The Ohio Supreme Court overturned a permit that state officials previously granted to a massive, 6,000-acre industrial-scale solar farm and battery operation in Madison County. In a ruling Tuesday, a fractured majority of Republican justices sided with a sweeping challenge brought by local and county officials against Oak Run Solar, which would sit in rural farmland between Columbus and Dayton. This makes for a significant setback but not necessarily a fatal blow to the facility. And it’s the latest in a series of legal roadblocks solar developers have faced from Ohio regulators and now, the state’s high court.Four justices who formed a majority in the Oak Run case dismissed most of the alleged shortfalls in the solar farm’s application around aesthetics, wildlife and hydrology. However, they ruled that the project application to the Ohio Power Siting Board failed to include project renderings of its substations from public points of view.
The court’s ruling reverses the issuance of the permit and orders the OPSB to “more thoroughly address” the visual impacts of the project. “By failing to provide any photographic simulations or pictorial sketches from public vantage points that show the substations’ support structures, which appear to be some of the project’s tallest features, Oak Run did not meet the rule’s requirements,” Justice Pat Fischer wrote for the majority.
