Alabama Clean Energy Guide

Alabama looks clean on paper and isn't built that way. Roughly 39-40% of the state's electricity is carbon-free, but almost all of it comes from five nuclear reactors and a century-old fleet of hydro dams — not from new wind or solar. Utility-scale solar is under 1% of generation, wind is effectively zero, and the state has no renewable portfolio standard. The real story here isn't a renewables boom; it's the collision between fast-arriving data-center load and rural landowners who nearly banned solar farms outright in 2026.

A Carbon-Free Grid That Owes Nothing to the Energy Transition

Alabama is a large power producer — 142,921,216 MWh of net generation in 2024, sixth nationally, with 30,996 MW of net summer capacity — and a net exporter. Its carbon-free share, around 39-40%, would look enviable next to plenty of "green" states. But the composition tells the real story. Nuclear supplies roughly 30% of generation from five reactors at Browns Ferry and Farley. Legacy hydropower adds about 6%. Biomass contributes a couple of percent, and utility-scale solar rounds out the clean slice at under 1%. Natural gas leads the whole mix at 44-46% and has since 2014; coal has fallen to the mid-teens.

In other words, Alabama's low-carbon profile is a mid-century engineering inheritance — TVA dams and Southern Company reactors — not a product of the wind-and-solar buildout reshaping Texas, the Midwest, or the desert Southwest. On the renewables that define the modern transition, Alabama is near the back of the pack: hydro is about two-thirds of its renewable generation, biomass a quarter, and solar roughly a tenth. Wind is a rounding error at zero utility-scale megawatts.

Policy: No RPS, No Mandate, No Net Metering — Procurement by Permission

Alabama is one of the few states with neither a renewable portfolio standard nor even a voluntary renewable target. There is no state solar tax credit and no RPS-driven incentive stack; the federal Investment Tax Credit is doing essentially all the policy lifting, and even that is now on the clock as the OBBBA tax-credit phaseouts tighten the window for new solar to lock in full-value credits. What growth exists happens because a regulated utility decides it wants the megawatts, not because the state requires them.

The most consequential recent regulatory move wasn't a law at all. In June 2023 the Alabama PSC expanded Alabama Power's Renewable Generation Certificate procurement authorization to 2,400 MW, up from 500 MW in 2015 — a nearly fivefold headroom increase that lets the utility contract utility-scale renewables to serve large customers without any legislative mandate. Alabama Power layers voluntary green-tariff products on top: "Greener State" RECs and a Renewable Subscription Program that lets big buyers (think Meta) claim the output of specific solar farms.

On the distributed side, the picture is bleak. Alabama has no statewide mandatory net metering. Alabama Power credits excess generation at avoided-cost-level rates under its Rate PAE while charging customers full retail for imports, and it has historically imposed a fixed monthly charge on solar and back-up customers. TVA credits excess at avoided cost through its Green Connect program. The predictable result: Alabama has the least small-scale rooftop solar of any state in the country.

The 2025 legislature did pass an energy package — the "Powering Growth" / "all-of-the-above" act Gov. Kay Ivey signed in May 2025, which streamlines permitting for energy infrastructure, funds site development, and creates the Alabama Energy Infrastructure Bank. But it is deliberately technology-neutral across gas, nuclear, and renewables — it is a load-growth bill, not a clean-energy bill.

Major Projects: A Short List, Anchored in the North

Alabama's utility-scale solar fleet is small enough to name project by project — a telling contrast with states measuring their pipeline in the gigawatts.

• Muscle Shoals Solar (Colbert County): 227 MWac, roughly 670,000 panels, operating since September 2021 under a long-term PPA with TVA. Owned by Orsted (acquired from Longroad Energy in 2020), it is the state's flagship and largest operating solar farm, and it sits in TVA territory in the north — outside PSC jurisdiction.
• AL Solar A (Chambers County, near LaFayette): 72 MW, operating since early 2018 at a cost of about $140M. Built by Swinerton Renewable Energy, with most of its output and RECs contracted to Walmart. It was Alabama's largest solar farm at the time.
• Black Bear Solar (Montgomery County): 100 MWac / 130 MWdc, 280,000-plus panels, under development by Lightsource bp on a 20-year PPA with the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority (AMEA). Expected to deliver $7M-plus in property taxes to county schools over its life.
• Stockton Solar (Baldwin County): 260 MWac total (Stockton I at 80 MWac plus Stockton II at 180 MWac), developed and owned by Silicon Ranch on a roughly $350M investment. Approved by the Alabama PSC in winter 2025, with construction expected in 2027 and operation by 2028. Alabama Power buys the power and RECs via its Renewable Subscription Program to serve Meta's Montgomery data center. It still needs a Baldwin County building permit and an Army Corps water permit — and it is the single most-contested project in the state.
• First Solar (Lawrence County): not a generation project but a supply-side one — a $1.1B thin-film CdTe module manufacturing plant with 700-plus jobs, announced in 2022 and now operational. Its panels feed U.S. utility-scale projects, including Stockton, giving Alabama a rare in-state clean-tech manufacturing anchor.

Siting & Local Opposition: The State That Nearly Banned Solar

Here is where Alabama's otherwise sleepy renewables story turns sharp. Because Alabama has no dedicated statewide solar siting board and counties have historically held limited land-use control over unincorporated areas, utility-scale generation serving Alabama Power is approved by the Alabama Public Service Commission through a certificate process — the same body that greenlit Stockton and expanded the 2,400 MW procurement authorization. TVA sites its own north-Alabama projects entirely outside that jurisdiction.

That top-down structure left rural landowners feeling boxed out — and they responded with the most aggressive anti-solar legislation of any Southern state this cycle. Organized opposition, concentrated in coastal Baldwin and Mobile counties around the Stockton project, drove Sen. Greg Albritton's SB354 and companion HB617: a proposed one-year statewide moratorium on new utility-scale solar not already operating or under construction, with a carve-out letting TVA keep adding solar in the north. SB354 passed the Senate 27-4 in spring 2026. It then died in April 2026 — not on the merits, but on a procedural rule: after the 26th legislative day, Senate-origin bills needed unanimous consent to move to the House, and it wasn't granted. The moratorium never became law, and Alabama's solar regulatory landscape is technically unchanged.

A narrower bill, HB618 from Rep. Matt Simpson, would hand Mobile and Baldwin county commissions direct authority to regulate solar farms in their unincorporated areas — a targeted response to Stockton. The opposition itself is real and named: groups like Friends of the Tensaw River (led by president Meagan Fowler) argue Silicon Ranch's 260 MWac farm would carve into Gulf Coast forests and swampland to power a Meta data center three hours away. Opponents openly invoke a 2013 precedent, when a proposed Alabama wind farm was abandoned after local pushback, as the outcome they're trying to repeat.

For a live view of active fights, moratorium moves, and county-level actions in the state, see our Alabama opposition tracker.

Demand: Data Centers Are the Only Growth Engine That Matters

If anything pulls Alabama into a faster clean-energy buildout, it will be load growth, not policy. The dominant driver is Meta's Montgomery data center — announced in May 2024 as an $800M, 715,000-square-foot AI-optimized facility off I-65, Meta's 24th data hub, pledged to run on 100% renewable energy and backed by the 260 MW of new solar at Stockton. It is expected to go live at the end of 2026, and in September 2025 Meta announced an expansion raising its local investment to roughly $1.5B.

That single campus is why the Stockton fight matters so much: Meta's renewable pledge is what created demand for a controversial coastal solar farm in the first place. The PSC has read the signal — its expansion of Alabama Power's renewable procurement authorization to 2,400 MW and its continued solar approvals (its December 2025 meeting covered rate stability, data-center growth, and new solar) point to procurement scaled to serve incoming industrial and data-center load. Advanced manufacturing adds to the pull: First Solar's Lawrence County plant and the broader auto and EV supply chain around Hyundai in Montgomery are electrifying and expanding.

The tension is unmistakable. The same data centers that could finance Alabama's first real wave of utility-scale solar are the reason rural legislators tried to freeze that solar in place. In a state with no RPS to force the issue, the megawatts get built only where a utility contract, a corporate offtaker, and a county willing to host all line up at once.

Outlook: Incremental Growth Against a Structural Ceiling

Don't mistake Alabama for a rising clean-energy market. It is a nuclear-and-gas state with a hydro legacy, no mandate, the worst rooftop-solar penetration in the country, and a legislature that came one procedural vote away from banning new solar farms. Growth is real but incremental — Stockton, Black Bear, and whatever the PSC clears under the 2,400 MW ceiling — and it is almost entirely demand-pulled by a handful of corporate and utility buyers rather than pushed by policy.

The variables to watch are narrow and specific: whether Stockton clears its Baldwin County building permit and Army Corps water permit; whether a 2027 version of the moratorium or the HB618 local-control push resurfaces after failing on a technicality; how aggressively Alabama Power procures against its 2,400 MW authorization as Meta's load comes online; and how much of the ITC value new projects can still capture before the OBBBA phaseouts bite. None of that makes Alabama a leader. It makes Alabama a market where a few large deals — and the local opposition they provoke — will decide the pace, one project at a time.

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