enough. You have to show your work.

It is not one decision. It is a pattern.

The Attorney General's office has disapproved solar and storage restrictions in Northfield, Ware, Carver, Wareham, Leyden, Pelham, Spencer and Wendell, among others. (Foley Hoag, Energy & Climate Counsel)

The primary records are public and worth reading if you site projects in New England:

• Wendell — a licensing bylaw that effectively barred systems above 10 MW; partially disapproved. (AG Municipal Law Unit decision)
• Northfield — solar and battery-storage moratoria disapproved following town meeting. (Town of Northfield, AG decision)
• Carver — the 2022 decision quoted above, issued by then-Attorney General Maura Healey. (AG decision, Case #10526)

Every one of those decisions is searchable in the Attorney General's public document system. That is unusual and useful: most states make you guess at how a preemption fight will go. Massachusetts publishes the reasoning.

What the state offers instead of a ban

A state that keeps striking down local rules owes those towns something workable, and Massachusetts has been building it. Under Chapter 239 of the Acts of 2024, the state created a consolidated siting and permitting process for clean-energy facilities, and the Department of Energy Resources has published a draft model bylaw for battery energy storage systems for towns to adopt. (Massachusetts DOER, draft BESS model bylaw)

That is the same pattern we found nationally in the storage data: the winning move for a jurisdiction is not a ban, it is a code. Massachusetts is unusual only in that the state wrote the code for its towns rather than waiting for each of them to invent one.

What it means

A moratorium is not a durable siting risk in Massachusetts. That is a real and specific finding, and it is the opposite of how most diligence treats the word. If your risk model marks a Massachusetts town red because town meeting passed a pause, your model is wrong — the pause may not survive AG review, and historically has not.

The friction has moved into rules that do survive. Aquifer-protection thresholds, large setbacks, solar-pairing requirements, capacity tiers. These are legitimate exercises of zoning authority with an articulated public-safety rationale, which is exactly what the AG standard asks for. They are harder to see from outside the state than a moratorium headline, and they matter more.

Watch for the standard, not the vote. When a Massachusetts town restricts storage, the question that decides the outcome is whether the record contains evidence of an important municipal interest. Developers who show up with fire-code compliance, an emergency response plan and a decommissioning commitment are, in effect, making it harder for the town to build that record.

And if you work outside Massachusetts, watch the mechanism itself. A state that already reviews local bylaws does not need to pass a preemption law to preempt. It just needs an attorney general willing to say no. That is a much lower bar than a legislature, and it is available in more states than the industry currently prices in.

What this analysis does not tell you

It does not tell you how many Massachusetts towns currently have a restriction in force — AG review is rolling, and a bylaw disapproved in one town meeting cycle can return in amended form the next. It does not cover the separate question of state-level siting reform under Chapter 239, whose implementation is ongoing. The DOER model bylaw cited here is a draft, and specific numeric provisions in it should be confirmed against the document before being relied on. Where this piece names a town, it links to the decision itself; where it names a longer list, that list comes from legal-sector reporting and should be checked decision-by-decision before you build a strategy on it.