As a college student in the early 1970s, Jim Zeigler organized young voters to support a challenger to one of the most famous villains of the civil rights movement in Alabama, Bull Connor, who had traded in his billy clubs and fire hoses for an unlikely sinecure at the Alabama Public Service Commission.
In 1972, Mr. Zeigler helped to oust Mr. Connor from the commission, which regulates Alabama’s water and power utilities, then won a seat himself two years later.
Five decades later, two seats on the commission are once again coveted political perches, thanks to the white-hot national debate over A.I. data centers.
On Tuesday, in a Republican runoff for one seat, Mr. Zeigler, 78, is positioning data centers as the latest villain for voters. But in an Alabama twist, he has branded another villain — solar power and efforts to reduce climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
“Alabama is being targeted by huge data centers, solar farms, and carbon capture operations,” he said at an Elmore County Republican Party event this month. “If anybody tries to sell you on the idea of these data centers and solar farms because of jobs and economic development, tell them that you know better.”
What solar power has to do with data centers depends on whom you ask.
Data centers have united Republicans and Democrats, who fear the behemoths are using massive amounts of power and water that ordinary citizens cannot spare or afford. Solar power and renewable energy in general have one particular opponent, President Trump.
Matt Beasley, chief commercial executive of Silicon Ranch, which is developing a solar farm near Mobile, said Mr. Ziegler, whose hometown is Mobile, is conflating two very different issues.
But that conflation could prove potent. Last month, Mr. Zeigler, a semiretired lawyer, finished far ahead of the commissioner he was challenging, Chris V. Beeker III, but not far enough to avoid a runoff. Another incumbent commissioner, Jeremy H. Oden, didn’t even make a runoff against another outsider, Matt Gentry, a sheriff from northern Alabama who also raised concerns about data centers and large-scale solar facilities.
Alabama residents face the highest electric bills in the South, and the upheaval around the commission carried echoes of last year’s election for the Georgia Public Service Commission, when two Democratic newcomers steamrolled Republican incumbents.
What is new is the animus toward utility-scale solar power.
“The idea to ban an industry that can bring benefits to the state when we’re already lagging behind doesn’t make sense,” said Christina Tidwell, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
John Dodd, policy manager for Energy Alabama, a nonprofit which supports clean energy, noted that solar now supplies almost 13 percent of the nation’s electricity, and eclipsed coal as the third-biggest source in May, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to stop it.
Even the Department of Energy has acknowledged the cost of solar power is dropping fast.
“There are a lot of counties in Alabama, especially in the Black Belt area, that would benefit greatly from the revenue that is generated from these types of projects, but also bring Alabamians more affordable energy, cleaner energy,” Mr. Dodd said.
Solar became an issue in February, when residents learned that the Public Service Commission had months earlier quickly approved Silicon Ranch’s 260-megawatt project in Stockton, Ala., in Baldwin County.
The project would occupy an area almost the size of Atlanta’s airport, and double as a working sheep ranch. The company would sell the energy generated by the $300 million project to Alabama Power, the state’s dominant utility. Alabama Power, in turn, would power a new $800 million Meta data center in Montgomery which has promised to use green energy.
Meagan Fowler, a local author and former journalist, read about the solar project on Facebook at 3 a.m. in early February. Then she started organizing, raising concerns about the project’s impact on a biodiverse area dubbed “America’s Amazon.” In 2023, she noted, a Georgia jury awarded a couple $135 million in damages from the muddy runoff from a Silicon Ranch solar project. (A judge later reduced it to $5 million, the parties settled and the company says it has “learned important lessons” about how they hold their contractors accountable.)
“We’re in the A.I. era, and so we’ve now got data centers popping up like Whac-a-Mole,” she said during a tour of historic sites, houseboats and bucolic areas. “These rural, unzoned, unincorporated lands have a target on their back.”
All of this put the commission under fierce scrutiny. During a fractious state legislative session, a bill to appoint commissioners and take away voters’ voices failed, but another bill that would impose a moratorium on large-scale solar facilities passed the State Senate.
Mr. Gentry, the sheriff who crushed Mr. Oden in the Republican primary last month, has also tied solar power to the technology companies pressing for data centers all over the country.
His answer? A moratorium on solar power.
He will compete in November against James O. Gordon, a Democratic former State Representative from Mobile, who has been more receptive to solar.
The post G.O.P. Stokes Opposition to Solar Power in Fight Against Data Centers appeared first on New York Times.
