The staff recommendation also does not consider the merits of opponents’ reasons for not wanting Grange Solar to move ahead.
“[T]he dozens of pages of the [Power Siting Board] staff report represent rigorous analysis and thorough fact-checking of every aspect of Grange’s planned project,” Herling said. “But there is no such fact-checking of the onslaught of anti-solar propaganda, which caused local officials to make statements against solar.”
Renewable energy developments face increasing headwinds across the country, often fueled by misinformation. Research released last June by Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law identifies hundreds of projects encountering significant opposition across 47 states. And a July 2024 report from the watchdog organization Energy and Policy Institute lists multiple fossil-fuel companies with links to anti-renewable front groups and activists.
Withdrawing the Grange Solar application was a difficult business decision, Herling said in a phone interview with Canary Media. Management at the company felt it could have eventually won, if not at the Ohio Power Siting Board then perhaps on appeal. But even if the company did prevail, it had no guarantee on how long that would take. And Grange Solar is not the only site Open Road Renewables has been working on.
“The decision to withdraw the application is not surprising when you consider the cost of the administrative proceedings, hearings, and appeals that lay ahead and the challenge of persuading the Ohio Power Siting Board to override the recommendation of its staff to deny the application,” said Matthew Eisenson, a lawyer with Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He represented two landowners who had agreed to lease their property for the Grange Solar project.
The Ohio Power Siting Board’s staff report acknowledges that Grange Solar is exempt from terms in a 2021 law, Senate Bill 52, which let counties block most large new solar projects. Two representatives from the host county and townships would still have served as ad hoc siting board members for deciding the case.
“However, the [Power Siting Board] staff’s recommendation to deny the application when the only purported defect was the existence of local opposition, particularly opposition from local government officials, is analogous to giving local government officials veto power,” Eisenson said.
“Our voices were heard,” said Aubrey Snapp, a representative of the Indian Lake Advocacy Group, which has opposed Grange Solar and applauded its demise in a Feb. 28 statement.
Other stakeholders had very different reactions.
The regulatory staff’s recommendation to block the Grange Solar Grazing Center “not only disregards the needs of Logan County workers and their families, but also squanders the potential for Logan County to become a leader in renewable energy and attract further investment,” said a statement from IBEW Local 32, the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which its lawyer in the case, Daniel Loud, provided to Canary Media.
The union also found fault with the local government leaders who opposed the solar farm. “Local decision-makers have a fundamental responsibility to prioritize the economic well-being of their communities. By rejecting the Grange Solar project, they have failed to uphold this responsibility and have jeopardized the livelihoods of countless workers and families.”
