This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was supposed to use up to $500 million from a Biden administration grant to usher in cleaner steelmaking in southwestern Ohio. Now, the company plans to instead put those funds toward a project that locks in old coal-based tech for decades and amps up local air pollution.

In a July 23 earnings call, Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves confirmed that the company aims to redirect the 2024 grant — which Congress originally earmarked for work that accelerates industrial decarbonization — to align with the pro-fossil-fuel Trump administration’s priorities.

“We have made major progress on the re-scoping of the Middletown project in compliance with the Trump administration’s energy dominance goals,” Goncalves said.

The money from the Department of Energy’s now-dismantled Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was meant to build a new facility to replace a coke-powered blast furnace at Cliffs’ Middletown Works. Blast furnaces use the dirty, coal-based fuel to purify iron ore into iron, which is then made into steel.

The new ​“direct reduced iron” facility would have purified iron ore without coal or coke by employing ions from natural gas or hydrogen to strip away unwanted oxygen ions. Then, two electric melting furnaces would then have readied the resulting iron for the final steps of steelmaking in the plant’s basic oxygen furnace.

Cliffs had indicated it hoped to eventually use hydrogen at Middletown Works, and the DOE estimated the facility upgrades could have slashed greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1 million tons annually.

But last summer, amid the Trump administration’s clawbacks of Biden-era clean energy funding, Cliffs began reevaluating the plan. A February air-permit application submitted to the state revealed the firm’s new idea: Simply refurbish Middletown Works’ blast furnace so it can run for another few decades, and add a cogeneration plant that uses the furnace’s waste heat to generate electricity and steam for the facility.

It wasn’t clear back in February that this work would be funded by the DOE grant, given that Congress originally allocated the funds for ​“advanced industrial technology,” which is defined as something ​“designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”

Goncalves’ comments in last month’s earnings call confirm that Cliffs does still plan to use the money for the Middletown Works, but to install run-of-the-mill technologies with questionable climate benefits.

“The Middletown blast furnace is due for a reline by 2030,” he said. ​“And this DOE grant will allow us to go further in optimizing the furnace and maximizing energy efficiency by capturing and using blast furnace gas to generate electricity on-site.”

Making electricity from the blast furnace’s gas is better than simply spewing it into the air, and would presumably offset some emissions from producing that power elsewhere. However, the project would still result in many more tons of greenhouse gases than the initial plan.

Goncalves noted that Cliffs would have another public announcement about the project within a month or so. Company representatives did not answer Canary Media’s follow-up questions about the work, its costs, emissions, or other issues.

Climate advocates are lamenting Cliffs’ walkback.

“The original proposal would have cut climate pollution, it would have cut health-harming pollution, and it would have created jobs,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at Industrious Labs, which advocates for decarbonizing heavy industry.

The cleaner-steel project would also have positioned the facility to compete favorably in markets where buyers still aim to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

“This is a horrible trade,” Lewis said.

How much more polluting is Cliffs’ new initiative?

Along with its climate impacts, Cliffs’ U-turn will result in its neighbors breathing in more dangerous chemicals.

Already, Middletown Works ranks in the top 10 polluters statewide for several health-harming contaminants, according to a 2024 report from Industrious Labs.

With the cogeneration plant and related upgrades, the plant is expected to annually emit 534 more tons of sulfur dioxide, 334 more tons of carbon monoxide, 179 more tons of nitrogen oxides, and 12 more tons of chemicals that increase smog, according to a draft permit issued by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in June. There would also be nearly 100 additional tons of different sizes of particle pollution.

Yet while projected emissions would be higher than those for almost all times during the past five years, the draft permit concludes net reductions will occur for all those health-harming chemicals except carbon monoxide.

That’s because instead of comparing the projected emissions with those in recent years, the Ohio EPA uses data from 2013 to 2015 as a baseline. Back then, Middletown Works still ran a hyper-polluting facility to make coke on-site. That group of ovens shut down in October 2021.

Comments filed by Industrious Labs and other environmental advocates challenge the Ohio EPA’s use of old data to calculate those offsets. They argue that if the agency had used emissions numbers from the past decade as the baseline, it might have found that the plan surpassed thresholds that would trigger further regulation or pollution limits.

Meanwhile, the Ohio EPA’s offset calculation offer little comfort for some area residents who have long felt plagued by the plant’s pollution.

“The cogen plant will reduce Cliffs’ energy use, saving them money, while they continue to harm [my] family and my neighbors’ health, and [with] even more pollution,” said Donna Ballinger, who lives approximately 1,000 feet from the Middletown Works and spoke at a July 9 public hearing.

Another local, Amy Wray, wrote to the Ohio EPA, ​“If it’s going to increase pollutants then we don’t want it. This town is already a toxic chemical soup.”

Still, Cliffs has substantial support from locals who see the plan as an environmentally sound way to keep the Middletown Works going.

“The proposed improvements to Cleveland-Cliffs will significantly reduce the facility’s carbon footprint while securing high-quality manufacturer and construction jobs for generations to come,” said Brian Kuhbander, who spoke for the Construction and General Laborers’ Local 534 union at the July 9 hearing.

It’s worth noting that the original green steel plan would have had big employment benefits, too. Besides protecting more than 2,000 existing jobs at the Middletown Works, the new facilities would have created 170 new permanent positions in addition to 1,200 construction jobs.

The public comment period on the draft permit is over, and the Ohio EPA expects to make a decision on a final permit by the end of this year, according to Dina Pierce, a public information officer for the agency. Cliffs has 18 months to begin construction once a permit is issued.

How long it may take to finish the project remains unclear. As power demand from data centers skyrockets, waiting lists for turbines needed for the cogeneration plant have grown to five years or more.

Lewis of Industrious Labs said it’s ​“not too late” to switch back to the earlier approach, particularly since the company did a lot of work to develop the cleaner-steel plan. A 2024 press release from Cliffs said it was prepared to invest more than $1 billion in addition to the government funding for that project, which would also have curbed its future production costs.

“They can — and they should — bring back that original plan,” Lewis said.

The post Ohio Steel Giant Aims to Use Biden Climate Funds for Polluting Project appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

More and more Ohioans are struggling to pay their utility bills. That’s one clear takeaway from the latest utility reports showing how many customers had their power shut off because of unpaid bills.

Across the state’s regulated electric utilities, an average of 7.7% of customers had their power turned off because of past-due bills for the latest reporting year, ending May 31 — a higher rate than in any of the three preceding periods, which ran between 6% and 7%.

Each customer is one household or business, so the total number of people affected would be more than the total of nearly 345,000 disconnections. The average amount customers owed when their power was cut was more than $60 greater than it was for the year before.

The company reports filed at the end of June with the Ohio Public Utilities Commission are yet one more sign of the energy affordability crisis affecting households nationwide.

“Families are put in an extremely vulnerable position when electric utilities shut off their electricity for a debt,” said Shelby Green, a research and communications manager with the Energy and Policy Institute, a national watchdog group that promotes clean energy. Among other things, no electricity typically means no ability to cool or heat homes, refrigerate food, and turn lights on at night.

The bump in disconnection rates could be driven by numerous factors — such as that families have less money left over after higher expenses for healthcare, food, and other needs. Yet the skyrocketing cost of energy certainly plays a role.

The average Ohio electricity bill grew by more than 53% from June 2021 to June 2026, according to the Electricity Price Hub from Heatmap and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s significantly higher than the national average growth of 32% over that time period.

Energy bills have been on the uptick for multiple reasons: among them, ballooning electricity demand, much of it from data center developers; the impacts of extreme weather; and costs linked to aging transmission and distribution equipment.

In any case, experts agree that the U.S. needs more electrons flowing onto the grid. But that’s become increasingly difficult to accomplish as President Donald Trump throws sand in the gears of companies developing wind and solar — energy sources that are often relatively quicker and cheaper to build than fossil-fueled plants. His administration has not only killed renewable energy tax incentives but also snarled permitting and — in some cases — tried to halt projects, either through stop-work orders or payoffs.

“Instead of trying to suppress all these forms of energy that we need, we need to be doing everything we can to get all that energy online,” said Jesse Lee, a senior adviser for Climate Power, which advocates for progress on climate action and clean energy. ​“Then maybe you could start to catch up with the exponential increase in demand.”

While Trump’s actions affect projects nationwide, renewables developers face a particularly steep uphill battle in Ohio. The state’s permitting rules and local restrictions for wind and solar are notoriously challenging. Pending legislation could hamstring clean energy even more.

And House Bill 6, the 2019 law at the heart of Ohio’s ongoing corruption scandal, eliminated widely available utility-run energy-efficiency programs. Those initiatives can help households use less electricity, thus lowering their costs and potentially reducing the risk of overdue bills. The Trump administration has also moved to slash support for energy-efficiency upgrades.

While many people struggle to pay their power bills, utility executives are raking in the big bucks. An April analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute shows utility profits and executive compensation surging in recent years. Bill Fehrman, head of American Electric Power, which owns an Ohio utility, made a whopping $36 million in 2025.

Unless top utility executives and shareholders pass some of their take back to customers, Green says, ​“we’ll continue to see the trend of disconnections grow.”

A closer look at Ohio’s disconnection data

The topline figures about power shutoffs hide some dramatic differences between Ohio utilities.

Overall, the companies cut electricity to households about 345,000 times from June 2025 through May 2026. The average arrears — the amount owed at the time of the shutoff — was $558, up from $495 the year before.

FirstEnergy had the lowest disconnection rate for that latest reporting year, at 3.6%, as well as the least variability in average arrears in recent years. Since 2020, the company has beefed up efforts to help customers avoid shutoffs, including ​“more flexible payment plans, increased outreach to connect people with assistance, coordination with state and local programs, and expanded protections for vulnerable customers,” spokesperson Brooke Conlan said.

AEP’s Ohio Power utility had the highest rate of disconnections, at 15% — at least double that reported by FirstEnergy, AES Ohio, or Duke Energy. That continues a trend from the three preceding years.

“Turning off someone’s power is always a last resort, and we do not disconnect customers during extreme weather,” like heat waves, said an AEP spokesperson via email. The person did not provide their name or answer Canary Media’s question about why the company’s disconnection rate was so high compared with those of Ohio’s other regulated electric utilities.

More detailed information may help the state bring utility disconnection rates down.

For years, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio resisted requiring companies to provide disconnection data based on zip code. Such data could show whether utility shutoffs disproportionately impact communities of color or other vulnerable groups.

However, a 2024 settlement obligates AEP Ohio to provide that zip code data to the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, which is the official state advocate for utility consumers. The office has finished reviewing that company’s data for 2023–2024 and plans to look for trends in information for subsequent reporting periods.

“Our analysis has shown that areas with high poverty rates do not always align with areas experiencing the highest number of disconnections, making local data important,” explained Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis. ​“This information helps OCC identify trends, target concerns, and advocate for solutions that reduce disconnections and keep consumers connected to essential electric service.”

The information can also help the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel target its own outreach efforts, Willis said. That work can help people understand payment options, bill-assistance programs, and other consumer protections.

One point Willis noted that is not obvious from the lump-sum data: ​“Neighborhoods with the highest overdue utility balances were not always the same communities experiencing the most shutoffs.”

The 10 zip codes with the highest disconnection rates were primarily high-poverty areas in the cities of Columbus and Canton, where customers had their power shut off for lower average arrears than customers in rural and Appalachian areas did, Willis noted. However, it took longer for ratepayers in those less densely populated areas to get their power back. Higher accumulated debt — sometimes exceeding $4,000 — may make it more difficult for households to restore service quickly, Willis said.

The Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel now also receives zip code-level disconnection data from AES Ohio, as well as Northeast Ohio Natural Gas and Duke Energy Ohio’s natural gas utility, Willis noted.

Meanwhile, some Ohio advocates expect keeping up with power bills to get even more challenging as climate change drives hotter summers, requiring people to run their cooling units longer and harder.

“Now, with the summer and needing AC to even stay healthy, it seems like it’s only going to grow the problem,” said Morgan Harper, co-founder and executive director for Columbus Stand Up!, a grassroots organizing group that advocates for working people.

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The post More Ohioans Are Getting Their Power Shut Off as Energy Costs Surge appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Solar arrays cover a tiny share of Ohio’s farmland — but you wouldn’t know it based on how often renewable energy opponents call to block or limit utility-scale installations in agricultural areas.

Solar panels sit on less than one-seventh of 1% of prime farmland in Ohio, according to a map recently released by the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA.

In Ohio — and increasingly around the U.S. — fears over farmland loss have become one of the most common arguments against proposed large-scale solar development.

For example, agricultural issues were on Republican state Sen. Bill Reineke’s list of reasons for sponsoring a 2021 law that now lets Ohio counties ban most solar and wind projects and imposes added hurdles for those that might move ahead.

Two years later, a presentation to Ohio lawmakers by Mitch Given, then Ohio director at pro-natural gas group The Empowerment Alliance, included slides on ​“lost Ohio farmland” and ​“fighting the nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields.” Shortly after that, Given spoke at a rally to build opposition to the Frasier Solar project in Knox County.

When Richland County banned large-scale solar and wind energy in most of its territory last year, all three commissioners voted for the resolution, saying they were deferring to officials at the township level who wanted to preserve the agricultural nature of the area.

“They are very protective of farmlands, and it was clear to those township trustees that they did not want to lose farmland to large wind and solar,” Richland County Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media last fall.

When residents mounted a referendum effort to overturn the ban, Richland Farmland Preservation was the group whose campaign successfully kept it in place.

It’s not just Ohio. Last week, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins invoked arguments about the loss of prime farmland to push back against New York’s approach to siting solar energy. She made similar claims last August while announcing that her agency — which has long helped farmers install solar arrays on their own properties — ​“will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland.”

Local officials in Idaho, Wisconsin, and several other states have also passed ordinances restricting or banning solar on certain farmland, according to a 2025 report from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Calls to reject solar on farmland often focus on the acreage of a proposed installation — but they rarely provide context on what a few hundred acres looks like in practice, or how it compares to other uses that may encroach on agricultural areas. That’s where SEIA’s new map comes in.

Overall, about 31 of Ohio’s 37 square miles of solar generation area overlap with what the U.S. Department of Agriculture would deem prime farmland, the SEIA map shows.

Meanwhile, golf courses take up more than 2.7 times that much. Suburban sprawl from 2014 through 2024 used more than five times as much.

“That farmland is being permanently lost,” said Tom Bullock, executive director for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio, a consumer advocacy group. In contrast, building solar on leased land ​“doesn’t destroy the ability to make it arable land once again.”

Calls to protect farmland from solar also tend not to acknowledge the fact that a significant amount of active farmland is, in fact, being used to produce energy already — just in a far less efficient manner.

Ohio farmers harvested corn from more than 3.1 million acres last year, Department of Agriculture numbers show. About 40% of that is used to make ethanol, most of which is blended into gasoline. Corn ethanol biofuels require about 30 times the land per unit of energy as solar, according to a 2025 study by Cornell University researchers.

The increasing pushback against solar on farmland comes as Ohio and other states face growing electricity demands that are pushing energy bills ever higher.

“With energy demand rising at a historically fast rate, Ohio needs every electron it can get, as soon as possible,” said Andrew Linhares, Midwest state affairs director for SEIA, noting that solar and storage accounted for 91% of new capacity added in the U.S. for the first three months this year.

“We need all forms of energy, but gas plants take five to seven years to build, and we are still years away from bringing new nuclear online,” Linhares said. ​“Solar-plus-storage is available now.”

From a local perspective, these statewide concerns may not ​“move the needle,” Bullock noted, ​“because a local township is worried about their township, and not the macro numbers.”

Even so, better data can help local officials make better decisions as they scrutinize different development proposals.

“Land use planning, not necessarily at a federal or even regional level, but at a local level … has got to be critical,” said Dale Arnold, director of energy, utility, and local government policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, which advocates for farmers.

That’s because officials must juggle a slew of other priorities alongside agricultural needs, from boosting economic development and tax revenue to ensuring adequate housing and the protection of natural areas.

But, many advocates point out, solar and farming do not need to be at odds.

A farmer in Knox County teamed up on a sheep-grazing agreement with the Frasier Solar project, for example. And pilot studies at a Madison County development aim to develop best practices for growing forage or other crops at scale amid rows of panels.

“Achieving a clean energy future does not have to be a choice between agriculture and energy production,” said Karin Nordstrom, an attorney with advocacy group the Ohio Environmental Council.

The post In Ohio, Solar Is No Big Threat to Farmland appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Last year, Ohio legislators almost unanimously enacted a sweeping law meant to get energy generation online faster and meet surging electricity demand.

The law, Ohio House Bill 15, is meant to be apply evenly to all types of energy when it comes to adding new generation, according to some leading state lawmakers.

“We said we’re going to have a level playing field. Let the free market work,” Republican Sen. Brian Chavez, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, said of HB 15 during a legislative panel at the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners in Columbus last week.

Yet now state lawmakers are advancing a bill that would expand preferences for natural gas and nuclear generation while adding even more hurdles for solar and wind — energy sources that the state has already stymied over the last decade.

On June 10, the Republican-dominated Ohio Senate voted along straight party lines to pass Senate Bill 294, which is based on a model bill from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and calls for electricity generation to ​“employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” Louisiana and Utah have passed similar laws, and bills are also under consideration in Arizona, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and West Virginia, according to an April report from ALEC.

But the bill’s current definition of ​“reliable” could cause the Ohio Power Siting Board to block many utility-scale solar and wind projects, even after many groups testified against the original version, introduced in the General Assembly last October.

“We need more supply, not less,” said Democratic Sen. Kent Smith, ranking minority member of the Senate Energy Committee, who also spoke at the conference. He cited calls by both grid operator PJM Interconnection and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for an all-of-the-above approach to adding new generation. ​“We need to be generation-agnostic. We need to let the market work.”

Chavez said the current version of SB 294 could allow solar and wind to qualify as reliable if they are combined with batteries. And developers wouldn’t need to meet the bill’s criteria for projects that are below the threshold needed for state review: under 50 megawatts for solar and under 5 MW for wind.

“If it goes to the Power Siting Board, we just said you have to have 50% reliability,” said Chavez, who has worked in and has had multiple connections to the oil and gas industry. But, he continued, ​“flat land is at a premium. … So we would say, if you’re going to put your bigger power supplies in Ohio, you shall consider if it is dispatchable more than 50% of the time.”

Still, it’s not clear how many wind or solar projects could qualify. SB 294 mandates that any ​“reliable energy source” have a ​“site-combined minimum capacity factor” of 50%. The capacity factor describes the ratio of a generator’s actual electricity output over the course of a year to the maximum that source could theoretically produce.

The average capacity factor for photovoltaic solar farms in the United States was just 24.4% last year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. If solar projects are required to install enough battery storage to reach a 50% threshold, project costs would significantly increase.

“Capacity factors are not measures of reliability and the wrong thing to focus on,” said Andrew Linhares, Midwest director of state affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association. ​“Ohio won’t solve its energy challenges by sidelining solar and storage, which are the fastest-growing and most affordable sources of new power on the grid.”

Further, SB 294 demands that power be readily available and dispatchable ​“at all times” of high usage and ​“in times of need.” Facilities often discharge batteries’ energy at high-usage times to take advantage of higher prices, but whether that could qualify as ​“at all times” is also unclear.

The bill’s focus on the reliability of any single resource is misguided because of how the grid functions, according to Democratic Rep. Tristan Rader, the ranking minority member of the House Energy Committee, who spoke at the conference as well. ​“That’s why we have peaker plants.”

While states issue permits for different facilities, and state policies affect what types of generation investments they attract, PJM is responsible for ensuring the reliable operation of the regional grid for Ohio and all or parts of a dozen other states and the District of Columbia.

“PJM is not favoring or disfavoring any resources class during this time when we need every megawatt of power generated to manage our supply/​demand imbalance being driven by data center growth,” said spokesperson Jeffrey Shields.

The grid operator already accounts for variability in power production and the likelihood that resources will be able to supply electricity when needed, noted Evan Vaughan, executive director for MAREC Action, who also attended last week’s conference and heard the Ohio lawmakers’ comments. The tool for that is a metric called the effective load-carrying capacity, which is meant to capture how reliable a given resource is for purposes of PJM’s capacity market.

“Ultimately, the grid is reliable because it is a diverse mix of resources,” Vaughan said. ​“It’s not reliable because of any one particular resource.”

No single facility is immune from problems. PJM tweaked its methodology for calculating effective load-carrying capacity after multiple gas plants failed during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022. That storm’s high winds also caused water levels to fall near the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio. Numerous gas plants also failed during Winter Storm Fern this January, while wind farms performed above their expected output, according to a Grid Strategies report for the Niskanen Center, which was released in March.

Affordability remains a major issue, too. Prices reflect energy markets, the capacity market, and an ancillary services market, which helps maintain balance on the electric grid and minimize blackouts.

“If you look at the wholesale price in each of those markets, energy is actually the biggest factor in a consumer’s bill, not capacity,” Vaughan said. And while there are roles in the system for different types of generation, ​“energy is provided best by cheap electrons, which is what wind and solar provide.”

Proponents of SB 294 during its Senate hearings included ALEC and the Heartland Institute, which both have multiple links to fossil fuel interests and a history of undermining climate science and lobbying against renewables. The Oil & Gas Workers Association also supported the bill.

Opponents include the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum, American Clean Power, the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition, multiple environmental organizations, and dozens of individuals.

The bill is now in the Ohio House, where it was introduced on June 16 and is likely to be taken up when lawmakers return from their summer recess.

While the bill no longer states that its requirements apply ​“in all cases,” as in the original version, it does preserve other siting criteria under Ohio law — including a requirement that projects serve the ​“public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

Serving the public interest broadly is a good thing. However, officials at the Power Siting Board have taken a narrow view in some cases where local townships have objected to solar and wind projects, treating such opposition as ​“controlling” on the public interest question, even over environmental, economic, and other considerations. If SB 294 becomes law, there’s a risk that regulators might similarly rely on it to rule against renewable energy projects — in contrast to the state’s lax stance toward permitting fossil fuel infrastructure.

“If you create a policy, that policy drives investments,” said Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis. And when and if it’s passed by the General Assembly, ​“it’s out there. It is policy.”

The post New Ohio Bill Could Hamstring Big Wind and Solar Farms Even More appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

The Ohio Supreme Court recently blocked a permit for what would be the state’s largest solar installation. The 800-megawatt Oak Run Solar Project still has a pathway to completion — the court reversed only one part of the state siting board’s prior approval — but it remains unclear how things will play out.

This is just the latest example of how state lawmakers and other officials have obstructed renewable energy development in Ohio. In total, they have thwarted more than 5.3 gigawatts of solar and wind projects over the last dozen years.

So says a recent analysis released by Save Ohio Parks, which opposes fracking and oil and gas extraction from public lands.

“It’s a lot of inexpensive power that we don’t have available to us. And it means fewer choices for consumers,” said Tom Bullock, executive director for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. ​“Boy, would that come in handy right now when electricity prices keep going up, up, up.”

Ohio, like many other states, is facing rising utility bills as well as massive new energy demand due to a wave of proposed data centers. The Save Ohio Parks report contends that clean energy could have helped rein in those energy costs while meeting a huge chunk of data centers’ demand if Ohio had allowed more development. The 5.3 GW of blocked clean energy would have also avoided large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution.

The state stepped up its pushback on wind and solar as each of those clean energy sources became more cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear power.

A 2014 law that more than doubled property-line setbacks for wind turbines effectively blocked over 3.3 GW of utility-scale projects in the state, the report notes. Efforts in 2017 to roll back those restrictions failed, leaving Ohio among the nation’s most restrictive states for wind power.

“The economics of a wind farm don’t work when you need that amount of setback from a property line,” said Rachel Kutzley, a Save Ohio Parks board member who worked on the report.

Seven years later, Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 52, which lets counties ban new solar projects above 50 MW of capacity and ​“economically significant” wind farms able to produce more than 5 MW of electricity. SB 52 doesn’t let counties ban power plants that use fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Neither the Save Ohio Parks report nor a February 2026 paper in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy quantified how much clean energy generation the bans by Ohio counties have prevented.

Projects that were already in grid operator PJM Interconnection’s queue are not subject to outright bans under SB 52. The Ohio Power Siting Board, however, can deny permits for individual projects — and since 2021 it has rejected eight installations, making Ohio one of the toughest states for developing clean energy. The board has routinely referenced local government opposition when rejecting projects.

Those eight rulings alone have killed more than 1.1 GW of solar generation.

Developers withdrew five other applications for projects that would have added roughly another 1 GW, after adverse recommendations from the Power Siting Board’s staff or significant local pushback made it likely the full board would deny permits. The Kingwood Solar case, which challenges the board’s deference to local government opposition, is due to be decided soon.

Matt Schilling, a spokesperson for the Ohio Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, said he did not have a comment on the report from Save Ohio Parks. ​“However, I will observe OPSB has approved 49 solar projects across Ohio with nameplate capacity totaling 9,250 MW,” he added.

Only about one-third of those approvals were for permit applications filed after SB 52’s effective date.

It’s not just solar and wind — Ohio has also stymied energy-efficiency efforts over the years, which would have additionally cut down on pollution and saved money for residents. The Save Ohio Parks’ report doesn’t consider the effects of the state’s infamous House Bill 6, which eliminated utilities’ energy-efficiency requirements after 2020.

Those impacts would have been quite sizable, said Mike Specian, a utilities manager with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, who shared his separate analysis with Canary Media.

If utilities had continued to achieve energy savings for customers after 2020, the cumulative savings could have been as much as 70 terawatt-hours, or 70 million megawatt-hours, Specian said. That high number is partially because energy-efficiency investments provide benefits, on average, for nearly a decade. ​“Those savings deliver year over year over year,” he said.

The mix of thwarted solar and wind projects alone likely would have displaced 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel plants, said Ben King, a director with research firm Rhodium Group’s energy and climate practice. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas that drives human-caused climate change.

King based that estimate on results from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Avoided Emissions and Generation Tool. Ohio’s lost clean energy generation could have cut millions of metric tons of pollution from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants with harmful health effects as well, the EPA tool shows.

The lost clean energy opportunities are also impacting consumers’ finances, although it’s hard to tell exactly how much because electricity prices reflect multiple components.

Ohio gets about 7.5% of its electricity from wind and solar, compared with 80.6% from coal and gas, according to federal data for 2025.

When it comes to the electricity dispatch market, ​“the generation we have less of is the least expensive in Ohio,” said Ashley Brown, a former member of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Solar and wind have no fuel costs, so their marginal costs for producing energy are very low. That competition also reins in bidding by producers of other forms of electricity, particularly fossil fuels, whose prices have soared even higher because of the Trump administration’s war on Iran.

“It really does force enormous price pressure on other forms of generation,” Brown said.

Less solar and wind generation has some effect on the capacity market, the mechanism PJM uses to ensure it will have enough energy producers available to meet future demand spikes. Last year, capacity made up about 16% of the wholesale cost of electricity, noted Jeff Shields, PJM’s senior manager for external communications. Even though renewables count less toward capacity than other types of energy, ​“we can use all the capacity we can get,” he said.

Renewables’ ability to come online more quickly than other sources could do a lot to curb inflation, said Bullock at the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. ​“Unless Ohio takes action, consumers are locked on this escalator. We’re strapped to the escalator that keeps going up.”

Nevertheless, some Ohio lawmakers seem intent on making it harder — not easier — to build new clean energy projects in the state.

SB 294, reported out of the Senate Energy Committee on June 2, would further cement the state’s preferences for natural gas and nuclear power — and potentially make it even harder to get approval from regulators for solar and wind.

The post Ohio Has Blocked a Lot of Wind and Solar. Its Residents Pay the Price. appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week.

An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its 18 townships. But the ballot’s wording perplexed enough of them to have flipped the results.

That preliminary finding doesn’t change the outcome of the May 5 Richland County election. The final tally was 53% ​“yes” votes to keep the ban versus 47% ​“no” votes to axe it. But the poll sheds light on how people in the county really felt and can inform future work to roll back clean energy restrictions in Ohio and beyond.

Richland County’s referendum drew national attention because it was a rare case of residents pushing back against limits on solar and wind power. Such state and local restrictions have grown dramatically across the U.S. in recent years.

Meanwhile, skyrocketing demand for electricity is fueling an affordability crisis. Solar and wind, and batteries to store their energy, can generally come online more quickly than natural gas plants to meet some of that demand. Renewables also aren’t subject to fluctuating fuel costs, and they increase competition in electricity markets, which can rein in power prices.

Richland County’s three commissioners relied on a 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, to pass the restrictions last July. Local residents who opposed the ban quickly began pushing to put it to a vote. SB 52 states that for any referendum against a county’s ban, its commissioners’ resolution needs a majority vote in favor to go into effect.

So, a ​“yes” vote means someone opposes the referendum effort to overturn the ban, while a ​“no” vote means the person backs the campaign to get rid of the ban.

“It’s confusing,” County Commissioner Cliff Mears told Canary Media in March when explaining his support against the referendum and for the ban.

Lots of voters may have been confused, too — about one in five across all political groups, according to early analysis of the exit surveys completed by 1,193 of the 23,042 people who voted on the issue. ​“When we model what the result would have looked like if everyone had voted their stated preference, the outcome flips,” to 54% wanting to reverse the ban and 46% wanting to keep it, said Graham Diedrich, a University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate who oversaw the exit polling at a dozen locations across Richland County.

“We anticipated this would be an issue,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, an organizing group that assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development with the ​“no” campaign. ​“I think we did the best we could on educating folks on this very complicated ballot language.”

Misunderstanding went beyond the ballot language, said Brian McPeek, one of the local leaders for the vote-no group. Those in favor of the ban suggested that repealing it would open the floodgates for projects to come into the area, McPeek said. In fact, the county would simply have returned to the prior system of accepting or rejecting most new solar and wind farms on a case-by-case basis before the projects head to the Ohio Power Siting Board for state permitting.

To further complicate matters, supporters of the renewable energy restrictions tried to cast the referendum effort as driven by outside interests, pointing to the New York headquarters for the NRDC Action Fund, which provided advertising for the campaign.

However, all decision-making for the campaign was handled by local leaders, stressed Bogin at Ohio Citizen Action. People from Ohio Citizen Action and the NRDC Action Fund identified their organizations at public town hall meetings. And Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development disclosed both groups clearly on its finance report. The finance report for the campaign to maintain the ban didn’t highlight its connections to cheerleaders for the natural gas industry, such as The Empowerment Alliance. Canary Media and the Energy and Policy Institute publicized those links only after connecting the dots from other public records and emails.

Bigger picture, Ohio’s preference for fossil fuels is causing renewable energy companies to take many projects elsewhere, said Michael Benson, president of the board of directors for Green Energy Ohio, an industry association. ​“We are losing out on the economic development potential solar provides to a state in desperate need of more energy for our grid.”

Lessons learned

The campaign against the ban did not explicitly stress renewable energy’s role in limiting climate change and its impacts. Yet concern about a warming planet seemed to factor into residents’ votes.

“Voters who were very worried about climate change backed repeal at 75%, while those not at all worried backed the ban at the same rate,” Diedrich said. Separate responses to a 2025 survey analyzed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 53% of people in Richland County said they were worried about climate change. That’s close to the 54% of exit-poll respondents whose answers suggested they opposed the ban.

Party affiliation was also a factor, with 72% of Republicans voting for the ban and 76% of Democrats voting against it. However, Richland County is home to far more Republicans, who outnumber Democrats by more than 3 to 1, meaning many must have voted against the ban in order for the final results to be so close.

“One of the biggest lessons from this campaign is just how important sustained local organizing and trusted community voices are in conversations around energy and land use,” Bogin said. In her view, the movement to reverse the ban in Richland County got as much support as it did ​“because the people making the case were neighbors talking to neighbors.” She remains hopeful that other efforts to reverse prohibitions on clean energy may succeed, and thinks the campaign could trigger a larger discussion at the statehouse about the hurdles SB 52 creates for renewables, which don’t apply to either fossil fuel or nuclear projects.

Although the campaign did not overturn the ban, Diedrich noted that 90% of survey respondents were aware of the renewables referendum before casting their ballot. To him, that shows the group effectively educated voters, despite the ​“structural” problem of the ballot wording.

McPeek said he still feels that most people will ultimately come out against blanket prohibitions on solar and wind when they get all the facts. And adoption of a prohibition against solar and wind does not mean it will go on forever.

“The question of who gets to decide what happens on private land in Richland County did not end tonight,” Morgan Carroll, another leader in the campaign against the ban, said in a statement after the vote was tallied on Election Day. ​“We will continue to stand with farmers and landowners who believe that right belongs to them, not to their government and certainly not to the fossil fuel industry.”

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The post Confusing Ballot Wording May Have Tipped Ohio County’s Vote on Renewables Ban appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Ohio is a notoriously difficult state for building renewable energy. Many counties ban wind and solar outright, but even in those that don’t, state regulators often rely on local opposition to deny permits for developers.

Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, do not face these hurdles. This discrepancy is underscored by the fact that plans to build two fracking-waste wells in Ohio’s rural Washington County are poised to move ahead despite objections from residents, environmental groups, and nearby town governments. DeepRock Disposal Solutions aims to use these deep holes in the earth to push toxic liquid waste from fracking oil and gas into porous rock layers far underground.

Last week, a Franklin County Court of Appeals magistrate — a court officer who handles preliminary matters as well as detailed issues in complex cases — recommended the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Buckeye Environmental Network in opposition to the wells. The group argues that the state illegally relied on outdated rules when permitting the project, which risks contaminating local groundwater supplies.

DeepRock applied for drilling permits in late 2021, about a month before the state adopted stricter waste-well regulations that are meant to better protect public safety and health. Although the state didn’t complete a technical review or issue DeepRock’s permits until 2025, it relied on the more lax standards in place when the company had first applied. Buckeye Environmental Network says that the current rules would have required a denial of the permits.

In recommending that the Franklin County Court of Appeals dismiss the lawsuit, Magistrate Thomas Scholl wrote that Buckeye Environmental Network had not adequately shown that the state ​“had a clear legal duty” to use the new rules. To reach that conclusion, he noted that DeepRock had a ​“vested and substantial” interest in the agency applying the old framework, adding that ​“permit applications require substantial investments of time, capital, and technical resources to complete.”

Renewable energy firms, by contrast, have historically not gotten similar deference from state regulators.

Opposition by local government boards and area residents has been enough for the Ohio Power Siting Board to deny permits for certain solar projects, even after developers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on studies, hearings, and other work to meet legal requirements. Last month, for example, the flip-flop of a single township trustee’s vote led to the denial of a permit for the 94-megawatt Crossroads Solar Grazing Center. (The Ohio Supreme Court is currently considering whether local government opposition was sufficient grounds for denying a permit in the case of Kingwood Solar.)

Parties in the fracking-waste lawsuit — which include state regulators, DeepRock, and Buckeye Environmental Network — have until April 30 to file objections to the magistrate’s recommendation. But if judges at the court agree with the magistrate — as they often do — and dismiss the case, it could clear the way for DeepRock to drill its wells in the coming months.

“We believe that the decision speaks for itself, so we have no additional comment,” said Karina Cheung, spokesperson at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

“How much waste can one county take?”

Ohio already has more than 200 Class II injection wells that together accept more than a billion gallons per year of super-salty fluids from fracking activities. This brine can contain heavy metals, radioactive chemicals, and ​“trade secret” compounds. Seventeen of those wells are in Washington County, along with many other wells for drilling for natural gas, Buckeye Environmental Network reports.

“Washington County has been forced to accept over 71 million barrels of oil and gas wastewater since 2010,” said Bev Reed, Appalachian community organizer for the network. ​“How much waste can one county take before someone looks at this and says ​‘enough is enough’?”

Others are pushing back, too. The city of Marietta, whose municipal water system and source water protection area is roughly two miles from DeepRock’s project sites, passed a resolution last year to oppose one of DeepRock’s permits. In March, officials for the city of Marietta and nearby townships also asked Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio lawmakers to impose a three-year moratorium on additional wells in Washington County. Although similar opposition from local governments has tanked renewables projects, these efforts have not yielded results.

One of the primary concerns is that the waste wells will leak and contaminate groundwater. In multiple instances, waste from oil and gas wells in the region has moved outside injection wells, said Megan Hunter, an attorney with Earthjustice who represents Buckeye Environmental Network in the case.

It is the Department of Natural Resources’ responsibility to enforce the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, she added, and given the risks, the agency should have applied the stricter rules when considering DeepRock’s permits.

“This role comes with tremendous power and mandates that [the department] not issue a permit unless the applicant demonstrates the disposal well will not endanger underground sources of drinking water and public health and safety,” Hunter said. “[The department] has the discretion — indeed, the responsibility — to thoroughly investigate these reports and to subject any new wells permitted in Washington County to the full rigor of the existing application process.”

Compared with the new rules, the old ones require the state to examine a much smaller area around a proposed well when approving permits. For DeepRock’s projects, that meant regulators ignored nearly 200 oil and gas wells within a two-mile radius of the projects, including some abandoned and ​“orphaned” wells that can act as pathways for waste to contaminate water or other resources, Reed said.

The Department of Natural Resources’ director, Mary Mertz, pushed back on the idea that her agency disregards residents’ concerns about risks. At an Ohio State Bar Association event in March, she acknowledged the frustration of residents who oppose oil and gas industry activities, but said that regulators have a duty to grant permits when companies meet various conditions spelled out by law.

Mertz added that the agency has followed up in the ​“very few” places where fracking waste has apparently migrated out of injection zones. But its personnel have not yet come across an instance in which groundwater has been impacted, she noted.

Ultimately, Mertz said, she thinks that what residents in areas with oil and gas waste disposal are ​“concerned about is really a policy issue: Should we have these injection wells? And how do we feel about them?”

Even so, there’s a clear bias in how the state’s lawmakers and regulators treat different energy sources, observed Cathy Cowan Becker, board president for Save Ohio Parks, a group that opposes fracking of public lands and which is not a party to the case.

“Oil and gas are heavily favored,” she said, ​“while solar and wind have been made almost impossible to site.”

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The post An Ohio Court May OK Fracking-Waste Wells Despite Pollution Concerns appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

The historic criminal trial of two former FirstEnergy executives ended with a deadlocked jury and mistrial. Now, they’re set to stand trial for a second time on the same state criminal charges related to Ohio’s House Bill 6 utility corruption scandal.

It’s the latest twist in the largest corruption scandal in state history, in which FirstEnergy’s executives allegedly bribed officials to pass and protect HB 6, a 2019 law to bail out uncompetitive coal and nuclear plants and to gut the state’s clean energy standards. Judge Susan Baker Ross plans to begin the new trial on Sept. 28.

The effects of the scandal are visible to this day: Ohioans have less solar and wind power, pay higher energy bills, and continue to have more pollution as a result of HB 6.

The state’s criminal case has focused on allegations that the former executives paid a $4.3 million bribe to a company owned by the late Sam Randazzo, weeks before he became Ohio’s top utility regulator. Other claims include fraud, money laundering, records tampering, racketeering, and conspiracy.

The defendants, FirstEnergy’s former CEO Chuck Jones and its former senior vice president for external affairs Mik Dowling, have pleaded not guilty in the state case and in a pending federal criminal case against them.

FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 that it and its subsidiaries had paid approximately $60 million to dark money groups, which then funneled the funds to an organization controlled by former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder. Householder was convicted in 2023 on charges under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

State prosecutors did not include charges about Householder in their indictment, so Baker Ross kept that evidence out of the state case. She also excluded statements by FirstEnergy lawyers that fingered Jones and Dowling as the individuals who made the payments.

The judge’s rulings also kept jurors from learning about FirstEnergy’s admission in a deferred prosecution agreement that it paid the $4.3 million to Randazzo’s company shortly before he became chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. In return, FirstEnergy expected Randazzo to pass HB 6 and otherwise further the company’s priorities ​“as requested and as opportunities arose,” the company admitted in the agreement.

The two-month trial ended on March 31 when jurors made it clear they could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Minimizing confusion at the retrial

Ashley Brown, a former public utilities regulator for Ohio, said confusion could have led to the hung jury.

“The prosecutor failed to provide a full context of the legal ethics and regulatory aspects of the case,” Brown said.

Even when Dennis Deters, a current public utilities commissioner, was on the stand, the state’s lawyers did not ask him to explain some basic issues that are obscure for most of the public, Brown noted.

In the state’s retrial, a better grounding could help guide jurors when testimony again gets into the weeds.

Additional context could have helped rebut suggestions in testimony by other former FirstEnergy executives that money payments under secret side agreements were common and somehow acceptable in regulatory cases. In fact, regulators fined FirstEnergy nearly $19 million for that violation last fall.

Similarly, the first trial included multiple instances in which cross-examination by defense lawyers mixed up different aspects of utility regulation. The defense at one point treated money that FirstEnergy earned as compensation or incentives for offering energy-efficiency programs as equivalent to a charge it could collect under HB 6 for basically doing nothing.

“Most people don’t understand how that all works,” said Michael Benza, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who teaches criminal law and procedure. ​“So corruption can kind of hide in plain view because nobody understands what’s happening in the first place.”

The defense’s cross-examination also suggested that Randazzo couldn’t have been acting on FirstEnergy’s behalf, because ending the energy-efficiency standard cut off some of the fees the company had collected, and because Randazzo already wanted to get rid of the standard. On retrial, the prosecution might include evidence that FirstEnergy tried to put the brakes on Ohio’s energy efficiency standard as early as 2012. And, of course, one can still be paid unlawfully for something they otherwise want to do.

Brown also pointed out a question that the jurors sent the judge last month, asking for clarification about whether a bribe can happen before someone formally submits their application for a public appointment. From Brown’s perspective, the question was a legal one, to which the judge should have answered yes.

Trials’ timing may matter

The federal case against Jones and Dowling does not yet have a trial date, although one could be set next month.

As a general rule, what happens in the state criminal case should not affect what happens in the federal case, Benza said. Nonetheless, if the defense ultimately gets a verdict of not guilty in the state case, it could change how federal prosecutors approach their trial.

Because the federal case alleges violations of Ohio law in order to prove there was a pattern of corrupt activity under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, however, the state case might well influence the federal one. A not-guilty verdict on charges related to bribing Randazzo could block that part of the case dealing with allegations about him, suggested David DeVillers, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio who is now in private practice with Barnes & Thornburg in Columbus. The federal government could still move ahead on the allegations relating to Householder.

For now, both the prosecution and defense will hope that the jury comes back with a unanimous verdict in their favor the next time around. But, Benza stressed, a ​“not guilty” verdict is not an acquittal.

“‘Not guilty’ does not mean you’re innocent,” he said. ​“The jury by saying ​‘not guilty,’ at best, is saying that the prosecution failed to prove an element or elements of its case.”

The post What to Expect as FirstEnergy Corruption Trial Heads for a Do-Over appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Ohio is poised to block a major solar farm because of local pushback — even though a substantial number of public comments opposing the installation appear to be fabricated.

Open Road Renewables plans to invest roughly $98 million for the 94-megawatt Crossroads Solar Grazing Center, which would use land in three townships in Morrow County, located about an hour north of Columbus.

The project has yet to obtain approval from the Ohio Power Siting Board, the state’s central authority for energy permitting. The evidentiary hearing — a key administrative trial — took place on seven days last month before the power siting board, which is expected to rule in the case by March 19.

To prepare for the hearing, Doug Herling, vice president of Open Road Renewables, reviewed the public comments filed with the power siting board. Beyond dozens of anonymous comments against the project, Herling found at least 34 instances in which people apparently gave false names or lied about their residence in Morrow County.

Each of these comments was negative, including the one purportedly from Roger Willard of Cardington, Ohio, which called ​“industrial solar … a crime against local property owners and the rural way of life we value.” Another, from Mike Mercer, who also claimed to live in Cardington, said, ​“REAL PEOPLE THAT LIVE HERE DO NOT WANT THE SOLAR SCAM!”

Canary Media checked all 34 instances at VoterRecords.com and Whitepages.com and was able to verify the existence of only a single name at its stated town. A message sent to the email address provided for the one exception — someone named Smith — bounced back as undeliverable. As of Jan. 31, Canary Media also found seven more potentially fake comments that had been entered into the board’s online docket since Jan. 13, when Herling began testifying.

“When comments are submitted under false identities, false addresses, or with misrepresented affiliations, it undermines the credibility of the process and is unfair to residents who participated honestly and in food faith,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs at the nonprofit grassroots organizing group Ohio Citizen Action.

It’s just one example of the serious hurdles that renewable energy faces in Ohio, even as the state — like much of the United States — contends with rising electricity demand and energy bills.

Close to 40 county-level bans on new utility-scale solar and wind have cropped up since a 2021 state law authorized such restrictions. Morrow County, the site of Crossroads Solar, adopted bans for a majority of its townships last year.

The law created a carve-out for Crossroads Solar and projects that were already in the grid operator’s queue, but even that limited exception has proved difficult for developers to count on. The power siting board has blocked multiple applications for such grandfathered solar farms, citing local opposition — even when the projects have met all other legal criteria and the permit conditions would have addressed any substantive complaints.

Developers also have withdrawn several applications after staff at the power siting board relied on local government opposition to say solar farms wouldn’t meet a statutory requirement for serving the ​“public interest.” One example is Open Road’s Grange Solar, an agrivoltaics center that most public commenters wanted to move ahead.

The Ohio Supreme Court has yet to rule on other solar farms that the board denied through a final order, despite hearing oral argument on the Kingwood Solar matter last March and another case last month.

Lawmakers at one point considered letting local townships block the power siting board from finding that a solar or wind farm was in the public interest, but they cut that language from the final version of Senate Bill 52 passed in 2021. In practice, however, critics say that’s basically what is happening anyway. On several occasions, the board and its staff have allowed unanimous disapproval by local governments to preclude a public interest finding, often while claiming to use a ​“broad lens.”

While the power siting board’s staff had initially deemed Crossroads Solar in the public interest, it later changed its mind, citing Cardington’s resolution and the township lawyer’s claim of overwhelming opposition by residents. But evidence of overwhelming public opposition is dubious at best.

Taking a closer look at ​“local opposition”

Herling didn’t just question the legitimacy of some of the opposition to Crossroads Solar — he also argued that the data shows that the public actually supports the project.

After discarding the apparently false, anonymous, and duplicate comments from the same individuals, he found that more than 78% of those who filed remarks favored Crossroads Solar. Support within Morrow County ran above 58%. There was more opposition within the three townships where the project would be built, yet 44% still supported it.

“Sentiment regarding the project is clearly mixed and is not overwhelmingly for or against the project,” Herling testified.

Yet for months, people who wanted to block the array had exaggerated the level of anti-solar opinion and used misinformation to try to build opposition and get local government officials on board, Herling testified. He called the process ​“bandwagoning.”

Among other things, the anti-solar group Concerned Citizens of Morrow County had claimed multiple times last year that sentiment among residents ran 10–1against the project — a figure that ultimately did not stand up under cross-examination.

Yet by the end of November, after those claims were made, the county and two of three townships had formally opposed Crossroads Solar. The third township, Cardington, was neutral at the time.

A Dec. 5 report by the power siting board’s regulatory staff recommended that the board find that the project would serve the public interest, noting there wasn’t unanimous local government opposition.

But three days later, one Cardington trustee objected to the board’s staff report and changed his stance on Crossroads Solar. The township then formally opposed the project by a 2–1 vote. On Dec. 9, the lawyer for the townships apprised the power siting board of the new resolution and asked for its staff to change the report.

On Jan. 7, Jess Stottsberry, a geologist and utility specialist at the Ohio Power Siting Board, said the staff now believes that Crossroads Solar would not serve the public interest. During cross-examination on Jan. 14, the Cardington resolution was the only specific reason he could cite for the reversal.

“Local popularity contests”

The staff’s flip-flop shows how Ohio’s rigorous review process has become ​“perverted,” said Craig Adair, vice president of development for Open Road Renewables. ​“Staff has allowed it to become reduced to local popularity contests, which is highly vulnerable to misinformation [and] manipulation by, in this case, a very small number of anti-solar activists.”

The power siting board ​“risks abdicating its responsibility as a state regulatory agency when it defers heavily to resolutions passed by a small number of township trustees,” said Bogin of Ohio Citizen Action. Especially in light of Herling’s analysis, she said, ​“deference to a handful of township resolutions as definitive statements of the ​‘public interest’ is not only inappropriate but misleading.”

Most of the seven days of testimony indeed focused on local issues. Yet two witnesses for the Ohio Environmental Council emphasized the broader statewide ramifications.

Jeffrey Reutter, a scientist and the former head of the Ohio Sea Grant Program, testified about the value of renewable energy ​“to mitigate climate change and contribute to the public interest.”

Andrew Watterson, who heads the consulting firm Blue CSR Strategies, testified that Crossroads Solar will serve the public interest because two-thirds of Ohio’s top 100 employers are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and many need renewable energy. Ohio’s three largest cities and other local governments also need and want renewable power, he said.

And, notably, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce is also a party to the case and is in favor of the project.

In general, the group supports adding more renewable energy as part of an all-of-the-above strategy to meet Ohio’s growing energy needs. But while local sentiment is one issue to consider, it shouldn’t supersede all other factors, said Tony Long, the group’s general counsel and director of energy policy.

“You can’t really do state energy policy township by township, county by county,” Long told Canary Media. ​“It’s really got to be a state policy.”

The post Are Faked Public Comments About to Tank an Ohio Solar Farm? appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments.

Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables — a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions.

Ohio has become a hot spot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships.

In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.

By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio.

From the very beginning, ​“it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it.

“We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. ​“They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.”

Many petition signers ​“didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. ​“And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land.

While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects.

The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure.

All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380 — just 60 more than the required threshold of 8% of the number of votes in the last governor’s election.

Deference to townships?

Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making.

In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their Feb. 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter.

Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17.

Roughly two dozen residents came to the July meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees.

“The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media.

He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. ​“I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said.

The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments — and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond.

“It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel — not food. ​“We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added.

Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties — not townships — have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue.

In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to.

The choice shows how SB 52 has led to ​“an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, ​“county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships.

Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board.

As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind — two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy.

“Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said.

Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum.

“It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere.

Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county.

“It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said. As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. ​“To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.”

Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. ​“I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said.

Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. ​“Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said.

“So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.

The post This Ohio County Banned Wind and Solar. Now, Residents Are Pushing Back appeared first on Cleveland Scene.