I spent yesterday driving over to Michigan’s west side to attend an open house for a pending solar farm, being developed in White River Township, north end of Muskegon County.
I’ve been in touch with farmers and landowners in the area, who are on the verge of a win after 6 years or so of pushback and controversy over the project.
Nutshell: Governor Whitmer and Democrats in the legislature pushed through siting reform that gives farmers and developers a pathway to end-run around locally imposed, and illegal, restrictions on clean energy development.
The developer in this case, Geronimo Energy will very likely be taking that pathway thru the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) in coming weeks – so barring anything unforeseen, this project will get done.
Around the country, the forecast is cloudy.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects.
One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants. These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties.
In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
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In the Very Bad, Horrible, No Good Bill recently passed by congress, tax incentives for solar and wind projects were radically sundowned and will be terminated on a timeline that most current projects can’t meet.
Nevertheless, practical realities dictate that many projects will go forward, as they remain not only the least cost option, but in fact, the only option in light of supply chain limitations on gas turbines, and the historically slow process of developing nuclear power.
The gold standard for determining competitiveness of electric generation technologies has long been the Levelized Cost of Energy tables released annually by the international Consulting firm Lazard, which released a new report in June, just before the Horrible Bill was passed.
Bottom line, renewables still beating fossil, but moreover, a huge majority of projects that are in the “queue” for Transmission are renewable – and these are signed contracts that people have to wait for over several years, and would not be easily undone by legislation.
As I have noted many times on these pages, an order for gas turbines today would mean waiting for 5 to 7 years to take delivery. Nuclear would be longer, even under best possible assumptions.
Key Findings from the 2025 LCOE+ Report
- Renewables Remain Competitive: Unsubsidized Wind & Solar Lowest Cost Generation Sources for Last 10 YearsDespite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies). As such, renewable energy will continue to play a key role in the buildout of new power generation in the U.S. as the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy generation.
- Increased Cost of Gas-Fired Generation: Gas-Fired Generation Reaches 10-Year High LCOE While persistent low gas prices, high energy demand and increasing renewable LCOEs have resulted in the continued cost competitiveness of operating existing baseload gas generation, the cost of building a new combined cycle gas turbine has reached a 10-year high. Turbine shortages, rising costs and long delivery times are expected to continue driving steep LCOE increases for gas technologies in the near term—however, productivity enhancements and supply chain normalization could offset such increases over the longer term.
Developers have told me that those projects planned by big players like utilities or a few others will remain on track. Smaller scale projects by less well capitalized developers will, and are, falling by the wayside.
The administration is still playing around with new ideas to hobble clean energy, and they may yet succeed in creating roadblocks – but at least in Michigan, clean energy has been given the tools to successfully override some of the most daunting obstacles.
As for last night’s meeting, no one had to evacuate – but I did get called “a jerk” by one of the overheated locals (someone’s been talking to my wife, apparently) .
Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have all passed similar legislation to break the clean energy logjam.
A number of projects are now entering the MPSC pipeline, and are being closely watched to see how that process plays out.
UPDATE:
One last thing – the restrictions that some townships have placed on clean energy are very clearly illegal, according to the governing legislation, in this case, the Michigan Zoning and enabling act. I spoke to some pretty knowledgeable folks, and of course, read the law.