Ohio’s largest solar and battery project can finally move forward after years of slogging through legal and regulatory challenges.
The Ohio Power Siting Board on Thursday approved a permit for Oak Run Solar, which will combine 800 megawatts of solar with 300 MW of battery storage. The Madison County development will also include an agrivoltaics component, with around 1,000 sheep grazing among the rows of panels.
Barring any more hiccups, Oak Run will become the rare example of a utility-scale solar farm able to succeed in a state that is notoriously hostile to renewable energy. Over the last dozen years, the Ohio legislature has more than doubled wind turbine setbacks, gutted clean energy standards, and created extra hurdles for wind and solar farms that don’t apply for fossil fuel developments. Since 2021, the Power Siting Board has also increasingly relied on local government opposition to deny solar permits.
Oak Run developer Savion first sought a permit in 2022 and won approval from the Power Siting Board in March 2024. But the government of Madison County and three of its townships appealed the decision to the Ohio Supreme Court later that year.
That put Oak Run in a holding pattern. Judges finally weighed in this spring, after Savion asked the court to expedite its ruling so that there would be enough time to start building the project and meet contract obligations to grid operator PJM Interconnection.
The court’s split decision rejected all objections to the project except one: a need for renderings of the expected visual impacts from the project’s substations, which step up the voltage of the electricity produced and feed it onto the grid. The court sent the case back to the Ohio Power Siting Board, telling it to more thoroughly consider evidence on that issue and then make a final call.
Savion submitted a report with pictures as well as testimony, which sufficiently convinced the board’s staff to recommend permit approval. The nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council and John Boeckl, a local resident who had intervened in the case, filed briefs in support of Oak Run, too. Madison County and the three townships still objected.
The board voted 7–2 to approve the project’s permit, with the nays coming from a county representative and a representative of the townships. Those two individuals got to vote as ad hoc board members under Senate Bill 52, a 2021 state law that gives local governments more say in blocking or siting renewables even though they do not have that authority over fossil fuel development.
The board specifically rejected the local governments’ argument that it should have made Oak Run go through extra procedural steps for meetings and notices, as if the company were filing a new permit application instead of additional evidence.
“The Court’s remand directive was narrow in scope,” the board’s order said. “The only question remaining was the substations’ specific visual impact.”
