A Village of 1,300 Now Has Ohio's Largest Floating Solar Array

Water that works twice

In Monroeville, Ohio, a body of water that once served a single purpose is now doing two. The village has installed 9,222 solar panels across three floating platforms on its reservoir, and electricity from the array is already flowing into the village's local distribution grid, according to Interesting Engineering. The system delivers 6 megawatts of generating capacity without a single new acre of cropland being taken out of production.

Developer D3Energy describes the installation as the largest floating solar project in Ohio and one of the five biggest in the United States. For a community of roughly 1,300 people, the scale is striking: with the project in place, Monroeville now has about 13 times the per-person solar capacity of Ohio as a whole.

Why the panels went on water instead of fields

The array occupies about 12 acres of reservoir surface. A comparable ground-mounted system would have required roughly 30 acres, meaning the floating approach spared about 18 acres of land. That distinction matters in Ohio, where a 2021 law has enabled about one-third of the state's 88 counties to restrict large solar developments. "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."

A second act, not a first step

The floating system is not Monroeville's first foray into solar. The village has been running a 4-megawatt ground-mounted facility since 2017. Adding the reservoir array brings the village's combined solar footprint to 10 megawatts, spread across a population of roughly 1,300 residents.

The people behind the project

Ownership of the Monroeville system sits with Gardner Capital, which sells the electricity it generates to the village. D3Energy served as the project's developer, and the contracting work was carried out by Appalachian Renewable Power, an Ohio-based firm.

D3Energy's expanding Ohio portfolio

Monroeville marks D3Energy's third floating solar installation in the state. The company previously built systems for Del-Co Water in Delaware and for the City of Lima at Twin Lakes Reservoir. Taken together, those projects put Ohio's active floating-solar capacity at nearly 10 megawatts.

A small town with a big lesson

Monroeville's experience suggests a possible route for other small communities weighing how to add renewable generation in places where land is scarce or politically contested. By making use of surface area that was already committed to another purpose, the village added generating capacity at a scale far beyond what its population size would typically suggest.

The wider floating-solar wave

What happened on Monroeville's reservoir fits into a larger pattern of floating solar development. In Florida, highway ponds are being converted into floating solar sites, with the potential to power 200,000 homes. Oregon has brought online its first floating solar array, a project expected to power 60 homes while also saving water. Meanwhile, research indicates that floating solar is quickly becoming cost-competitive across the African continent's extensive network of reservoirs.