In the United States, the energy transition has entered a paradoxical phase. While Washington reaffirms the primacy of hydrocarbons and dismantles several climate achievements, renewable energies continue to make progress. Driven by businesses and local communities for their competitiveness, they are increasingly seen as the only credible response to the energy thirst of data centers.
As the debate on the American energy transition still largely focuses on technology, capital, and the political will necessary to resist the resurgence of fossil fuels, a decisive factor now looms large in the equation: the humans who inhabit the place where this transition must take shape. In this new landscape, developers can no longer treat local opposition as background noise or irrational and negligible resistance.
The land on which projects are established is no longer just a surface to equip, but a lived space, filled with attachments, memories, and power. The American electric landscape is learning that territory is not the final stage of the energy transition, but its primary condition: without the consent of those who inhabit it, the transition does not succeed.
When Local Opposition Becomes an Industrial Risk
In the United States, local opposition is now mobilizing over the four infrastructures that the country’s electric transition depends on: renewable energy production, storage, new power transmission lines, and new data centers, whose power demand accelerates low-carbon projects.
For a long time, the main obstacle to the deployment of renewables was their cost, but that era has now passed. With the collapse of solar and wind costs, the social acceptability of projects has become one of the most determining factors in the United States. The Sabin Center of the Columbia Law School identified at least 498 contested renewable projects in 49 American states in 2025. When projects are initially blocked by local opposition, only 13% end up being built.
Building Acceptance Rather Than Buying It
For a developer, a territory is a site. For those who live there, it’s a world. Thus, the central question to avoid local opposition is no longer “How to obtain project acceptance?”, but “How to make the project acceptable?”
The Local, the New Asset of the Energy Transition
The new electric phase not only requires building on a location but also building with it. This means considering communities not as obstacles to execution but as design partners. An infrastructure can contribute to a greener world but be locally viewed as a degradation of the nearby world. If the transition is only seen as adding clean capacities, it risks missing its deepest promise: not just producing differently but making common life more habitable.
/2026/05/12/6a02f7f1c29d2306671503.jpg "Negotiations on Greenland continue between Denmark and the United States, with progress but no agreement")
