How Often Does Solar Siting Spark Conflict? A National Look at 686 Plants
Coverage of U.S. solar siting tells two stories. One says local opposition is everywhere, stalling the energy transition. The other says NIMBY headlines exaggerate a problem that touches only a small share of projects. Neither has rested on much systematic evidence.
A new paper I led with Jongeun You (Northern Michigan University), Natalie Baillargeon (UMass Amherst and Berkeley Lab), Alice Potapov (UMass Amherst), and Anmol Soni (Louisiana State University), published this week in Energy Research & Social Science, looks at 686 large-scale solar plants that began commercial operation between January 2022 and November 2023. We built a conflict-attention index for each plant from news coverage and social-media posts and paired it with each project’s permitting jurisdiction, capacity, and county demographics. The result is a national-scale empirical baseline for how often solar siting actually generates contestation.
Most plants are quiet. About one in five is contested.
Across the 686 plants in our sample, 56 percent fall into the no- or low-conflict-attention categories. At the other end, 19 percent of plants show high conflict-attention. That is well above the four percent reported in the closest prior study using the same method, and it lands close to what wind-siting research has documented.
State-level permitting is associated with lower conflict.
Energy siting in the United States runs through a patchwork of state and local authority. A handful of states have moved to state-level permitting for renewables. Twelve keep that authority at the local level. Most fall in between, with state and local governments sharing or alternating authority depending on project size or location. Whether to centralize permitting is now an active debate in legislatures and in federal proposals.
Holding capacity and demographics constant, projects permitted at the state level have a 16.9-percentage-point higher probability of falling into the no-conflict category and a 9.4-percentage-point lower probability of falling into the high-conflict category, relative to contingent permitting arrangements. The direction matches what permitting-reform advocates have argued, however, our data cannot adjudicate the mechanism. State authority might reduce conflict by streamlining process and reducing veto points. It might also reduce observable conflict by limiting opportunities for public participation. Both are plausible, and the policy implications are very different.
Project size matters more than local partisanship.
Capacity is the other strong predictor. Moving from a 25th-percentile plant (about two megawatts) to a 75th-percentile plant (about 34 megawatts) roughly halves the chance of avoiding conflict and more than doubles the chance of landing in the high-conflict category.
What turns out not to predict conflict is Democratic vote share. In our data, the partisan composition of the host county shows no statistically significant relationship with any conflict-attention category. Higher household income is modestly associated with less conflict, the opposite of what most wind-siting work finds. These patterns diverge from wind, and they suggest that solar opposition does not map cleanly onto the political and economic templates that have organized energy-siting research for two decades.
What this means for the permitting-reform debate.
Proposals to reshape renewable permitting are appearing at every level of government. State legislatures are debating whether to take siting authority from counties and municipalities. Most of these debates have proceeded on anecdote and case-study evidence.
Our paper offers three things to that debate. It puts a defensible national number on how often solar siting actually attracts contestation. It shows that institutional design, specifically which level of government holds permitting authority, is associated with where conflict shows up. And it documents that the demographic story for solar looks different from the demographic story for wind, which means borrowing wind playbooks for solar policy is risky.
The deeper point is methodological. Conflict over infrastructure is measurable at scale. Doing so requires explicit choices about what counts as conflict and where to look for it. The paper is transparent about its limitations, including that it does not include projects that were cancelled and therefore missing from our dataset. The research represent a one baseline datapoint that future work can refine and challenge.
Katz, J., You, J., Baillargeon, N., Potapov, A., and Soni, A. (2026). “Sunburned? Conflict prevalence in 686 United States solar projects.” Energy Research & Social Science 136: 104747. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104747
Replication data and online appendices: https://osf.io/cjxy2/
