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Good morning and happy Friday,
Today marks a somber anniversary—and 25 years on from the 9/11 attacks, Americans are contending with a challenging economic picture that includes high inflation and rising prices, particularly for fuel: gas hit a record for Labor Day weekend, and diesel hit an all-time high.
The administration says prices will not come down until after November. Grist has the number that makes that a strategy rather than a forecast: "On average, the president's party loses 25 more congressional seats in midterm elections after gas prices spike than in those after gas prices go down, according to a Politico analysis of elections since 1978."
Against this backdrop, The RNC hosted its first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas this week, a two-day event that sought to engage voters and shore up support for GOP candidates ahead of the November elections.
In clean energy news, Q2 was a strong one…SEIA’s Solar Market Insight Report finds that 11.4 GW of solar was installed, including a massive 61% jump in utility-scale projects driven by by the ITC’s July 4 “start construction” deadline; ACP says a 45% year-over-year increase in installations marks “the strongest second quarter and first half on record for the sector” and brings cumulative capacity to 388 GW. While 5 GW of onshore wind was added, ACP estimates at least 44 GW of projects are “stuck” in DOD review.
Read on for more…and if you haven’t already, don’t forget to sign up for the first ever Developer Dispatch Live session, next Wednesday, September 16 at 4:00 Eastern!
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888 Ways to Say No
The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has released the sixth edition of Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States, along with an updated analysis, Rebutting 38 False Claims About Solar, Wind, Electric Vehicles, and Battery Storage. Together, the reports and an interactive opposition map catalog the two headwinds every developer knows by feel: a growing patchwork of state and local restrictions, and the misinformation that fuels them. Here's the tally:
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The fight is local. As of the end of 2025, at least 888 state and local restrictions across 48 states were severe enough to block or significantly curtail renewable energy development. Of those, 865 were local ordinances. Whatever happens in Washington or the statehouse, the decisive vote is still being cast at the county or township level.
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Four in ten contested projects don't survive. Researchers identified at least 567 contested wind, solar, storage, and transmission projects across 48 states, and at least 227 of them, roughly 40%, have been canceled. The report is careful to note that local pushback isn't the sole cause of every cancellation, but the correlation is hard to ignore.
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Wind takes the most fire. At least 416 local ordinances target wind development exclusively, making it the most restricted technology by a wide margin. Solar restrictions are also substantial. Battery storage is the blind spot: existing datasets don't comprehensively capture BESS restrictions, which means the real count is almost certainly higher than what's on the books.
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New local bans are slowing, but the action is moving upstairs. Localities adopted 70 new restrictions in 2025, down from 112 in 2024 and 165 in 2023, a decline the report partly credits to state reforms limiting local authority. The catch: 148 anti-renewables bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2025. Opposition isn't shrinking so much as changing venue.
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The myths have a new edition too. The companion report refreshes rebuttals to 33 previously identified false claims and adds five new ones covering offshore wind, national security, and battery storage. Misinformation is keeping pace with the technology it targets.
⚡️ The Takeaway
Facing headwinds, making headway. The Sabin Center's picture is of a sector navigating significant and evolving siting friction at precisely the moment electricity demand is taking off. For developers, understanding the regulatory map, anticipating local opposition, and getting ahead of misinformation isn't a phase to wait out. It's the job. The encouraging part is that the numbers also show barriers can come down: state streamlining efforts are working where they've been tried, and solar and wind deployment has kept growing through all of it. The projects that get built are the ones that treat the hearing room as the make or break stage gate they have become. |
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Bring Your Own Power
As data centers race to lock down reliable power, natural gas development has surged, in part because on-site generation lets developers sidestep years-long interconnection and transmission delays. But a growing set of companies argue that renewables, paired with storage, existing generation, and other firming resources, are the smarter and faster play. And at least one state now agrees: Massachusetts has become the third state in as many months to put new restrictions on data center development, and now requires new facilities to run on 100% clean energy. Here's the state of play:
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Gas is winning the race to propose, not the race to build. U.S. gas-fired capacity being developed specifically for data centers nearly doubled in the first half of 2026. But large gas plants carry long development timelines, a turbine shortage that stretches to 2030 and beyond, and construction costs that have surged 66%. Existing wind and solar, behind-the-meter generation, and hybrid systems can get electrons flowing sooner and cheaper.
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A new class of developer is selling speed. Companies including Cloverleaf, Soluna, and Daylight Infrastructure are building or marketing configurations that combine renewables with storage, gas, grid connections, or other firming resources. Their pitch to hyperscalers is its time-to-power without a 20-year fossil fuel commitment attached.
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States are putting a thumb on the scale. This week, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order requiring, among other things, that new data centers larger than 25 MW use 100% clean power or pay into a fund. Where Pennsylvania offered a permitting fast lane for "bring your own power," Massachusetts is now specifying what kind of power counts.
⚡️ The Takeaway
"The pendulum is starting, slowly, to swing back." That's Cloverleaf co-founder and COO Brian Janous, who believes the tech giants that walked back their climate commitments will find their appetite for low-carbon solutions returning as the economics assert themselves. Cloverleaf's own playbook "advocates for minimizing gas as much as possible, and introducing other options like grid-enhancing technologies, flexibility at the data center level, and of course renewables and storage." Layer in states writing clean energy and community benefit requirements directly into data center rules, and the picture sharpens: the fastest path to powering the AI build-out may also be the one that creates significant new demand for the projects your team is already trying to permit.
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Out of This World
We’ve written previously about space-based solar—the technology that could beam electricity back to Earth. But space power, which uses solar to power spacecraft, has been a reality for decades. Now the space economy is taking off—and solar is along for the ride.
The global space economy reached an estimated $686 billion in 2025 and could grow to $2 trillion by 2040. That growth is creating a new, high-value market for photovoltaics while pushing the industry to rethink which solar technologies make the most sense beyond Earth.
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Space power relies heavily on III-V solar cells. While valued for their efficiency and radiation resistance, they also face limited production capacity and long lead times. Falling launch costs for alternatives are making lighter-weight, lower-cost crystalline-silicon technologies increasingly viable, particularly for the rapidly growing low-Earth orbit market.
Perovskites are generating excitement, too. With the potential to deliver efficiencies above 30% at substantially lower costs than traditional III-V technologies, perovskites could become an important part of the space-solar mix. The catch: they still need to demonstrate the long-term durability and reliability required for equipment that is extraordinarily expensive to put into orbit.
For clean-tech companies, the opportunity extends beyond manufacturing cells and modules. As space solar evolves, rigorous testing, characterization, and validation will be essential—and government funding is beginning to support that ecosystem. With investment pouring into the space sector and new PV technologies advancing rapidly, solar’s next growth market may quite literally be out of this world.
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Thanks for diving into the Developer Dispatch with us.
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Building American power requires a powerful team. |
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