Original analysis, county-level data, and policy tracking from the team behind the nation's only solar permitting risk index.
In eighteen months the instrument went from a township's 180-day pause to a governor freezing an interconnection queue and a bill in both chambers of Congress. Each rung up the ladder is harder to route around than the one below it.
Nine Massachusetts towns voted to block solar or battery storage. The Attorney General struck down the bylaws, one at a time, under a statute most developers have never read. It is the quietest preemption mechanism in the country and nobody has to pass a law to use it.
Governor Abbott froze roughly 250–300 grid-connection requests representing about 200 GW — more than twice ERCOT's record peak. For the first time the binding constraint on a data center isn't a county board. It's the queue.
Ask where data centers get blocked in America and most people still say Northern Virginia. Georgia, Michigan and the Carolinas now hold the overwhelming majority of restricted counties. Virginia holds one.
Of 507 counties SitePath tracks for battery storage, five are in a restrictive posture. Meanwhile 114 have written a standalone BESS ordinance and 223 reference NFPA 855. Storage stopped being a political question and became a code question — right as the data-center backlash started reaching for it.
When a Virginia county wanted to keep utility-scale solar out, the state legislature took the decision away from it.
SitePath merged five county-cluster research dossiers into the canonical store, covering 14 Massachusetts counties and 26 BESS-related ordinance records. Two things stand out for siting professionals:
O'Brien County, IA (FIPS 19141); county seat Primghar; NW Iowa Technology: Data centers Primary documents (verified 2026-07-15 by SitePath meeting-researcher): signed Resolution 2026-17, May 19 2026 minutes, May 19 2026 agenda.
The second quarter of 2026 was the quarter Virginia stopped being a county-by-county story and became a statewide one.
If you develop utility-scale solar, two dates have been circled on your calendar all year. This week, both of them passed within seventy-two hours of each other — and they push you in opposite directions.
A coordinated wave of local data-center restrictions surfaced in SitePath's news layer this cycle. The trigger headline (GovTech, 2026-06-22, in SitePath's news index) was "Data Center Bans Emerge in 4 More New Jersey Communities." The…
The Woodbury County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to impose a one-year moratorium on data-center development in the unincorporated parts of the county.
Butler County, Ohio — the Cincinnati–Dayton-corridor county of roughly 390,000 people — has approved a moratorium on data centers.
On July 1, Virginia counties lose a power most of them never expected to lose: the power to say no to a battery.
In a single week, three more local governments moved to slam the door on data centers, and Virginia lawmakers — who can't ban them — moved instead to tax them.
Virginia's state budget — normally a fight about schools and Medicaid — has become, this month, a fight about data centers. Two threads are converging on the same deadline:
On June 15, 2026 (6–8 PM), roughly 230 residents packed a data-center listening session at the Best Western Battlefield Inn, Manassas (unincorporated Prince William County), hosted by state Sen. L.
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.
For three years, the most important fact about utility-scale solar in the United States has been that the action is local.
On July 1, 2026, the ground rules for siting utility-scale solar in Virginia change for the first time since the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
On July 1, a handful of Virginia counties that spent the last two years writing utility-scale solar out of their zoning codes will have to start saying yes again — or at least stop saying a flat no.
Every SitePath article is sourced directly from the county-level database — primary government documents, ordinance filings, and board vote records. No secondhand citations. Explore the data yourself on the interactive map.
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