Elizabeth Weise

This isn't what you stick on your roof.

These are solar farms that can power

tens and thousands of houses at a time.

And what we found when we looked at 2023, at that point, 15% of US counties made it difficult or impossible to build new wind or solar.

When we redid those numbers for 2024 and 2025, we are now up to 24%, almost 25% of US counties where you can either not build new wind or solar or

There are so many hurdles to building it that it becomes financially, it's a disincentive to developers.

It's a process that can take years.

I was just updating the California numbers, and there are counties in California that have been trying to build wind or solar for 12, 13, 18 years, and reasonably so.

There are a lot of hurdles.

You have to get the leases from the farmers, and then you have to go to the county commission, and often the county planning commission.

You have to get sign-off from various federal and state oversight institutions.

You have to make sure that there is no...

significant environmental impact.

I mean, it is a long slog.

What we're seeing is that counties are putting in place requirements that make it

longer and maybe even impossible.

I mean, there's a county in Michigan that requires their local county health department to sign off on whether a new wind project is healthy for the people in the community.

And the people at the health department are like, that is not our expertise.

How can we do this?

So people are coming up with new ways for counties to