Arkansas Clean Energy Guide

Arkansas managed a rare double in 2025: it switched on its first-ever utility-scale wind farm and passed one of the most restrictive wind siting laws in the country — in the same year. The 135 MW Crossover Wind project in Cross County reached commercial operation on November 24, 2025, just months after Act 945 imposed statewide setbacks that the Southeastern Wind Coalition calls a de facto ban on new wind development. Meanwhile, a data center boom headlined by Google's $4 billion West Memphis campus is forcing the state's utilities to build generation faster than at any point in decades.

The state has no renewable portfolio standard and never has. What Arkansas has instead is cheap land, two wholesale markets, and corporate offtakers — Microsoft, Google, U.S. Steel — willing to underwrite projects the legislature won't mandate. That formula built 2,775 MW of operating wind, solar, and storage capacity through early 2026, good for 30th among states, and it is about to be stress-tested by 36 GW of interconnection requests and a wave of county-level moratoria across the Ozarks.

Policy: No Mandate, a Wind Wall, and a Gas-Friendly Financing Law

Arkansas has never adopted a renewable portfolio standard or clean energy standard, mandatory or voluntary — and the 2025 legislative session made clear one isn't coming. Lawmakers instead rewired the market in two directions at once: making it easier for utilities to finance new generation of any kind, and dramatically harder to site wind. For context on where the state starts from, EIA's 2024 profile puts renewables at about 10.1% of the state's 61.5 million MWh of generation — hydro at 5.1%, utility-scale solar at 3.8%, biomass around 1.2% — with nuclear from Arkansas Nuclear One adding 24%, natural gas around 40.1%, and coal around 25.4%.

Act 945: The Wind Energy Development Act

Passed April 22, 2025 as SB437, Act 945 created Arkansas's first state-level wind permitting regime, administered by the Arkansas Public Service Commission. The setbacks are the story: the greater of 3.5 times total turbine height or 2,500 feet from nonparticipating landowners (waivable down to 1.1 times height with consent), and a full mile from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, churches, state and federal parks, public airports, and city or town limits. Add minimum five-rotor-diameter turbine spacing and decommissioning financial assurance filed at least 30 days before construction, and the Southeastern Wind Coalition's verdict — a de facto ban on new wind development — looks less like advocacy hyperbole than arithmetic.

Projects already under development as of April 9, 2025 — an executed lease, studies commenced, or construction started — are exempt, which is the only reason Arkansas's nascent wind industry exists at all. Implementation is still contested: an APSC administrative law judge issued proposed Wind Energy Development Rules on December 29, 2025, the full Commission adopted them on January 14, 2026, and the Southern Renewable Energy Association filed a rehearing petition on February 13, 2026, with final effectiveness still pending legislative review as of early 2026.

Act 373: Financing the Data Center Buildout

The Generating Arkansas Jobs Act of 2025 (SB307, passed March 2025) lets utilities recover the cost of new generating plants during construction through a rider — CWIP-style financing — rather than waiting for completion, and requires the APSC to rule on a designated strategic investment within six months. It was framed explicitly as a tool for meeting data center and industrial load growth, and Entergy Arkansas is already putting it to work on a buildout that mixes solar, storage, and gas. A companion measure, Act 548 of 2025, expanded the state's data-center sales-and-use tax incentives to large multi-site facilities.

Net Metering: Closed to New 1:1 Customers

Act 278 of 2023 (SB295, signed March 13, 2023) ended retail-rate net metering for new customers. Systems installed by September 30, 2024 keep full 1:1 retail credit, grandfathered for 20 years through September 2040. Anything installed on or after October 1, 2024 falls under net energy billing with instantaneous netting: exports are credited at avoided cost, roughly 4 to 6 cents per kWh against a retail rate of about 10 to 11 cents. Residential systems are capped at 25 kW. There is no state solar income-tax credit; federal ITC and PTC treatment applies per federal law.

Major Projects: From Zero Wind to a Wind Fleet in Under Two Years

Through year-end 2024, EIA capacity tables showed zero wind in Arkansas. That changed fast — and the projects that made it happen all beat the Act 945 cutoff.

• Crossover Wind (Cross County): 135 MW, Cordelio Power — the state's first utility-scale wind farm, online November 24, 2025. Thirty-two Vestas V163-4.5 MW turbines, 100% of output sold to Microsoft under a 20-year PPA, and roughly $950,000 per year flowing to Cross County.
• Nimbus Wind (Carroll County): 180 MW, Scout Clean Energy — construction is complete, with commercial operation expected in spring 2026, after a build that employed around 200 workers as of mid-2025. Thirty turbines standing up to 644 feet tall across roughly 14 square miles, with a projected $31 million in tax revenue over 30 years. Exempt from Act 945 as under development before April 9, 2025 — and grandfathered past the county's own wind ban.
• Driver Solar (Mississippi County): 250 MW AC (about 312 MW DC) near Osceola — the largest solar plant in Arkansas. Developed by Lightsource bp under a build-transfer agreement, owned and operated by Entergy Arkansas, operating since November 2024 with around 343 GWh of annual generation. Sited directly beside U.S. Steel's Big River Steel works, it was reported as covering up to roughly 40% of the Big River II expansion's 550 MW demand.
• Walnut Bend Solar (Lee County): 100 MW east of Brinkley, built by Invenergy and acquired by Entergy Arkansas, in commercial operation as of September 19, 2024 and paying about $700,000 per year in property taxes to Lee County.
• Chicot Solar (Chicot County): 100 MW at Lake Village, built by NextEra for Entergy offtake, operating since August 2020 with about 216.5 GWh of annual generation.
• Searcy Solar (White County): 100 MW solar-plus-battery hybrid owned by Entergy Arkansas, operating since December 2021 with about 182.9 GWh of annual generation.

Note the pattern: every large solar plant in the state is either owned by Entergy Arkansas or under long-term contract to it, and neither wind farm is a utility asset — Crossover's output is fully contracted to Microsoft, while Nimbus plans to sell its power into the MISO market. Utility-scale storage remains embryonic — EIA counted just 28.2 MW of battery capacity statewide in 2024 — but the 350 MW battery attached to Entergy's proposed Cypress Solar project would change that at a stroke.

Siting & Opposition: The Ozarks Build a Wall, the Delta Hesitates

Arkansas siting is a two-track system. Wind now runs through the APSC's Act 945 permitting regime with its statutory setbacks. Solar has no equivalent state siting board — utility-scale projects go through local county processes, plus APSC review where the plant is utility-owned. And because many rural Arkansas counties lack county-wide zoning, quorum courts have reached for the bluntest instrument available: the moratorium. The Association of Arkansas Counties has warned that counties have limited legal authority to sustain outright bans, which has not slowed the wave.

• Carroll County: The epicenter. After a failed ban attempt in 2024, the quorum court voted unanimously on March 18, 2025 for a moratorium on new commercial wind and solar projects, then in May 2025 passed a five-year wind ban that starts running when the Nimbus project begins producing power. The local group Stop Wind Farms AR, led by justice of the peace Caroline Rogers, drove the effort; state Sen. Bryan King of Carroll County is the legislature's most prominent wind opponent.
• Crawford County: Passed its own five-year wind moratorium on July 21, 2025.
• Madison, Newton, and Boone counties: Each passed wind moratorium or restriction ordinances in 2024-2025, part of the broader Ozarks wave — Madison County acted months before Carroll County's March 2025 vote.
• Crittenden County: A six-month wind moratorium in the Delta, per July 2025 reporting — notable because the Delta is where the state's operating wind and biggest load growth actually are.
• Searcy County: The counterexample. On August 11, 2025 its quorum court rejected a proposed moratorium aimed at an early-stage RWE wind project with signed leases, instead passing an emergency ordinance requiring compliance with the state Wind Energy Development Act — after the Association of Arkansas Counties advised that a moratorium was legally indefensible.

The deeper shift is that Act 945 has partially nationalized the fight: with state setbacks this restrictive, county ordinances are increasingly symbolic for wind, while solar — untouched by the Act — remains exposed to county-by-county politics, as Carroll County's dual wind-and-solar moratorium shows. We track every active dispute, ordinance, and moratorium in our Arkansas opposition tracker.

Demand: A $10 Billion Data Center Bet Meets a 36 GW Queue

Arkansas spent decades as a slow-growth load pocket. Then, between October 2025 and January 2026, roughly $10 billion in initial data center investment landed. Google began construction on a $4 billion, roughly 1,000-acre campus in West Memphis, announced October 2, 2025. AVAIO Digital's Project Leo, announced in January 2026 for Pulaski County east of I-530 near Little Rock, starts at $6 billion and could grow to $21 billion — contracted with Entergy Arkansas for an initial 150 MW and up to roughly 1 GW at full buildout, about 5% of the state's generating capacity by itself.

Entergy Arkansas's response mixes every technology it can permit. For the Google campus it has applied to the APSC for Cypress Solar — 600 MW of solar plus 350 MW of battery storage, expected in 2028. Alongside it: the roughly 750 MW Jefferson Power Station combined-cycle gas plant near Redfield (expected 2029), the 450 MW Ironwood gas plant in Hot Spring County (expected 2028), and license renewal at the roughly 1,800 MW Arkansas Nuclear One. The utility's stated 2023 goal is 88% clean generation — nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro — by 2030. Developers are betting bigger still: as of January 2026, Arkansas had 164 active interconnection requests totaling 36.17 GW across the combined MISO and SPP queues. Against 2,775 MW operating today, that queue is a statement about where the market thinks this state is headed — even if most of it never gets built.

Frequently Asked Questions

Outlook: Growth Where the State Allows It

Arkansas's clean energy trajectory now runs on two clocks. Solar and storage face no state siting regime and a utility that needs enormous amounts of new capacity fast — Cypress Solar's 600 MW plus 350 MW of batteries is likely the template, with Act 373's construction-financing rider greasing the approvals. Wind faces the opposite: a permitting law its own industry calls a de facto ban, implementing rules still under challenge as of early 2026, and a map of county moratoria across the Ozarks. The projects that beat the April 9, 2025 exemption deadline — Crossover and Nimbus — may define the state's wind fleet for years. But with $5 billion already invested, $18.8 million a year flowing to landowners in lease payments, and hyperscalers signing for gigawatt-class loads, the economic pull is unambiguous. In Arkansas, the question is no longer whether clean energy gets built — it's which technologies the state's patchwork of rules will let through.