Jeff Hough did not pull any punches. What his fellow Republican county commissioners were about to do, he said to the packed courthouse, would violate America’s founding ideals. He quoted the Declaration of Independence to make his case. 

The three-person commission was about to vote on an ordinance that would ban utility-scale solar and wind development in Bannock County, Idaho. 

“We cannot deny the entire county the opportunity to exercise their property rights,” Hough said. “That goes against the principles this country was founded on.” 

A few minutes after Hough’s emphatic speech, the ordinance passed by a 2–1 vote. Hough was the lone dissenter.

Since that consequential vote in March 2024, Hough has become the chair of the county commission and has dedicated himself to overturning that ordinance. He will soon have a chance to make that happen. This fall, Hough and the other two commissioners are set to vote on an ordinance with new language that would allow the development of solar and wind, along with nuclear energy, in the county.

The Bannock County vote is a test case of whether — and how — a community can revisit its assumptions about the costs and benefits of clean energy and decide to welcome development it once swore off.

In 2025, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. counties had some kind of ban, moratorium, or impediment to clean energy development, up from 15 percent of counties in 2023. More than 60 percent of counties with bans are rural, according to a Daily Yonder and Canary Media analysis of data from USA Today and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. (The Daily Yonder defines “rural” using criteria from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.)

Bucking this national trend and reversing the ban would put Bannock County back in play at a moment when Idaho needs all the energy it can get. Idaho Power, the state’s largest utility, expects electricity demand to grow by 1 gigawatt by 2030, a roughly 26 percent leap from current levels.

“The need to build stuff now is critical to Idaho’s economic future,” said Aaron Menenberg, the Idaho policy manager for Renewable Northwest, a nonprofit working to decarbonize the region’s grid. “We can’t afford to say no to anything.”

Bannock County, nestled in a valley a few hours north of Salt Lake City and 100 miles west of Wyoming’s Teton Range, is a prime location for new power plants. It’s home to the Populus substation, a critical juncture for getting electrons onto the grid and into Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and the Pacific Northwest. Building new power plants near a substation is cheaper, and those savings can help bring down costs for utility customers. 

But the biggest opportunity for county residents, as Hough sees it, is not utility-bill savings: It’s economic development. In recent years, Bannock County’s population has grown far more slowly than Idaho’s. The county’s rural communities, meanwhile, are watching essential services disappear, and drought worsened by climate change is making it difficult for family farms to stay afloat. 

Hough believes renewables would bring money into the community. Bannock County’s neighbors offer local proof: In 2024, projects in nearby Power and Bingham counties generated $909,000 and $639,000 in tax revenue, respectively. Hough wants to send a message — to the renewables industry and others — that Bannock County is “open for business,” too. 

“Rural America is in a transition state,” Hough said from his office in Pocatello, the county seat, in July. “How do we make or help rural America … transition to this new way of life, so that they can thrive and prosper?”

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Not everyone shares Hough’s vision of prosperity. In south Bannock County, Hough’s campaign has met with fierce opposition. Two camps exist: On one side are residents who are willing to lease their own land to solar energy developers or stand by their neighbors’ right to do so. On the other are those who are skeptical of renewables and believe that leasing land to developers is equivalent to selling out — many of them do, however, support nuclear.

Steve Criddle, a third-generation farmer and lifelong resident of south Bannock County, voiced his support for solar in 2024 before the ban passed. He described the situation today simply: “It’s confrontational.”

Bannock County’s moratorium on solar and wind stemmed from an unlikely source: Hough himself.

It was the fall of 2023, and he had just attended a conference of the Idaho Association of Counties in Boise.

At the conference, the Lava Ridge Wind Project, a 1-GW development slated for more than 57,000 acres of federal land in southern Idaho, dominated the conversation. County leaders from around the state were concerned about clean energy developers running roughshod over their communities. (President Donald Trump’s Interior Department canceled Lava Ridge in August 2025.)

The discussion got Hough thinking. Months before the conference, he had learned that several developers, including Chicago-based Hecate Energy and Moab, Utah–based Balanced Rock Power, were approaching landowners about solar projects in Bannock County.

When Hough returned from Boise, the cautionary tale of Lava Ridge fresh in his mind, he took action. 

“I realized that we didn’t have any kind of ordinance,” Hough said. “So I knew they’d come in and do whatever they wanted.”

On October 12, 2023, spearheaded by Hough, the county commissioners voted unanimously to enact a six-month moratorium on large-scale energy projects. The idea was not to ban solar and wind, but simply to give the county time to regulate the developments and ensure they balanced economic opportunity with responsible land stewardship. A public hearing on the topic was set for the following February, and the commissioners would vote on the future of the moratorium in March.

But Hough’s moratorium took on a life of its own. In the months that followed, a group of concerned residents organized to make it permanent.

Rebecca Falcon led the charge. A decades-long resident of Downey, a town in south Bannock County, Falcon had been approached by Balanced Rock in September 2023 about leasing a portion of her 80 acres for solar. Appalled, she turned the company away. But Balanced Rock’s proposed Harmon Solar Project (aka Harmon I), a 300-megawatt solar facility with a 1,200-megawatt-hour on-site battery energy storage system, included her neighbors’ land. Stopping it would take more than just Falcon saying no.

Falcon and another neighbor, Dez Hauser, who had also turned away Balanced Rock, encouraged other concerned community members to show up to the February 2024 public hearing about the future of the moratorium.

By the time the hearing rolled around, residents had sorted themselves into two groups: for solar and against it. The meeting attracted such interest that it was moved from the county courthouse to a local high school auditorium in south Bannock County. The venue was still packed.

More than two dozen speakers, nearly all of them from south Bannock County, showed up to say their piece. The vast majority testified in opposition to solar. 

The commissioners convened the next month to decide what to do with the moratorium. Hough voted to repeal it. The other two commissioners voted to extend it. The commissioners framed it as an additional pause to study the potential effects of large-scale renewable energy development in the county. Yet as the controversy mounted through the spring and summer of 2024, the county declined to take further action. 

The ban stayed in place. Falcon, Hauser, and the other opponents had won. 

Dale Lish, a grain farmer based in Downey, was frustrated with the decision. Recently retired from a career at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lish became familiar with solar while working on projects in Idaho and Washington through the Rural Energy for America Program. He spoke in favor of the energy source at the same hearing where Falcon and Hauser expressed their concerns. 

“The approach was just no to everything, which bothered me,” Lish said of the county’s decision, in a June interview on his property. “A straight-out ban — I don’t think that’s American. I think we, as private-property owners, ought to have a chance to do what we want within reason.”

In 2023, Lish signed a one-year contract with Hecate to option about 400 acres of his land for solar development. Hecate declined to renew the contract in 2024 because of the county’s ordinance. 

The company has since pulled out of the county altogether. Representatives from Hecate did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

For the two and a half years since that March vote, Hough has been beating the drum of private-property rights while also trying to educate the community on Idaho’s power needs and how they might be met in Bannock County.

While the commission won’t vote until later this fall on the new ordinance, which is still undergoing public review, at least one of Hough’s colleagues may have changed his tune. Ernie Moser, an incumbent who supported the ban in 2024, said in an interview in June that his fears about solar and wind are “not as big” as they were two years ago. Still, Moser, who’s retiring from the commission at the end of this year, stressed that he wants “to do it right” when it comes to revisiting the county’s energy policy. The other commissioner, Ken Bullock, declined to comment. 

May’s primary elections offered another indication of the county’s divided views. In the Republican primary, Hough faced a challenger from south Bannock County with an anti-solar platform, and though he won his race by 14 percentage points overall, his opponent captured 70 percent of the vote in Downey. No Democrat is running in the race, so Hough won’t face competition in the November general election. 

This year’s results mirror those of 2024, when former county commissioner John Crowder, who voted for the ban in March of that year, won big in Downey but lost to Ken Bullock, an ally of Hough’s. 

“In south Bannock County, it’s a supermajority of residents that do not want this,” Crowder said about solar development. 

Steve Criddle can trace his family’s roots in Downey back to 1876, when his ancestors first filed paperwork for water rights. His grandfather farmed grain, including wheat. Criddle’s father did the same. He’s kept the agricultural heritage alive himself, but because of a changing climate, grain farming is no longer enough to sustain him. 

“We don’t get enough moisture anymore,” Criddle said. The fields where he grows crops without irrigation now hardly produce enough to make ends meet. He’s turned some of his land over to cattle grazing and has worked odd jobs over the years to hold on to the farm. 

On a sunny day in late June, Criddle drove me down a dirt road in his wife’s pickup truck. We were headed to one of his alfalfa fields. Three years ago, he said, the field produced some 800 bales of hay. This year, it produced only a dozen. 

“The drought’s been tough,” Criddle told me. Before last year, he’d never had to buy hay for his cows. This year, he’ll likely have to buy hay again, as more than 87 percent of the county is now experiencing extreme drought conditions after a winter with record-low snowfall. 

Lish, who also grows crops without irrigation, said that wells in the valley are limited. 

“That’s the Achilles’ heel of this area. There’s just a lack of groundwater, and then, of course, sparse rainfall,” he said. To accumulate enough moisture to grow wheat, Lish leaves his fields fallow every other year, allowing the soil to stock up on water. 

While Criddle and Lish have fought to hang on to their land over the past six decades, climate change and the loss of small-scale farming have reshaped their community. 

“You don’t have family farms anymore,” said Criddle’s wife, Keedrin. “The families can’t survive on a farm.”

As neighbors sold their land to corporations or moved out of Downey altogether, the town’s services have struggled to stay open. Over the years, the rural hospital closed, along with the town’s bank, pharmacy, movie theater, grocery store, and farm-equipment shop. Gone too are the dairies and granary. 

So when representatives from Hecate knocked on the Criddles’ door in 2023 proposing a lease for solar development, Steve and Keedrin heard them out. And while the couple didn’t sign a contract, they realized how such a lease could bring them a stable source of income, which they could use to hire help and reinvest in the long-term sustainability of the farm. 

The Criddles now have 11 grandchildren, with another one on the way. Steve thinks often about what he’ll leave for the next generations.

“I don’t want my kids to have to work this hard,” he said. 

Lish, who did sign a contract with Hecate, said the decision didn’t come easily. But, he added, it would have been “kind of irresponsible” to not consider the opportunity. With solar, the per-acre income projections were four to five times higher than with wheat alone, Lish said.

“Lots of people have lots of opinions on what you’re going to do to your ground. I get that, and I can appreciate it. But we love this land too, and we’re not going to do something that’s going to be harmful,” Lish said. “We’re just looking at something that’s going to help us continue on to multiple generations.”

A few years earlier, Lytton Bastian, another farmer in Downey, had found himself contemplating the same questions. 

Bastian, who was born and raised in Bannock County, is a multigenerational farmer and father of six. He owns over 2,000 acres in the valley. Balanced Rock was interested in 840 of those acres adjacent to the Populus substation, a parcel Bastian currently uses as a gravel pit and as cattle pasture for a month each fall and spring. In 2021, he signed a five-year contract with Balanced Rock that includes modest quarterly payments. If the ban lifts and Balanced Rock installs solar, the payments would increase. 

Bastian’s neighbor is Falcon. She criticized his decision to lease to Balanced Rock, saying that he sold out to make more money than he could with agriculture.

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“My biggest issue is that it’s all ag land,” Falcon said. “They’ll take the grain; they’ll take the hay; they’ll take the cattle; they’ll take it all.” 

Bastian said he only went through with the contract because Balanced Rock wanted his “least productive piece of ground.” An irrigated parcel would have been out of the question, he said. “Any normal farmer will not sell out good prime ground, because that’s hard to come by.”

At the February 2024 hearing at the high school, Bastian was among the few local farmers who spoke in favor of solar.

For Bastian, the stakes are getting higher. His contract with Balanced Rock is up at the end of this year. He thinks the renewal hinges on the county overturning the ban. Otherwise, he fears that the company could go the way of Hecate and look elsewhere.

“If the ban is lifted, the short answer is yes, we will move forward with our project,” said Katarina Bagri, a senior manager of development at Balanced Rock who’s leading the Harmon Solar Project, which includes Bastian’s land. “If there’s still a ban, there’s not many options, so we’ll just have to see what are the options left.” 

It’s not just individual landowners who stand to miss out if the ban continues. Property tax payments from solar development would also deliver revenue to help the town bring back much-needed local services, like a grocery store. Balanced Rock, anticipating that the ban would be lifted, offered the city of Downey $100,000 in direct payments last fall via a community benefit program.

If Balanced Rock is unable to build, the city will not receive this money. Hough addressed this directly in an op-ed published in the local paper in February. Counties with bans in place, he wrote, “will watch the projects — and the money — go elsewhere.”

Just outside Downey, the northbound portion of Interstate 15 stretches over a pass and opens onto a sprawling valley. Golden fields give way to towering peaks. It’s part of why Falcon, who grew up in Utah, moved to Idaho: The landscape is all mountains and rolling hills. The idea that solar panels could become part of the view is unthinkable. 

“I think, my goodness, why do you have to build it where we live?” Falcon said. 

Falcon and her husband, Rudy, bought their 80-acre parcel of land in Downey more than three decades ago. That was before the Populus substation was built within view of their house. Now, transmission lines crisscross their land and that of their neighbors. 

“It is the ugliest thing on this planet,” Falcon said about the substation. “I wish it wasn’t there.” 

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In the coming years, two new high-voltage transmission lines will join the existing lines running through Populus. They’re part of the yearslong Energy Gateway project being built by PacifiCorp, one of the largest utilities in the West. The goal is to improve the region’s power transportation and reliability as energy demand grows, said Jonathan Whitesides, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power, a division of PacifiCorp that operates in Idaho. 

As much as Falcon doesn’t like looking at the substation, she understands the need for transporting power. Rudy works for the Bonneville Power Administration and is often on the road in Washington and Oregon building substations himself. But solar, to Falcon, is a different story. She said that she struggles with the amount of land it requires to produce power, a talking point that’s been popularized by the fossil fuel industry. 

She and Hauser, her Downey neighbor, have continued to speak out against solar since the 2024 ban. Hauser is active on community Facebook pages, and Falcon runs an email chain to share information with friends and neighbors. “I wasn’t willing to be quiet about it,” Hauser said. 

For years, the women have regularly filed public records requests with Bannock County and the federal government. That’s how they discovered that a month after Bannock County voted to maintain its ban, Balanced Rock applied for federal authorization for a second solar project, called Harmon II. The project, like Harmon I, was slated for 300 MW, and its application outlined solar and battery energy storage development on approximately 1,300 acres of public land administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Bannock County. Harmon II was proposed on land adjacent to Harmon I, which had stalled because of the county’s ban. 

In July, Bagri from Balanced Rock acknowledged that the company had been sitting on the application. “All of our focus is on the private land, [the] initial 300 megawatts. So once we make progress with that, we’ll figure out whether we want to pursue an expansion,” she said. In August, Balanced Rock officially withdrew its application for Harmon II.

Falcon and Hauser saw the second project as evidence of a lack of transparency from the developer. 

“The public has a right to know this will change this valley for 50 years,” Falcon said. “We will have left that mess to our children and grandchildren, because who’s going to guarantee who owns it in 50 years to decommission it and clean it up? You can’t make those kinds of guarantees.”

Bagri said the guardrails the county was considering in early 2024 — which are now baked into the ordinance the commissioners will vote on this fall — include provisions on decommissioning. The draft ordinance stipulates that in order to get projects permitted, developers must pay into a bond and submit a plan for the removal of all energy infrastructure at the end of the project’s lifetime. Bagri said these plans involve restoring project sites “back to as close to preconstruction condition as possible.” Today, project lifetimes range from 35 to 40 years, she said.

Still, for Hauser and Falcon, the feeling of disempowerment persists. Falcon pointed to other counties across the state, including Ada County, home to Boise, that have taken matters into their own hands to “put a limit” on development. In Ada County, solar is now prohibited on prime farmland, as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In southeast Idaho, some of Bannock County’s neighbors, like Caribou County, have also banned utility-scale solar, though others, such as Power and Bingham counties, have embraced it. 

“If you don’t build in the brakes, they will run you over,” Falcon said. 

For all their ire toward solar, Falcon and Hauser see promise in nuclear energy. That puts them in the majority: In January, Bannock County surveyed residents to gauge public opinion on nuclear energy. Over 700 people responded, with 90 percent indicating favorable views toward the industry. 

Hough was surprised by the results. “I didn’t think our community could agree on anything,” he said.

Southeast Idaho is home to Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, which leads the nation’s advanced nuclear research. As part of the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear energy, the lab was given priority in May 2025 to expedite construction of on-site microreactor test beds. The U.S. Department of Energy announced in July that INL will receive $60 million as part of a public-private partnership to use AI in nuclear energy development and operation. Buzzy nuclear startup Oklo aims to build its first fission reactor there. 

Plus, next door in western Wyoming, the Bill Gates–backed TerraPower is building what it hopes will be the country’s first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant. The project, now under construction in rural Kemmerer, is expected to be completed in 2030 and will supply PacifiCorp with up to 500 MW of power. 

The excitement around INL and the TerraPower project leave many in Bannock County wondering when their big opportunity might come along. In July, the Bannock County commissioners hosted a public educational forum with INL to discuss how the county could get involved with small modular reactors (SMRs), microreactors, and nuclear manufacturing. 

Falcon and Hauser were both in attendance. They said they’d much rather see the development of nuclear energy in Bannock County than renewables. “If you can have 30 acres with a semitruck-size nuclear plant on it, why wouldn’t you do that? Why would you give up thousands of acres to solar?” Falcon said. 

But the construction of SMRs and the broader nuclear revival touted by Trump remain highly uncertain prospects. 

Only two next-generation nuclear projects in the U.S. have received construction permits: TerraPower’s Kemmerer 1 and Kairos Power’s Hermes 2 reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Neither has an operating license, however. 

Even if more projects obtain licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission amid Trump’s push to streamline permitting, the SMR industry is far from a sure thing. Most companies are proposing first-of-a-kind projects rife with engineering and economic unknowns. There’s little to no supply chain for the type of fuel many SMRs are designed to use. The United States’ first fully licensed SMR project was canceled in 2023 over cost concerns. Only two commercial SMRs operate in the world today — one in Russia and one in China. 

Dustin Manwaring, a Republican state representative for Pocatello and a land-use and development attorney for Balanced Rock, is an ally of Hough’s. He said the commissioner wants to usher in a future where Bannock County leads Idaho’s burgeoning nuclear industry.

“[It’s] a worthy, noble thing to do,” Manwaring said. “If you take a step away, I don’t know how realistic that is. I love that he’s trying.”

In the near term, Hough recognizes that bringing nuclear power to Bannock County could take years. That’s why he doesn’t want to turn down other types of economic development — like solar and wind — in the meantime. “Everybody’s claiming nuclear is the future, which it is, but nuclear is 10 years away, maybe, so you’ve got to have something to help get you there,” Hough said.

Some clean energy advocates, like Linda Engle with the Portneuf Resource Council, the region’s environmental nonprofit, are optimistic that the support for nuclear energy could help overturn the ban. “With the nuclear piece in there, hopefully it gets passed,” Engle said.

For all the community debate, the future of clean energy in Bannock County ultimately rests on the decision of the three commissioners. To Commissioner Moser, who in 2024 voted in favor of the ban, the choice isn’t black-and-white. 

Hanging on the walls in Moser’s office are two landscape paintings depicting Idaho’s wilderness. In one, a crisp blue stream is flanked by forest and purple mountain cliffs; in another, two people perch on a log, fishing rods in hand, waiting patiently for a catch. Moser has arranged the paintings, which were created by his now-grown son, so he can see them while sitting at his desk. On another wall, a second pair of paintings depicts the American Revolution. In a snowy forest scene, George Washington kneels beside a horse, praying.

Five days before the Fourth of July, Moser sat in his office, considering the paintings. “I love our country, the freedoms that we enjoy — 250 years is amazing,” he said. “God created this for us. I’m a steward now. I’ve been called to take care of it.”

It is this ethos that guides Moser, a south Bannock County native, as he contemplates the county’s new energy ordinance. 

Moser’s fears have to do with solar site cleanup and the risks of battery fires. Moser is not alone in these concerns; they are often cited by solar opposition groups, which point to rare but devastating instances of battery fires in California. Such anxieties are also spreading nationwide. In December 2025, the volunteer fire departments in Downey and Lava Hot Springs, another rural community in south Bannock County, sent letters to the county commissioners warning that they were unprepared to fight battery fires and would need special equipment and training to do so. 

Bagri said Balanced Rock has tried to ease concerns about decommissioning and fire risk. During the numerous public hearings in 2024, representatives from both Hecate and Balanced Rock responded to the community’s concerns. “They addressed every one of those fears head-on, concisely with facts, and I thought they communicated very well,” said E.J. Zita, a rancher in Robin, Idaho, who’s had residential solar on her property for over a decade. But she said the anti-solar camp had dug in. “People didn’t listen; they just didn’t hear it.”

Despite his fears, Moser said he understands the weight of his responsibility. 

That’s why he’s tried to educate himself about Idaho’s energy needs over the past two years. In 2025, Moser visited a 40-MW solar project in neighboring Power County, a 20-minute drive west from Pocatello. The visit was organized for the Bannock County commissioners by Balanced Rock. The same year, Moser and Hough attended the energy academy hosted by Idaho Power in Boise and had conversations with Rocky Mountain Power. Language in Bannock County’s new draft ordinance requires energy developers to help local fire departments with training and equipment for dealing with battery fires. 

In June, Moser said he recognized that there’s a need for growth in Bannock County. He’s not the only one whose opinion has shifted. Wade Egan, the former chair of the county’s volunteer planning and development council, was “neutral” about the ban passing in 2024. Egan grew up next door to Dale Lish in Downey and now farms around 5,000 acres in the area. He has friends on both sides of the issue.

This time around, though, Egan is pro-solar. Echoing Hough, Egan said he sees it as a matter of property rights. “I really do believe the right to control and own personal property is as fundamental as speech,” he said. 

Moser, meanwhile, is focused on getting things right for future generations. Pointing to the landscape paintings in his office, he spoke about the Idaho wilderness that he wants his son, and grandchildren, to enjoy. 

“It’s not a personal choice. It’s hard choices,” Moser said. “We wake up at two o’clock in the morning thinking about them, and it isn’t a simple deal.”