Section
Preemption, statute, attorney-general review and litigation: the rules that override a county board.
Market Trend · 26 September 2026
In one September week, three towns in three states wrote data centers out of every zoning district, permanently. None of them had a project in front of them. The one town that did, in upstate New York, voted against pausing anything.
Market Trend · 26 September 2026
In one September week a county council refused to pause solar, a county that banned it moved to undo the ban, one state regulator approved 1,137 megawatts and another killed 440 megawatts over price.
Market Trend · 25 September 2026
On July 14 the town of Newcomb banned battery storage nobody had proposed. Nine weeks later, the state signed $3.7 billion in contracts for it. Both happened in New York. Only one tells you where the industry is actually headed.
Field Note · 22 September 2026
Lexington's council spent 14 months writing a solar ordinance with a hard 1% land cap and mandatory agrivoltaics — then watched the mayor veto it anyway.
Market Trend · 18 September 2026
New Hampshire has spent two years watching county boards and township meetings pass data-center moratoria one at a time.
Market Trend · 11 September 2026
In the same week a rural California county voted to stop every data center cold, the state legislature sent Governor Newsom four bills that do the opposite: let the projects come, but make Big Tech, not the ratepayer next door, cover the…
Market Trend · 8 September 2026
On August 26 the White House declared a national emergency over the equipment inside the grid — inverters, transformers, batteries. The rules that define the ban won't exist until December. The manufacturers aren't waiting for them.
Market Trend · 1 September 2026
State preemption of local solar siting is arriving as a typology, not a template — Virginia, Illinois, Maryland and Minnesota each take the county veto back a different way, and the legal design decides how much recourse a developer gains.
Market Trend · 21 August 2026
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.
Market Trend · 21 August 2026
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.
Market Trend · 18 August 2026
Five counties in the country hold a restrictive posture on battery storage. Far more have written a standalone BESS ordinance, and more still point their ordinance at NFPA 855.
Weekly Analysis · 21 July 2026
When a Virginia county wanted to keep utility-scale solar out, the state legislature took the decision away from it.
Field Note · 21 July 2026
SitePath merged several county-cluster research dossiers into the canonical store, covering a dozen or more Massachusetts counties and the BESS-related ordinance records behind them. Two things stand out for siting professionals.
Weekly Analysis · 4 July 2026
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.
Weekly Analysis · 22 June 2026
On July 1, Virginia counties lose a power most of them never expected to lose: the power to say no to a battery.
Field Note · 22 June 2026
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.
Field Note · 21 June 2026
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.
Weekly Analysis · 15 June 2026
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.
Policy Brief · 14 June 2026
For three years, the most important fact about utility-scale solar in the United States has been that the action is local.
Weekly Analysis · 8 June 2026
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.
Weekly Analysis · 4 June 2026
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.
County ordinances and board resolutions. Municipal and township action sits below this line and is not counted here.
This section, and the rest of The Scoop, weekly: who voted, what they passed, and the document it came from. Tick only the beats you want.
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What The Scoop is. A weekly read on where energy and data-center projects are getting waved through, slowed down, or stopped cold — written from the ordinances, board votes, dockets and filings themselves. Every figure traces to a primary document. If a value cannot be verified against one, it does not run.
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