After a 2-year wait, will Ohio’s largest solar project get the OK?

Following a key legal deadline last Friday, the stage is now set for the Ohio Power Siting Board to make a final decision about whether the state’s largest solar and energy storage project to date can move ahead.

The OPSB initially approved the Oak Run Solar Project in March 2024, but the case has since been bogged down by an appeal filed by Madison County and three of its townships.

Oak Run Solar would bring 800 megawatts of solar and 300 MW of energy storage to a state that has become increasingly hostile to clean energy, even as mounting electricity demand increases power prices and threatens grid reliability.

Though the county and townships filed their appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court in October 2024, it was not until this past May that the court weighed in. A majority of the seven justices rejected all objections to the project except one.

To deal with that issue, the court sent the case back to the board with instructions for regulators to ​“more thoroughly address the Oak Run project’s visual impacts,” specifically by reviewing photo simulations or artist’s sketches of how the project’s proposed substations would look from public vantage points.

On July 28, Ohio regulators heard testimony on this narrow issue. Briefing wrapped up last Friday.

Once the full board reviews the transcript, briefs, and other filings, it will issue a decision. The OPSB’s staff has already weighed in: Its Aug. 7 brief asks the full board to confirm Oak Run’s permit.

The board is under no obligation to vote according to its staff’s recommendation, and there is no specific deadline for it to act. Any additional appeal could also eat up more time.

“The project represents a significant opportunity for long-term economic investment in Madison County while supporting Ohio’s growing energy needs,” Samantha Sawmiller, senior development manager for the Oak Run Solar Project, told Canary Media. ​“We respectfully await the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision.”

Oak Run’s saga demonstrates the difficulty of developing clean energy in Ohio. In recent years, the state has blocked 5.3 gigawatts of wind and solar projects and garnered a reputation as the place ​“where wind and solar projects go to die.”

Since 2021, the General Assembly has enacted multiple laws that create extra hurdles for new solar and wind, but not for fossil fuel projects. 

Meanwhile, the OPSB has played a central role in restricting solar’s growth, especially for grandfathered projects exempted from local government bans under those state statutes.

In March, the OPSB denied permits for the proposed 94-MW Crossroads Solar Grazing Center in central Ohio. Last month, it asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss an appeal from the developer of the planned 175-MW Kingwood Solar installation, whose permits the regulators denied in 2022. The project’s interconnection agreement has expired while it awaits a court decision — a fact the board used to justify its request for dismissal.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s multiple opinions on May 26 in the Oak Run case may also suggest a growing partisanship among some of its members. Previously, the court’s members had generally shown more deference toward the OPSB’s expertise on its factual findings.

When those opinions are pieced together, six of the court’s seven justices found fault with the OPSB’s grant of the permit because the developer’s visual evidence didn’t include renderings of the project’s three substations.

Three of those justices found that was the only shortcoming. Three others also sided with the local governments and would have required more evidence on issues dealing with water, wildlife, and fears about the safety of battery storage.

Jennifer Brunner, the court’s only Democrat, would have affirmed the OPSB’s decision in its entirety, based on the case record’s other evidence.

Taken together, the opinions ​“added more confusion to an already uncertain legal environment” for utility-scale renewables, said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer with the Ohio Environmental Council, which is a party in the case supporting the project.

“Ohio is facing a massive energy crunch and ever-rising energy prices [and] really needs a clear substantive standard for reviewing these proposed projects,” she added. ​“And that’s not what we got from the court in this case.”

Testimony at the July 28 hearing was relatively brief. Lauren Devine, director of permitting and environmental matters for Savion, the project developer, said the company had the consulting firm EDR do additional work to show how public vantage points would look with the planned substations.

Gordon Perkins, a division manager with EDR, reported on that new work and its photo simulations with the substations included. The substations ​“would not contribute to visual impacts that were not already identified” in the group’s earlier review of the Oak Run project, he said, adding that the developer would take various steps to minimize visual impacts.

Mark Bellamy, a utilities specialist on the technical staff that advises the OPSB, reported that he had reviewed the consultant’s new report and concluded that Oak Run’s aesthetic appearance would be consistent with that of other solar farms — hence the staff recommendation to greenlight the project.

The local governments’ sole witness was Errol Gattis, a resident of London, Ohio, who said he’d be able to see the project from his yard and porch and objected to EDR’s choice of vantage points.

Ohio’s rules don’t require consideration of a project’s expected appearance from every possible angle, however. And state law doesn’t guarantee that viewsheds won’t change, said Tom Bullock, executive director for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio, a consumer watchdog group that promotes clean energy and is not part of the case.

An Aug. 7 brief filed by the opponents’ lawyer, Jack Van Kley — a longtime renewable-energy opponent in the state — took issue with the vantage points for the visual analysis and argued that the developer should have provided the materials as a supplement to the company’s project application, complete with various steps for public participation.

Those stances are similar to arguments that the Ohio Supreme Court rejected in its Oak Run ruling in May, about the general approach for a visual analysis and whether regulators had properly found that the developer’s application was complete. Moreover, the court didn’t order a supplement to the application, just the review of additional material on a single issue.

“This was the evidentiary hearing that is very narrowly focused on the simulations for the substations,” said Christine Pirik, a lawyer for the developer, when Van Kley tried to use the argument to block admission of the additional evidence into the case record.

Administrative Law Judges David Hicks and Isabel Marcelletti sided with the developer and the siting board’s staff, noting their belief that the hearing process complies with the court’s directive.

Filings by the OPSB’s staff and the Ohio Environmental Council, which advocates for clean energy, also took issue with Van Kley’s arguments. ​“The Local Governments’ alleged procedural violations apply to service requirements for an application, not supplemental evidence submitted on remand,” lawyers Karin Nordstrom and Chris Tavenor wrote in the council’s Aug. 14 reply brief.

The clock is ticking for Oak Run, as lawyers for the developer noted in a May 18 court filing: ​“Oak Run is now in dire need to have the appeals process come to a close as soon as possible.”

Besides having spent more than $13 million already, the developer faces contractual deadlines from grid operator PJM Interconnection and others to reach commercial operation by 2030.

“Should the Project fail due to the lengthy time for considerations, Oak Run will lose its significant financial investment and the community and state of Ohio will lose the employment and financial benefits that would result from construction and operation of the Project,” including about $250 million for local governments, its filing said.

Plus, of course, the clean energy and battery storage.