Ryan Wiser's data says solar is siting in the same counties that used to take the coal plant

Obion County, Tennessee took a 100 MW solar farm with no organized opposition anywhere in the project record. Sumter County, South Carolina has now denied three utility-scale solar projects in a row, and its county council has discussed a moratorium to head off a fourth attempt. Same technology. Same flat, cheap, rural farmland profile. The same site-selection math found both counties, because that math is doing exactly what a Berkeley Lab research team said it does.

Ryan Wiser is a senior scientist in the Electricity Markets & Policy group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and in 2022 he and four colleagues (Eric O'Shaughnessy was lead author) published "Drivers and energy justice implications of renewable energy project siting in the United States." The finding that matters for anyone underwriting a solar pipeline is simple to state: wind and solar projects go where the resource is strong and the land is open, and that logic channels them into sparsely populated rural areas and, to a lesser extent, into areas with lower incomes. Which is the same siting logic fossil generation followed for a hundred years. The counties that took the coal plant and the gas peaker are, statistically, the counties now being asked to take the panels.

Read as policy, that is an energy-justice finding about who carries the burden of the build-out. Read as diligence, it is something more immediately useful. Your pipeline is going to keep delivering you into communities with long memories about energy infrastructure and what it did or did not do for them, and what happens at the hearing depends on whether your project answers the question those memories ask. The question is always some version of who benefits.

Obion County answered the benefits question before anyone asked it

Origis Energy announced the 100 MW Skyhawk Solar project in Obion County, rural West Tennessee, in 2020, and the structure of the deal did the community work up front. Land came through voluntary lease agreements with agricultural landowners. No eminent domain. The tax piece ran through a PILOT structure coordinated with County Mayor Benny McGuire's office, with revenue flowing to Obion County schools and fire services, and the offtake ran through TVA Green Invest, with the output allocated to Google's data centers in Clarksville, Tennessee and Hollywood, Alabama. So the benefits ledger was legible from day one: Google buys the power, and the county keeps the lease payments and the PILOT revenue.

The file puts numbers on it. Roughly $23 million in construction-period local economic impact after the July 2022 groundbreaking, roughly $31 million in projected lifetime local benefits, commercial operation in April 2023, on schedule. RealClear's screen scored it 75/100 before construction. Our case file records no organized opposition surfacing at all, and that is not a Tennessee-wide condition; Franklin and Lincoln counties have both seen solar opposition emerge. It was an Obion County outcome, produced by an Obion County deal structure.

Sumter County had already voted twice, and the record said so

Sumter County's flat terrain, strong sun hours, and available farmland drew multiple developers starting in 2021 and 2022. The first Special Exception application was denied unanimously in 2023. The opposition then did the thing that changes everything: it incorporated. Sumter Citizens Against Industrial Solar formalized in late 2023, built email lists, recruited county landowners, and established relationships with Board of Zoning Appeals members and county council members. A second application was denied in 2024. Two for two, sitting in the public BZA archives as case numbers 23-017 and 24-031.

Then, in early 2025, Treaty Oak Clean Energy, a Texas-based developer, filed for a 170 MW project on roughly 1,700 acres near Black River Road, styled the White Palmetto Solar Farm, without appearing to have engaged community stakeholders before filing. The spring hearings drew hundreds of opponents. Their case was built on permanence: conversion of prime South Carolina farmland, decommissioning financial assurance no applicant had yet satisfied, and the precedent effect on the county's agricultural identity. Treaty Oak answered with the same economic-benefits pitch that had already lost twice, and it failed to move the board a third time. In May 2025 the BZA denied unanimously, and Treaty Oak is now appealing to the South Carolina Public Service Commission, a path our case file describes as taking 2 to 4 years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and requiring a demonstration of public need that commercial solar has historically struggled to meet.

Multigenerational farming families testified with personal, place-rooted opposition. Against that testimony, a Texas developer's benefits slide persuaded nobody, and the file says so plainly.

What Wiser's map means at the hearing

Put the framework and the two files together and the pattern stops looking like a paradox. Wiser's data says the industry's siting engine will keep landing projects in rural counties with modest incomes, because that is where the resource and the open land are; the engine cannot do otherwise. But those counties are not blank slates. They are the places where the last century of energy siting actually happened, and every new project gets evaluated against the bargains that came before it. Obion's deal put the benefits where the county could see them. Treaty Oak asked Sumter to accept permanent land conversion while offering a benefits case two prior boards had already weighed and rejected.

The two prior denials were the forecast.

My bet is that visible benefit structure at filing predicts the vote better than resource quality, project size, or anything else in the application, and the way to falsify me is cheap: find a county that unanimously denied two solar projects and then approved a third on an unchanged pitch. Sumter is running that test right now. I expect the county to adopt its moratorium before the Public Service Commission rules, and if Treaty Oak's appeal clears the public-need bar inside two years, I will have been wrong about much more than the timing.

This analysis is a source-cited research summary drawn from public records and industry reporting, not legal advice. It can contain errors and should be verified independently before any investment decision.