Tennessee Clean Energy Guide

Tennessee is the clearest test case in America of what clean energy development looks like when one federal utility — not markets, not mandates — makes every call. The state has no renewable portfolio standard, no net metering, and no state siting board. Yet 2025 and 2026 delivered the largest solar buildout in Tennessee history, because the Tennessee Valley Authority's corporate customers demanded it and county governments could not stop all of it.

The headline numbers undersell the state. ACP counts 889 MW of operating wind, solar, and storage — 43rd nationally, with wind, solar, and storage at just 1.9% of generation, 49th in the country. But Tennessee's grid is already about 56% carbon-free thanks to nuclear (42.3% of 2024 in-state generation) and hydro (11.7%), per EIA data. And the ACP snapshot predates a wave of completions: roughly 372 MW of solar came online in May 2026 alone. The real story here is a monopsony market lurching into a demand boom it did not plan for.

No Mandates, No Markets: TVA Is the Policy

Tennessee has never adopted a renewable portfolio standard or clean energy standard — it is not among the 30 states with active renewable or clean energy requirements tracked by NCSL, and no RPS legislation advanced in the 2025-2026 General Assembly. In a state where the utility answers to a federal board rather than state regulators, the legislature's energy debates mostly concern land use, not generation mix. The result: every megawatt of clean power in Tennessee exists because TVA procured it or a corporate buyer paid for it.

Net Metering Does Not Exist Here

There is no statewide net metering, and TVA does not offer it. Distributed solar owners can sell exports through TVA's Dispersed Power Production program at avoided-cost rates — typically a few cents per kWh, far below retail. The more generous Green Power Providers program closed to new applicants at the end of 2019, and there are no standardized statewide interconnection rules. For developers, this means the distributed segment is structurally capped; utility-scale contracts with TVA and its local power companies are the only real market.

What Incentives Tennessee Does Offer

• Green Energy Property Tax Assessment (Tenn. Code Ann. 67-5-601): Certified green energy production facilities are valued for property tax purposes at no more than 12.5% of total installed cost for solar and no more than one-third for wind. Requires TDEC certification, filed with the Comptroller by March 1 of the first year claimed.
• Sales tax relief on green energy machinery: Businesses (not homeowners) can claim a sales tax exemption or credit for qualifying green energy machinery. Tennessee offers no state solar rebates or income tax credits — it has no broad personal income tax to credit against.

The Siting Bill That Died

The 2025 session's marquee energy bill, HB 0149, would have extended Tennessee's wind-siting framework (Title 65, Chapter 17) to solar: minimum setbacks of 3.5 times the array's width or depth from property lines, decommissioning after 180 consecutive days of non-generation, and explicit local permitting authority. It was assigned to the Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee on January 28, 2025, never advanced, and was listed as dead by April 24, 2026. What did pass, earlier, is narrower: the Solar Decommissioning Law (Tenn. Code Ann. 66-9-207), effective June 1, 2022, requires decommissioning and facility-removal terms in landowner agreements — amended effective July 1, 2024 to cover facilities of 5 MW and up, with agreements filed with TDEC's Office of Energy Programs. The legislature also ordered a TACIR study of utility-scale solar development under Tenn. Code Ann. 4-10-116. Translation: Nashville is circling solar siting but has not landed.

The 2025-26 Buildout: From 601 MW to a Gigawatt-Plus

EIA's official count put Tennessee utility-scale solar at 601 MW at year-end 2024. By July 2026, the third-party tracker Cleanview counted roughly 1,211 MW operating across 52 utility-scale solar farms — the state effectively doubled its solar fleet in eighteen months, with about 372 MW hitting commercial operation in May 2026 alone. The projects driving it read like a who's-who of corporate procurement:

• Ridgely Energy Farm (Lake County): 177 MW by Leeward Renewable Energy, online October 2025 under a long-term TVA PPA — the largest solar farm in Tennessee. Roughly 700 construction jobs and about $3 million in lifetime property tax revenue.
• WR Graceland Solar (Shelby County): 150 MW by RWE with Memphis Light, Gas and Water as offtaker; more than 275,000 panels and a projected $20 million-plus in lifetime county property taxes. Denied by the Shelby County Commission in February 2024 amid a local solar moratorium — then built anyway, online May 2026.
• Elora Solar (Lincoln County): 150 MW by NextEra Energy Resources, operating since March 2022, with output attributed to Meta data centers through a TVA partnership.
• Yum Yum Solar (Fayette County): 147 MW by Invenergy on a 2,649-acre site, online May 2026; Google buys the output under a clean energy PPA with TVA to offset its Clarksville data center.
• Copeland Solar Farm (Cumberland County): 110 MW by Silicon Ranch, expected late 2027, serving Middle Tennessee Electric under TVA's expanded Generation Flexibility Program — billed as the largest solar facility serving a local power company directly in the Tennessee Valley.
• SR Millington II (Shelby County): 75 MW by Silicon Ranch, online May 2026, expanding the existing 53 MW Millington Solar Farm that dates to December 2018.

Storage is earlier in the curve. TVA's first owned grid-scale battery, the 40 MWh Vonore BESS in Monroe County, connected in July 2024 — nearly everything else on the storage ledger is TVA's roughly 1,616 MW Raccoon Mountain pumped-storage plant. The pipeline is stirring: TVA has issued an RFP for a 100 MW battery at the Kingston Energy Complex in Roane County with a 2029 target, and MLGW issued a March 2025 RFP for 100 MW of solar plus 80 MW of batteries targeting first operation in Q3 2026.

Siting Is a County-by-County Knife Fight

There is no state siting board or state permit for utility-scale solar in Tennessee. Permitting is local — county and municipal zoning where it exists, and many rural counties are unzoned — with TVA layering federal NEPA reviews onto projects it contracts. Wind gets its own statutory regime (Title 65, Chapter 17): setbacks of 3.5 times turbine height from neighboring property lines and a 35 dB noise limit at neighboring dwellings. Solar has nothing comparable at the state level, which means the fights happen commission by commission:

• Shelby County: Commissioners voted February 26, 2024 to deny RWE's 150 MW Graceland Solar amid a local moratorium; RWE threatened to sue, and the project ultimately reached operation in May 2026.
• Fayette County: The development committee approved a one-year moratorium on new solar farms in February 2024, even as Invenergy's Yum Yum Solar moved through approvals.
• Moore County (Lynchburg): The Metro Council voted unanimously in February 2025 for a five-year moratorium on new solar farms, prompted by an approved roughly 200 MW Silicon Ranch facility along Highway 55; in March 2025 it narrowed the personal-use exemption to ground-mounted arrays under a quarter acre.
• Franklin County: Adopted an indefinite ban on commercial renewable energy facilities back in April 2022 — an early mover in county-level bans.

Not every county is a wall. Bedford County created a renewable energy development zone that streamlines approvals inside the zone and applies stricter standards outside it — a template developers would love to see replicated. But with HB 0149 dead, the patchwork persists, and the Graceland saga shows both sides of it: a county can say no, and a determined developer with a TVA contract can still find a path. We track every active dispute on our Tennessee opposition tracker.

Data Centers Broke the Load Forecast

Tennessee hosts about 60 data centers as of mid-2026, and one of them changed TVA's math: xAI's Colossus supercomputer in southwest Memphis launched in September 2024 with roughly 150 MW of TVA-approved power (approved November 2024), grew to around 250 MW, and with additional Memphis-area sites could collectively require about 2 GW — roughly the power of a million homes, against a Memphis peak of about 3,000 MW. Google is building a data center in Clarksville whose carbon footprint is offset by the Yum Yum Solar PPA. TVA says demand is tracking its higher-growth scenario primarily because of data centers, after setting a record winter peak of 35,319 MW in January 2025 — a number that pushed the utility to a 26% winter planning reserve margin.

The backlash arrived fast. Since fall 2025, nine Tennessee cities and counties have passed data-center construction moratoria — including McMinnville (18 months), Coffee County, Cedar Hill, Washington County, Grundy County, Johnson City, Jonesborough, and Bristol — and Hawkins County enacted a permanent ban on data centers and crypto mining in 2025. Nashville, Knox County, and Anderson County were weighing similar measures as of June 2026. The same local-control instinct that produced solar moratoria is now aimed at the load itself.

How TVA plans to serve that load is the open question. Its preliminary 2026 Integrated Resource Plan, released June 24, 2026 with final recommendations due at the August 2026 board meeting, contemplates 7 to 26 GW of new natural gas, up to 5 GW of nuclear, 1 to 5 GW of storage, and 2 to 5 GW of renewables (1 to 8 GW of nameplate solar) by 2040 — and recommends pausing new wind additions on cost and portfolio-fit grounds. Read those bands carefully: gas gets a ceiling five times higher than renewables. Manufacturing demand is wobblier than it looked, too. Ford's BlueOval City EV campus in Stanton — an $11.4 billion Ford/SK investment with roughly 6,000 Tennessee jobs and a 66 MW TVA substation installed in 2023 — was shaken in December 2025 when Ford scrapped plans for a next-generation electric pickup there in favor of gas-powered trucks starting in 2029, with SK On taking over the on-site battery plant.

Outlook: Solar Grows Because Buyers Pay for It

Tennessee will keep adding solar for the least ideological reason imaginable: customers with sustainability targets — Google, Meta, MLGW, Middle Tennessee Electric — are writing contracts, and TVA needs every megawatt it can procure into a record demand curve. Wind is finished here for now: the 27 MW Buffalo Mountain farm, the state's only commercial wind project, dropped out of EIA capacity data in 2024 and its turbines were gone by 2025, and TVA's draft IRP would keep it that way. The economic base is real, if modest — $2 billion invested to date, $4.5 million a year in state and local taxes, $5.9 million a year in landowner lease payments, 26 clean energy supply-chain manufacturing facilities, and enough clean power for 107,000 homes. Count jobs broadly and the story gets bigger: E2 tallies 88,154 Tennessee clean energy jobs across efficiency, construction, and manufacturing — 13th in the nation.

The bet for developers is straightforward: a single counterparty with a demand problem, no state mandate to lean on, and a county map that changes color every few months. The winners in Tennessee are the ones who lock TVA offtake early and treat local permitting as the project's critical path — because, as Graceland and Yum Yum both proved, that is exactly what it is.

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