These emerging trends are challenging traditional construction risk management.
By Stephanie Thomas | August 14, 2025
As construction practices evolve to meet new environmental, technological and efficiency demands, so too do the associated risks.
Three emerging areas are giving rise to increasingly complex claims scenarios: solar farms, data centers, and modular construction. Each involves unique exposures, legal ambiguities and implications for underwriting and risk management.
Solar farms: Small damages, giant verdicts
As the renewable energy sector continues to grow worldwide, the construction of solar farms across America’s rural areas has triggered an uptick in high-severity pollution runoff claims. Though these claims often involve limited physical damage caused by silt or sediment runoff onto neighboring residential properties and waterways, they increasingly result in multi-million-dollar jury awards.
Solar farm construction involves clearing and grading large sections of land, often in rural communities. This phase of construction can lead to significant erosion and major sediment run-off into waterways and neighboring residential properties if the stormwater controls and drainage basins are inadequate. What might begin as a modest environmental incident can escalate into a highly litigious and emotionally charged dispute.
A landmark example of this trend is the Lumpkin Solar case, in which a Georgia jury awarded $135.5 million, including $125 million in punitive damages, to a couple whose private pond was contaminated by runoff during the construction of a nearby solar farm. The actual cost to remediate the damage was estimated at less than $1 million, but the verdict reflected deeper social dynamics: a strong jury inclination to penalize corporations thought to be infringing on rural livelihoods.
These high-dollar claims are rarely driven by catastrophic physical losses. Rather, they emerge from a mix of social inflation, the rise of third-party litigation funding and a growing public skepticism toward industrial-scale projects in rural settings — all resulting in nuclear jury verdicts, defined as verdicts in excess of $10 million. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have recognized this dynamic and are actively seeking similar cases, which is accelerating both the frequency and severity of these claims.
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