With Federal Support for Wind and Solar Waning, States Are Trying to Push

This hasn’t been a kind year for developers looking to break ground on renewable energy projects.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he issued a memorandum halting approvals, permits, leases and loans for both offshore and onshore wind projects.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in July with exclusively Republican support, accelerated the phaseout of tax credits promised under the Inflation Reduction Act for wind and solar projects. Subsequent guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department further constrained eligibility rules.

And as bipartisan permitting reform takes center stage in Congress, critics have expressed doubt over whether a technology-neutral bill would still benefit renewable energy development under the current administration.

During a House committee hearing for the SPEED Act on Sept. 10, multiple Democrats expressed concern about their ability to engage in good-faith negotiations with Republicans to accelerate permitting amid the GOP’s attacks on wind and solar. Environmental groups, too, have cautioned that federal efforts to reform permitting could offer little benefit for renewables.

According to a report from the think tank Clean Tomorrow, the battle over renewable development has spread beyond Congress and the Trump administration—with siting policy at the state level now serving as one of the primary battlegrounds for those seeking to curtail the deployment of new clean energy projects.

“It’s clear that states are taking some of their cues from the federal government,” said Nelson Falkenburg, siting policy manager at Clean Tomorrow and one of the report’s authors.

The report’s authors assessed the expected impact of more than 300 state-level siting bills based on factors including their effect on permitting timelines, the predictability and uniformity of siting decisions and whether the bill incentivizes development. Falkenburg said they also used criteria from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, when possible, to determine if a policy is restrictive.

According to Clean Tomorrow’s report, from January through June of this year, 148 siting-related bills were introduced across 47 states, seeking to make siting and permitting more restrictive.

That significantly outnumbers bills that would have a neutral impact (89) and those that would be more permissive (68).

Restrictive policies would hinder the development of renewable energy, while permissive policies would facilitate it. Bills that the authors deemed to have a neutral effect are those whose impact on project deployment was negligible or ambiguous, Falkenburg said.

The pushback against renewables, like recent actions at the federal level, is largely driven by the GOP.

Republican state lawmakers introduced nearly twice as many siting bills as Democrats, with an overwhelming number of those likely to restrict renewable development—nine restrictive bills…