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A proposed Meta-backed solar project in a small, unincorporated town is gearing up to be a big problem for renewables in the state.
It started as a brawl between Meta and a small Alabama town over a solar farm. Now it’s become a push to ban utility-scale solar across much of the state.
Stockton, Alabama, is a teeny, unincorporated town of fewer than 1,000 people. It’s a conservative community in Baldwin County, south of the state capital of Montgomery, where homeowners are very concerned about nature conservation, as it is surrounded by undeveloped bucolic Gulf Coast forest and swampland. And right now, Stockton residents are hopping mad over a giant solar farm that would power a data center in Montgomery owned by tech giant Meta Platforms Inc.
Meta is working with developer Silicon Ranch to construct a huge solar farm to help power an expansive data center campus in the capital. The Alabama Public Service Commission approved the project last winter through a process opponents say was rushed. Whether the surprise of the solar farm was intentional or not, the approval sent shockwaves across the region. Worse for disgruntled renewables opponents, under state law, county officials say they aren’t allowed to regulate land use within unincorporated and unzoned areas, leaving local elected bodies with little recourse.
That left state-wide elected bodies to muster a response. The Meta-Silicon Ranch project in Stockton also frustrated some Republicans in the state legislature, giving rise to SB 354, a bill that would ban new utility-scale solar projects across most of Alabama for at least a year. The bill was reported out of the state senate’s transportation and energy committee on March 11 with one exception added allowing the Tennessee Valley Authority to add new solar capacity. But anywhere else? This bill would stop big solar farms in their tracks. If enacted, the ban would take immediate effect.
We’ve seen a lot of local bans like these in towns and counties. We’ve also seen states restrict wind farms. But as far as I know, this would be the first time a state issued a blanket ban on solar projects.
SB 354’s author is State Senator Greg Albritton, who represents Stockton. At the bill’s hearing earlier this week, he compared his legislation to the ways towns, cities, and counties have in recent years paused solar and wind projects to develop hypothetical regulations.
“What I’ve done with this bill — what I’m doing here, at this point — is I’m asking we pass this, a moratorium on construction of any new ones until we can get answers on any policies and procedures,” Albritton told the committee.
The odds of the bill’s final passage and enactment have yet to come into focus, and Governor Kay Ivey previously supported the Meta data center campus. But there’s also clear precedent in Alabama for taking an action like this. In 2013, Alabama temporarily banned wind energy projects in response to a conflict over an Apex Clean Energy proposal near Stockton in Baldwin County. The state then explicitly gave counties like Baldwin the power to reject turbines.
If Alabama can ban wind for a while, why wouldn’t it try the same with solar?
“There was a wind farm nobody wanted. It’s like the same scenario on repeat,” Meagan Fowler, president of opposition group Friends of the Tensaw River, told Gulf Coast radio show Mobile Mornings in an episode published March 11. Fowler said she hopes the bill can advance while legislators also work in language explicitly granting the county power to regulate solar farms. “Our hope is that this regulation might make Silicon Ranch want to go somewhere else because that’s what happened with the wind turbine thing.”
John Dodd, policy director for the pro-renewables organization Energy Alabama, told me a House companion bill to the one-year ban was introduced yesterday, but the group’s aim is to “effectively kill it,” he said, or try to get legislators to narrow the focus of the ban just to Stockton and Baldwin County.
“SB 354 would impose a blanket, statewide prohibition on new large-scale solar facilities — something that isn’t defined — for an entire year. That’s not targeted oversight. That’s effectively hitting the kill switch on an entire industry overnight,” Dodd told me in a statement. “In a state that prides itself on being pro-business and welcoming to investment, that sends a troubling signal.”
The Stockton solar farm is planned to begin full construction in 2027, and the process will take between a year and 18 months, according to Silicon Ranch’s recent statements to local media. The project still requires a building permit from Baldwin County and a water permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Silicon Ranch could not provide comments by publication time, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Jael Holzman
Jael is a senior reporter at Heatmap. Previously, she was an energy and climate policy reporter for Axios and covered energy transition resources for E&E News. She lives in Washington, D.C.
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Plus manufacturing news in advanced battery materials and a glint of light for clean steel.
This week’s Funding Friday comes with good news for a few hard-hit sectors. First up, the international sustainable infrastructure giant Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised a significant first close of its latest credit fund, highlighting institutional confidence in the maturing clean energy sector despite challenging political sentiments stateside.
Furthermore, clean iron startup Electra bolstered its capital base with debt financing from J.P. Morgan, another promising sign of life for low-carbon materials despite federal incentive rollbacks, grant cuts, and industry layoffs. Meanwhile, a new platform that helps homeowners cut upfront costs for clean energy upgrades also secured funding, even as the Trump administration exhibits its disdain for residential electrification initiatives. Finally, there’s also activity in silicon batteries and transformers, two areas gaining momentum as of late.
Building on the success of its first energy transition credit fund, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised nearly $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion) at the first close of its second credit fund, which will support renewable energy projects and companies driving the energy transition. While CIP is targeting a total of $2.29 billion (€2 billion) for the final close, this first tranche of capital exceeds the more than $1.1 billion (€1 billion) it raised for its first fund, which is now fully invested.
With roughly $40 billion in assets under management, CIP ranks among the largest climate and energy infrastructure investors globally. By comparison, sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital manages “only” about $9 billion in assets — though its recent $1 billion raise for its own dedicated credit strategy illustrates both the growing role of debt financing for clean energy projects and the increasing confidence that institutional investors have in the risk profile of low-carbon assets.
CIF has already begun allocating capital from this latest fund, refinancing a 450-megawatt portfolio of Dutch solar and battery storage assets, as it targets investments across Europe, North America, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. While it doesn’t disclose its limited partners, they span an array of typical LP categories, from sovereign wealth funds to insurance companies and pension funds, the firm says. CIF also contributed an undisclosed amount to the fund itself, signaling internal confidence in its strategy despite the headwinds facing renewables — particularly in the U.S.
Building on its momentum from a big 2025, the clean iron startup Electra has announced a $30 million venture debt facility from J.P. Morgan. This lending agreement allows Electra to draw funds in tranches as it plans to build out its first commercial iron ore refining plant, expected to come online by the end of the decade. The mix of debt capital from a major institutional lender combined with last year’s $186 million Series B round — backed by prominent climate tech investors alongside iron ore mining companies and steel producers — is a sign the startup could be ready for a big infrastructure buildout.
Iron is the base metal for steel, and its energy-intensive refining process is the fundamental driver of steel-related emissions, which account for about 7% of the global total. Melting and purifying iron ore requires extremely high temperatures — around 1,600 degrees Celsius — traditionally achieved by burning coke derived from coal in blast furnaces. Electra’s tech, however, can refine iron at just 60 degrees Celsius by dissolving the ore in an acidic solution to separate it from impurities and then zapping that solution with electricity to deposit pure iron onto metal sheets.
While competitors’ systems typically require continuously high temperatures, Electra’s low-temperature approach pairs well with renewables, as it’s simple to start and stop the process in sync with wind and solar output. The startup has secured binding purchase orders from industry leaders such as Nucor and Toyota Tsusho, as well as an agreement with Meta to sell the tech giant the Environmental Attribute Credits associated with its reduced emissions.
The median American household has about $8,000 in savings, so expecting people to shell out thousands upfront for an energy-efficient home upgrade like a heat pump is a tough sell. That’s the problem electrification startup Coral aims to address with its platform that helps installers navigate the patchwork of electrification incentives — from state rebate programs to utility-run initiatives — and apply them directly at the point of sale, taking thousands off the upfront cost. So far, the platform has helped installers sell nearly 4,000 heat pumps across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, cutting upfront costs by 30%. This week the company announced a $7.5 million seed round to help expand its platform nationwide.
Homeowners often wait months to receive rebates from incentive programs in the mail — and that’s after they’ve spent untold hours parsing eligibility requirements and filling out paperwork. Coral verifies eligibility and manages the application process on customers’ behalf. And while it started with heat pumps, it now aims to expand both geographically and across other electrification opportunities, including water heaters, home batteries, and electric vehicle chargers.
The Trump administration phased out federal incentives for residential energy efficiency and electrification upgrades a full seven years early via last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but continued venture funding for startups like Coral and heat pump adoption platform Zero Homes, which I covered a few weeks ago, underscores ongoing demand for home energy upgrades.
This latest funding round, led by ResilienceVC, also included strategic participation from Watsco Ventures, the VC arm of North America’s largest HVAC distributor, showing that corporates remain committed to the sector, as well.
The advanced battery materials company Group14 makes a silicon-carbon composite anode for batteries that, it says, can charge from 0% to 100% in just 90 seconds. Now the startup has officially started production of its proprietary formula at a facility in South Korea, which is expected to ramp up to 2,000 metric tons of material annually — about 10 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity. Depending on what its customers — which include batterymakers Molicel and Sionic Energy —are optimizing for, Group14 says they can build cells that are 43% more energy dense or charge 50 times faster than traditional lithium-ion chemistries.
While standard batteries typically have graphite anodes, silicon could theoretically, at least, be a superior choice. But pure silicon anodes are prone to swelling, causing mechanical stress and destabilizing the battery. Group14 says it has solved this challenge by building a nanocarbon scaffold to contain the silicon and prevent it from expanding as the battery charges and discharges.
Group14’s battery materials can already be found in consumer-focused electronics such as certain Android smartphones, cargo drones, and yet-to-be commercialized air taxis. CEO Rick Luebbe told TechCrunch that if the startup can scale into the EV market, that could enable cars to, say, wirelessly recharge while they’re at a stoplight, “You’d never think about charging ever again,” Luebbe said.
In a small but telling seed round, the solid state transformer company Hyperscale Power has raised $5.7 million to build a prototype that it says will be even more compact than products from a growing field of competitors. The raise follows two much larger financing rounds in the solid state transformer space that I covered recently — $140 million for Heron Power and $60 million for DG Matrix — highlighting rising demand for smarter, smaller, and more efficient transformers as data centers push to maximize their usable space and electricity load growth strains conventional grid infrastructure.
The company expects data centers to be a core market As Hyperscale’s co-founder Daniel Rothmund said in a release, “Server racks are becoming significantly denser, and our technology provides the ideal solution.”
In districts across the country — from North Carolina to Texas to Indiana — voters and candidates are making the computing boom a central issue.
Data centers are already dominating this year’s elections. As a campaign issue, they’re primed to disrupt races across the country, big and small, right and left.
Candidates at every point of the political spectrum are being buried with questions about data centers and artificial intelligence. Interest groups are making data center support a deciding factor in whether they support a given candidate, alongside other boogeymen such as the “green new deal,” Big Tech billionaires, and Israel. In Florida and Ohio, underdog Republican candidates for governor are railing against data centers as they try to win their party’s nomination over establishment-backed candidates. In Michigan, a former GOP statehouse speaker is making the issue his biggest talking point in a bid for the governor’s mansion.
Perhaps my favorite race to watch right now is in Texas, where farmer Clayton Tucker, the Democratic nominee to flip the state’s agriculture commissioner seat, is running against the state’s data center growth. I spoke with Tucker, whose campaign focuses on how the authorities of the commission could be leveraged against data center developers. One of those ideas is to conduct “impact studies” on data centers, water, and cropland.
“To me this is an AI bubble, 2008-style. They’re not going to be used for anything important or that’s going to help society or our country,” Tucker told me. He explained how his campaign first focused on a bigger topic – monopolies like in the beef industry – before he ultimately pivoted to data center frustrations, which he groups together with other complaints farmers have about Big Business.
“It’s about being laser focused on who is the true problem, who our true enemies are: the monopolies, the tech bros, and the people who are just trying to rig everything and who are forcing these data centers down our throats.”
I chronicled how the 2025 elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia were stuffed with data center-coded rhetoric about rising electricity bills and energy costs and protecting the environment from new AI-backed industrial development. There was an unmistakable populist tinge to any and all arguments against data centers on the campaign trail back then, for sure. But let’s be honest: We were still in the infancy of the boom in data center development. The outcry over these projects has exploded even since November.
Primary voters last week in Stokes County, North Carolina ousted two county commissioners – Rick Morris and Brad Chandler – who’d voted days earlier to approve a zoning request for Project Delta, a large data center proposed by developer Engineered Land Solutions. Situated in the rural, mostly undeveloped farming community of Walnut Cove, the Project Delta proposal has become controversial over its close proximity to a river and local worries about noise, among other grievances. Nearby residents and environmental advocates filed a lawsuit yesterday against its construction.
It’s unclear whether what happened in Stokes County will matter in North Carolina come the general election this fall, or whether the issue will have the same saliency in higher-level races. The reliably red county is represented in Congress by Virginia Foxx, one of the GOP’s staunchest conservatives. The Cook Political Report rates Foxx’s congressional district a “Solid R” because Donald Trump won the presidential vote there last time by 18 points. Elsewhere in North Carolina, two congressional candidates backed by AI companies – Representative Valerie Foushee and Republican candidate Laurie Buckout – won their primary races over candidates more vocally critical of local data center projects.
In other places, though, it’s easy to see how data center fights could have a decisive impact, even at the congressional level.
Take Indiana’s 1st Congressional District, a mixture of suburban and rural communities bordering Michigan and Illinois. The 1st has seen some of the worst spikes in electricity bill costs of anywhere in the Midwest, according to data compiled by MIT researchers and Heatmap Pro. The 1st is represented by Frank Mrvan, a moderate Democrat who has previously championed the use of federal funds to support data center growth, but is now criticizing the potential ramifications for energy and farmland. Mrvan is going up against Barb Regnitz, a Republican county commissioner running a self-funded campaign who has said she would vote against any data center proposal; data center developer QTS recently withdrew plans for a large data center in the county, though it’s unclear what role if any Regnitz played in that story. The Cook Political Report finds it is “likely” that Mrvan keeps his seat, but it also also says that the seat has “all of the characteristics of a district that should be moving in Republicans’ direction.”
Other congressional races are being dominated by data centers in Indiana, which is one of the top states for data center development. Indianapolis – a hotbed for data center strife – is represented by Andre Carson, who is facing his most contested primary election since winning his seat in 2008. One of his primary opponents, Destiny Wells, is railing against data centers in the district and pledging not to take utility industry money. Another primary candidate, George Hornedo, is getting flack from the grassroots left for not fighting hard enough against data centers.
Whether data centers will decide any statewide primary elections is a bigger question. Take the GOP gubernatorial primaries in Florida and Ohio, each of which features a Republican hardliner — James Fishback and Casey Putsch, respectively — campaigning loudly against data centers; both candidates appear to be longshots at the moment. In Texas, the GOP’s nomination for agriculture commission went to Governor Greg Abbott’s preferred candidate instead of an incumbent calling to restrict data centers on farmland.
When it comes to Tucker’s race for agriculture commissioner, which won’t be decided until November, he’s not “counting his chickens before they hatch.”
“I don’t believe in that as a farmer,” he said. “I get too superstitious to be doing that.”
A county commissioner ousted over batteries, plus more of the week’s biggest renewables and data center fights.
Menard County, Texas – An anti-battery campaign just ousted a member of a county commission who would have had to consider storage infrastructure on his own property.
Wake County, North Carolina – There mere idea of impending restrictions killed a data center here this week.
Frederick County, Maryland – This agriculture-dense county seems to be gearing up for a big ol’ data center referendum.
Montcalm County, Michigan – Pour one out for the Montcalm wind farm.
Dunn County, North Dakota – At least one company is vying to start work on a fresh wind farm proposal: NextEra.
Hartford County, Connecticut – The state of Connecticut’s siting council approved expanding a DESRI Holdings-backed solar farm in the rural town of East Windsor.
