The Solar 'No' Just Moved Upstairs

Here is a question worth sitting with. If you develop utility-scale solar, who is most likely to stop your next project: the county planning board, or the state utility commission?

For most of the last five years the answer was easy. The fight was local. Setbacks, acreage caps, farmland, moratoria, a packed hearing room at nine at night. Second week of September 2026, four things happened in four states that suggest the answer is shifting.

Thursday, September 10: a county says no to a pause

Darlington County, South Carolina, had a nine-month moratorium on new solar and wind projects in front of it. A 417-acre project, Stripe Solar, proposed by Palladium Energy near Kellytown, had brought neighbors to council meetings for weeks. On September 10 the council voted 5–3 against the moratorium. The existing rules stand: fifty feet from adjoining property lines, two hundred from the nearest home. "I am comfortable with what we've put in our file for the past two years," Council Member David Coker said. A landowner in the project, W.J. Gilbert, put the other side plainly: "This project isn't just a business decision for us, it's a way to keep our land in our family." (WPDE, 13 September)

A county with a live, contested project in front of it declined to reach for the pause button. Two years ago that would have been the unusual outcome.

The same Thursday: a regulator says yes to 1,137 megawatts

Also on September 10, Georgia Power announced that the Georgia Public Service Commission had approved 1,137 megawatts of new solar power purchase agreements, procured through the company's CARES 2023 and CARES 2025 requests for proposals. Seven projects, seven rural counties: 200 megawatts each in Sumter and Irwin, 194 in Jefferson, 185 in Emanuel, 150 in Warren, 130 in Decatur, 78 in Appling. Commercial operation as early as 2029. The company called the 2023 tranche the largest single solar procurement in its history. (Georgia Power release, 10 September)

Notice what CARES is. It is a subscription program: corporate customers buy a share of the output to meet their own sustainability targets. The demand pulling these seven projects through the commission is not the county's and not, strictly, the utility's. It is the customer's.

Monday, September 14: a county that banned solar starts to walk it back

Bannock County, Idaho, unanimously adopted a six-month moratorium on large-scale solar and wind on October 12, 2023, and on March 26, 2024 turned it into an outright ban on a 2–1 vote. The one dissenter, Jeff Hough, is now the commission's chair. This fall the commission is scheduled to vote on a replacement chapter of its land-use ordinance that would allow solar, wind and nuclear as conditional uses, with an emergency plan, a fire-protection plan, decommissioning bonds and a restoration plan attached to every permit. The county's own project page put public hearings in late July through early September and adoption in September. (Bannock County, Our Future; The Daily Yonder, 14 September)

What changed is worth naming, because it is what changes everywhere. The ban did what bans do. Balanced Rock Power's 300-megawatt Harmon project, with a 1,200 megawatt-hour battery, stalled; its landowner agreements come up for renewal at the end of this year. The developer withdrew a second, federal-land phase in August. Hecate Energy walked away from a 400-acre lease it had signed. Meanwhile two neighboring counties collected property taxes from renewable projects in 2024: $909,000 in Power County and $639,000 in Bingham. "We cannot deny the entire county the opportunity to exercise their property rights," Hough told the Daily Yonder. The commissioner who voted for the ban and lost his seat, John Crowder, still says south Bannock County is "a supermajority of residents that do not want this." Both can be true. The county is about to find out which one governs.

Thursday, September 17: a regulator says no to 440 megawatts

Now Arkansas. Pattern Energy is building Big Island Solar, 440 megawatts on 3,200 acres near Wilson in Mississippi County, broken ground and aimed at 2028. Entergy Arkansas signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for the output on December 18, 2025 and asked the Arkansas Public Service Commission to approve it on January 29. Entergy's own estimate of the cost to a residential customer was about 60 cents a month in year one, falling to 35 cents by year five. The agreement would also have generated renewable energy credits that Google wants for the $4 billion data center it is building in West Memphis, a few miles away, which Entergy has separately contracted to power under a 20-year special rate.

On September 17 the commission denied the application. The order's operative sentence is worth reading in full: "As the commission does not find the cost of the PPA reasonable and prudent, does not find that the PPA will provide savings for retail customers as compared to other generation and power supply options over the term of the agreement, does not find that the PPA is required by the public convenience and necessity, does not find that the PPA is necessary to supplement or replace [Entergy Arkansas's] existing generation resources, and does not find that approval of the PPA is in the public interest, the commission denies [Entergy Arkansas's] application." The commission found Entergy's projected capacity benefits, fuel-stability benefits, renewable-credit values, fuel-diversity benefits and assumed future carbon costs all inadequately supported, and it was uneasy that the project's economics leaned on credit revenue still under negotiation with Google. Entergy's spokesman, Lamor Williams, said the commission "encouraged us to work with our customer to determine whether we can address the commission's concerns" and that the company plans to ask for reconsideration if it can. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 17 September) The order itself sits on the commission's docket; the quotations here are from the Democrat-Gazette's account of it.

Read that list of findings again. Not one of them is about land. Nobody objected to 3,200 acres of panels in the Arkansas Delta. The project was stopped, for now, on a spreadsheet: whether ratepayers who are not Google should carry any of the cost of solar that Google wants.

County ordinances and board resolutions. Municipal and township action sits below this line and is not counted here.

What this means if you're siting solar

The county fight is aging out, and the numbers show it. Counties that adopted moratoria in 2022 and 2023 have had two or three years to write the ordinance they said they needed. Darlington had one and used it. Bannock is writing one. The restriction energy that used to land on solar is now landing on data centers, and the chart above shows how far that has gone. If your project is in a county with a mature solar ordinance, your odds at the planning board are better than they were, and better than the headlines suggest.

The rate case is the new veto, and data-center demand is the reason. Georgia and Arkansas were asked the same question in the same week: should retail customers backstop solar that a large customer wants? Georgia's answer ran through a subscription program where the corporate buyer pays for its share. Arkansas's answer was that a utility PPA whose value depends on unfinished credit negotiations with one data-center customer does not clear a prudence test. If your offtake story involves a hyperscaler, expect the commission, not the county, to be the room where it gets tested, and expect the question to be who pays.

Structure follows the decider. The projects that cleared in Georgia had a buyer for the attributes before they reached the commission. The one that failed in Arkansas did not. That is a contracting sequence, and it is inside your control in a way a county board's mood never was.

What this analysis does not tell you

It does not tell you whether Arkansas's denial holds. Entergy has said it may seek reconsideration, and a revised agreement with a finalized credit arrangement could get a different answer; this piece is about the reasoning, not the final outcome. It does not tell you how any Bannock County commissioner will vote this fall, only that a vote is scheduled and that one of the three who voted in 2024 has said publicly his fears are smaller than they were. It does not tell you what the seven Georgia contracts cost per megawatt-hour or how long they run, because the company's release does not say and the commission's approval documents were not reviewed for this piece. Darlington's vote is reported from one local account; the county's minutes were not reviewed for this piece. And four decisions in one week are a pattern worth watching, not proof of a national turn; the figure above measures county-level rules on the books and does not count township or municipal action, which in several states is where solar restriction now lives.