D3Energy installs floating solar array in Ohio village
The small village of Monroeville, Ohio now lays claim to the largest floating solar array in all of the Buckeye State and one of the five largest floating arrays in the U.S., courtesy of developer D3Energy.
Spanning 9,222 solar modules across three floating islands, the 6 MW array sits on the village’s reservoir. The system serves feeds Monroeville’s distribution grid, according to D3Energy officials, and serves as a complement to the village’s existing 4 MW ground-mounted array.
“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 new solar array floats on 12 acres of water that the village already owned, D3Energy says. The company adds that if a team were to construct the project on land, it would have taken up 30 acres of Huron County’s farmland thanks to the space needed for more traditional mounting technology.
Leading Ohio’s PV push
The floating solar project is the village of Monroeville’s second solar array in total, and its first installment since 2017. The small town of just 1,300 has become a leader for solar technology in the state of Ohio, sporting one of the highest concentrations of solar wattage per capita in the Buckeye State.
D3Energy representatives say that about one third of Ohio’s 88 counties have put restrictions and sanctions on utility-scale solar projects since the state’s lawmakers gave them the ability to do so in 2021. Conversely, Monroeville has leaned further into solar energy than ever before, making the area a crucial site for developers looking to branch into the lower Midwest.
“None of this happens without Monroeville’s forward-thinking leadership,” Tchividjian adds. “Tom Gray, the recently retired village administrator, drove this project from the first conversation to the day it energized. This one is his.”
The Monroeville site is D3Energy’s third project in Ohio, officials say, following Delaware, Ohio’s Del-Co Water solar project and the Twin Lakes Reservoir project in Lima, which came online earlier this year. In total, the firm sports total to nearly 10 MW of solar around the state.
