Wind, solar power face a common foe — creative local governments

Elizabeth Weise and Suhail Bhat, USA TODAYSat, February 21, 2026 at 11:01 AM UTC

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Efforts to block wind and solar energy have grown along with advances in the technology, especially since 2021.

USA TODAY’s analysis found by the end of 2025, 24% of counties nationwide had some impediment to new utility-scale wind and solar energy ‒ up from as few as 15% two years earlier.

That calculation of local rules included outright bans, zoning restrictions, land-use rules or political stonewalls. It also required USA TODAY to set a standard about which regulations were restrictive enough to count as an impediment.

1 / 0Trump doesn't like wind energy, so he's put offshore project on holdDominion Energy's coastal Virginia offshore wind turbines are a part of the energy company's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.

Here’s what we found, and how we measured it:

Counties with outright bans

In some cases, counties simply ban large renewable energy projects, as part of a backlash to their growing presence. Any county with a ban was counted in our data.

Pulaski County, Indiana, is one example. In 2021, the Pulaski County board of commissioners banned all commercial wind turbines from the county, citing the need to protect and promote the “health, safety and general welfare of the residents.”

These kinds of bans have proliferated.

Counties with moratoriums

Counties use moratoriums to buy time to write new zoning and regulation for wind and solar farms, sometimes to craft reasonable laws and sometimes to craft bans.

In most cases, a county realizes it doesn’t have adequate zoning regulations in place to properly evaluate a solar or wind project, so officials place a moratorium on any new renewable projects while its zoning board writes one. Once the new rule is adopted, the moratorium is lifted.

That’s what happened in Linn County, Iowa. Two solar projects were approved in 2022 amid a fair amount of dissent.

“So the supervisors pressed the pause button,” said Steve Guyer with the Iowa Environmental Council.

During a year’s moratorium, the county revised rules to ones considered fairly reasonable by everyone. As county supervisor Louis Zumback told a local television station, “There’s really nothing in it that is a poison pill.”

But in other cases, a moratorium is closer to a stand-in for a ban.

“They’ll carefully craft the ordinance so it doesn’t look ridiculously restrictive, but they know it will stop it,” said Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, which supports the rights of landowners and all forms of energy, whether renewable or fossil fuels.

Impediments: Heights and setbacks

If you’re allowed to build a wind turbine, but it has to be so short that it can’t catch the wind, you can’t run a successful power plant. If your county allows turbines but requires they be at least a mile from anyone else’s property line, chances are, there are almost no places they can actually be built.

That’s the scenario in counties across the country.

Green energy might technically be allowed, but building restrictions, especially those focused on wind power, make it so difficult that experts and industry representatives agree there’s no practical, cost-effective way to build.

USA TODAY’s analysis considers a turbine height limit of 500 feet or less to be a significant impediment, based on the consensus of experts including energy attorneys and university academics who study renewable energy.

Model zoning ordinances in multiple states require a turbine to be set back from the property line, typically measured according to the height of the turbine, so a setback of 1.1- to 1.5-times its height would require the structure to be built 550- to 750-feet from the property line. That way even if a turbine should fall over (an exceedingly rare occurrence), it would not touch neighbors’ property.

In 2014, Connecticut passed a law that required setbacks of at least 2.5 times a turbine’s height, or about 1,250 feet.

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No new wind projects have been built in the state since.

Impediments: Noise limits

In the 2010s, a common concern about wind turbines was that the swishing noise was annoying or even dangerous to residents’ health.

The health effects have been discounted and today turbines are quiet enough with reasonable setbacks that sound is not considered a major issue.

When Indiana enacted voluntary model renewable energy zoning regulations, it set a maximum allowable sound limit of 50 decibels, about the sound of a household refrigerator.

But other places set tougher noise limits. Vermont’s 39-decibel limit is somewhere between the sound of a library and a quiet rural area, according to Purdue University.USA TODAY’s analysis considers sound limits below 50 decibels to be impediments to wind power.

Wind turbines are pictured on a wind farm in Minco, Okla., on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025.

“The decision-makers may say a 30-decibel sound limit sounds like a great thing, but that’s quieter than the wind itself, so you’re effectively placing a ban on this form of energy without having to set a ban,” said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A block to solar: Agriculture rule

An increasingly common way to curtail solar projects is to set limits on the amount of agricultural land that can be used for them in a county. Farmland is a popular place to build solar because it’s generally flat and open. Not surprisingly, places where crops are grown tend to have good sunlight.

Opponents argue that too much farmland being turned into solar farms will affect the country’s ability to feed itself at the national level and destroy the rural nature of life at the county level. Yet the U.S. currently pays farmers nationwide to keep millions of acres out of production.

USA TODAY’s analysis found that in at least nine states, agricultural limits have been used to create impediments to solar power.

How we did this report

USA TODAY’s analysis began in 2022 with data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now renamed National Laboratory of the Rockies, and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which track laws governing solar and wind energy.

We built on that with more than three year’s worth of research, tracking restrictions on wind and solar using federal data, local government filings and media reports from across the country.

Wind turbines are shown in Palm Springs, California, U.S., October 12, 2024.

We used this to create a database of rules and zoning restrictions for counties, plus some municipalities. We also indexed those by the date they began, stretching from the first we found, in 1996, through the end of 2025.

After interviews with more than 45 experts, we set standards for what kinds of rules and conditions constituted blocks to new, utility-scale (over 5 megawatts) wind and solar projects. These fell into four categories: outright bans, moratoriums, significant impediments and other conditions that made projects difficult to permit.

For each state, we created an overview of current and past state law on the placement and regulation of wind and solar power, and a list of counties that currently have blocks. We ran each state’s overview by at least two experts familiar with the state to confirm our findings. These included regional and state academics, regulators, renewable energy developers and groups supporting wind and/or solar power.

The overall methodology and conclusions were vetted by a panel that included state and national experts from the industry and academia. They were:

Alan Anderson, chair of the energy practice at Polsinelli law firm, Kansas City, Missouri.

Matt Eisenson, at the time a senior fellow at the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He wrote their 2025 paper, "Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States."

Tamara Ogle, a member of the land use team at Purdue University Extension, who inventoried Indiana’s renewable energy ordinances in 2022.

By the end of 2025, we had identified 755 counties in the United States in which it is now difficult or impossible to build a new, utility-scale wind or solar farm. This inventory, and the date each block began, allowed us to see the increases over time.

USA TODAY's Ignacio Calderon contributed data analysis.

Ramon Padilla, Karina Zaiets, Stephen J. Beard, Carlie Procell, Veronica Bravo, Josh Susong, Suhail Bhat, Javier Zarracina and Shawn J. Sullivan contributed graphics and data visualizations.

This story was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: States, counties limit wind and solar using many creative tactics.

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