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SitePath Research · Weekly Analysis · July 21, 2026

Massachusetts Doesn't Pass a Preemption Law. Its Attorney General Just Deletes the Bans.

When a Virginia county wanted to keep utility-scale solar out, the state legislature took the decision away from it.

Every claim sourced to a primary document · SitePath Intelligence editorial desk

When a Virginia county wanted to keep utility-scale solar out, the state legislature took the decision away from it. Virginia's HB 711 — signed in April 2026, effective July 1 — simply forbids localities from banning solar and battery projects above one megawatt. One law, one date, every county reopened at once.

Massachusetts gets to nearly the same place. It just doesn't use a law to do it. It uses a lawyer.

The freshest batch of ordinance records in SitePath's change feed, dated July 18, 2026, is entirely Massachusetts — 23 updates to town solar and battery-storage bylaws in a single day. Read one at a time they look like routine zoning housekeeping. Read together they document something systematic: town after town has tried to block battery energy storage, and the Massachusetts Attorney General's office has struck the blocks down, one bylaw at a time.

How a town loses its ban in Massachusetts

The mechanism is a quirk of Massachusetts municipal law. When a town passes a zoning bylaw, it isn't final until the Attorney General's Municipal Law Unit reviews and approves it — and the AG can disapprove any provision that conflicts with state law. Increasingly, the office does exactly that to battery and solar restrictions.

The legal hook is consistent. It rests on G.L. c.40A §3, the statute that protects solar from being zoned out of existence, and on a 2022 appeals-court decision, _Tracer Lane II Realty v. City of Waltham_, which held that a municipality cannot effectively prohibit solar across most of its land without a genuine public-health, safety, or welfare reason. The AG has extended that logic to battery storage co-located with — and, in practice, standalone from — solar. Absent a real evidentiary record, a moratorium or a de facto ban doesn't survive review.

Here is what that looks like in the towns.

The towns that lost

Carver (Plymouth County) passed 11.5-month moratoria on both solar and battery storage at its April 2022 Town Meeting, on a lopsided 387–87 vote. Then-Attorney General Maura Healey's office disapproved the moratoria, citing Tracer Lane II and finding no record evidence of a public-health, safety, or welfare interest sufficient to justify shutting the projects out. Carver went back and wrote a real bylaw instead — tiered permitting, fire-compliance-plan requirements, buffer areas, underground-utility rules — the ordinance a town writes once it can no longer just say no.

Northfield (Franklin County) tried a cleaner version of the same move: a moratorium on battery storage as a principal use, running until August 2025 or the adoption of a permanent bylaw, plus a parallel moratorium on large-scale ground-mounted solar. On October 30, 2024, the AG disapproved both moratorium provisions as unsupported by any health-or-safety record.

Blandford (Hampden County) passed a temporary moratorium on large-scale solar and BESS in the fall of 2025 — while three projects were already completed or under construction, two were in permitting, and three more had expressed interest. The AG disapproved the moratorium on March 11, 2026. A town watching eight projects line up is exactly the setting in which "we need time to study this" reads, to a reviewer, as "we've decided to say no."

Wendell (Franklin County) tried a licensing scheme instead of a flat moratorium. Its "General Bylaw for the Licensing of Battery Energy Storage Systems" passed 100–1: under 1 MW needed no license, 1–10 MW required a new licensing board's health-and-safety findings, and over 10 MW was effectively barred by requiring findings the board couldn't make. An earlier version had already drawn a March 1, 2023 AG decision disapproving two sections — including one prohibiting standalone BESS in every district — for the same missing public-welfare basis.

Spencer (Worcester County) and Shutesbury (Franklin County) round out the pattern. Current Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell's office disapproved two Spencer provisions under Tracer Lane II — a town-wide prohibition on an "Energy Storage System" as a principal use, plus a companion clause hemming storage in as a mere accessory to solar. Shutesbury's bylaw, allowing storage under 1 MW by right, routing 1–10 MW to a new seven-member licensing board, and barring anything over 10 MW, was disapproved in full on November 25, 2024.

Per a Foley Hoag analysis cited in the dataset, these aren't the first: "by the end of 2023, the Attorney General had issued rulings striking down prohibitive energy storage bylaws in the Towns of Shrewsbury, Hubbardston, and Pelham," on the same grounds. (That trio is a secondary characterization, not a primary decision in the feed — backdrop, not a fresh data point.)

Why this matters beyond Massachusetts

Two things make this a story for anyone siting storage, not just in New England.

First, it's a second route to the same destination. SitePath has spent much of 2026 documenting Virginia's legislative preemption — a statute that reopens every county on one date. Massachusetts shows the administrative version: no new law, just a reviewer with a veto and a precedent, working town by town. The Virginia route is faster and blunter; the Massachusetts route is slower but has already produced a longer paper trail of named strike-downs. For a developer choosing where a project can survive local politics, the shape of the legal risk differs even when the outcome rhymes.

Second, the towns keep making the same four mistakes — the ones developers see everywhere. The disapproved bylaws share a menu of tells: defining battery storage only as an accessory to solar so standalone projects have no permitted use; prohibiting storage as a principal use across all districts; setting a megawatt threshold above which approval requires findings the board can't make; and blanket moratoriums with no evidentiary record. Each reads, to a reviewer applying Tracer Lane II, as a ban wearing a permitting costume — and each keeps getting pulled off.

None of this means Massachusetts towns want the batteries. SitePath's own storage tracker records the opposite mood on the ground: of the 14 Massachusetts counties it follows, the Western Massachusetts cluster where these fights concentrate — Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Berkshire, Middlesex — is flagged "opposed." Northfield, Wendell, and Shutesbury all sit in Franklin County, a single county that appears three separate times in one day's data. The opposition is real and local. What's changed is that, in Massachusetts, wanting to say no is no longer the same thing as being allowed to.

Sources (all present in the SitePath dataset)

Published from the SitePath editorial desk on July 21, 2026. Claims are traced to primary documents and to records already in the SitePath dataset; source links appear inline. Material the source review could not confirm has been withheld from this page rather than published with a caveat — see methodology for how SitePath sources and scores what it publishes.

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