D3Energy has energized a 6-MW floating solar array on a village reservoir in Monroeville, Ohio. It is the largest floating solar system in the state and among the five largest in the country.
The 6-MW floating solar project in Monroeville.
Roughly one-third of Ohio’s 88 counties have restricted utility-scale solar since a 2021 state law gave them that authority, and townships keep voting on it. Monroeville took a different approach. Its array floats on 12 acres of water the village already owned.
“Solar needs space, and in farm country there’s no such thing as spare ground,” said Stetson Tchividjian, Managing Director of D3Energy. “Monroeville had water sitting right there doing one job. Now it does two.”
The floating array is Monroeville’s second solar project. The village’s 4-MW ground-mounted array has been running since 2017. Between the two, the village of 1,300 has roughly 13-times as much solar per resident as the rest of Ohio, one of the highest concentrations per capita in the state.
Monroeville is D3Energy’s third Ohio project. It follows the Del-Co Water array in Delaware, Ohio, and the City of Lima’s array on Twin Lake Reservoir, which was completed earlier this year and visited by Solar Power World. Together they give Ohio almost 10 MW of operating floating solar, all of it on water the host utilities already owned. That is more than any other state in the Midwest. D3Energy built the array with Gardner Capital, which owns the system and sells its output to the village, and Ohio-based contractor Appalachian Renewable Power.
“None of this happens without Monroeville’s forward-thinking leadership,” Tchividjian said. “Tom Gray, the recently retired village administrator, drove this project from the first conversation to the day it energized. This one is his.”