Small towns in the Midwest tend to be known for one slightly odd thing. Sometimes it’s a giant fiberglass statue out by the highway, and sometimes it’s a water tower shaped like an ear of corn. Monroeville, Ohio, a village of about 1,300 people in Huron County, might have just picked up a new one: the biggest floating solar array anywhere in Ohio, sitting on the reservoir the village gets its drinking water from.<\/p>\n
The builder, a floating solar developer called D3Energy, said on September 16 that the array is up and running. It’s 9,222 solar panels spread across three floating islands on about 12 acres of water, and the power goes straight into the village’s own distribution grid.<\/p>\n
A ground-mounted array making the same power would have needed about 30 acres of farmland in Huron County, according to D3Energy’s announcement<\/a>. Stetson Tchividjian, the company’s managing director, summed it up with a line that’s frankly better than most press release quotes: “Monroeville had water sitting right there doing one job. Now it does two.”<\/p>\n It’s less exotic than it sounds like it would be, and most floating arrays work the same basic way. Panels get bolted onto plastic floats that lock together into big rafts, and the rafts get tied off so they can’t drift around the water. Monroeville’s three islands add up to 11.1 acres, according to the builder’s project page, and they’re held in place with lines run to the shore and heavy weights sitting on the bottom. The reservoir itself is 11 feet deep at its deepest point.<\/p>\n The array is rated at 6 megawatts, and if you divide that by the number of panels, you get roughly 650 watts apiece. That’s a big panel. EnergySage says most panels going onto house roofs are around 400 watts, so these are the bigger utility-scale kind you’d usually see on racks in a field. That 6 megawatts is also a peak figure, which means it’s what the panels could make in perfect lab conditions, and we went through why real-world output comes in lower when we looked at a solar park on an old Maryland landfill<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n So what happens when an Ohio winter freezes that reservoir over?<\/p>\n One of our readers asked exactly that under our story on Lima’s floating array<\/a> last month, and it’s a fair question. The honest answer is that we don’t know yet for Monroeville, because it’s only just started producing, and I haven’t seen anything published on how its islands handle ice. What I can tell you is that Ohio’s first floating array, on a Del-Co Water reservoir in Delaware, Ohio, has already sat through two winters and still counts as operating. And a research team in Ontario managed to keep the ice off a small floating test array for an entire winter with an aquarium pump<\/a>, which is about as low-tech as a fix gets.<\/p>\n Not quite. It’s a decent start, though. When construction began, the American Public Power Association<\/a> reported the array would make more than 7,500 megawatt-hours a year. The Energy Information Administration<\/a> puts the average American household at about 865 kilowatt-hours a month, so I ran the math and got enough for roughly 720 homes. Monroeville had a little over 500 households at the last census.<\/p>\n But houses aren’t the only thing on that grid. The village’s first solar project, a 4-megawatt array mounted on the ground that’s been running for the better part of a decade, was expected to offset about 10% of the electricity Monroeville buys each year, according to the Sandusky Register’s report when it opened. Add a bigger array on the water and solar’s share climbs a lot. Still, it’s safe to assume most of the village’s power comes from somewhere else, and the sun goes down every night anyway.<\/p>\n D3Energy figures the two arrays together give Monroeville about 13 times the solar per person that the rest of Ohio has. I can’t check that one independently, but with roughly 10 megawatts shared among a village this small, I don’t have much trouble believing it.<\/p>\n Monroeville is also one of the roughly 2,000 American towns and cities that run their own electric utility, and the American Public Power Association counts the village among its members. So the village owns the poles and wires and sends out the bills. It just doesn’t own the floating panels. Gardner Capital does. It sells the electricity to Monroeville under a long-term contract, so the village basically pays for the power and lets someone else worry about the hardware. For a place this size, that’s arguably the easiest way to get a project like this built.<\/p>\n Monroeville is the third floating array D3Energy has built in Ohio, after the Del-Co Water one and the array Lima switched on in August. Ohio’s county-level solar bans only reach projects of 50 megawatts and up, as we found with Lima, so none of the three had to fight that particular battle.<\/p>\n The company also says Monroeville’s array ranks among the five largest floating arrays in the country, and that Ohio now has more floating solar than any of its Midwest neighbors. I couldn’t find an independent tally to check either claim against, so I’d file both under probably true, but self-reported.<\/p>\n The array showed up a little later than planned, too. When construction began, the plan was to have it running by early 2026. It’s now September. The announcement doesn’t say which day the power actually started flowing, only that it has. For a construction job with an Ohio winter stuck in the middle of it, I’d call that a pretty forgivable delay.<\/p>\n Tchividjian gave the credit to Tom Gray, Monroeville’s recently retired village administrator, who, he said, saw the project through from the first meeting to the day it went live.<\/p>\n With Monroeville online, the September 16 announcement puts Ohio at almost 10 megawatts of floating solar across three sites, and 6 of those megawatts now sit on the reservoir of a village of 1,300 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Small towns in the Midwest tend to be known for one slightly odd thing. Sometimes it’s a giant fiberglass statue … <\/p>\nSo how do you float thousands of solar panels?<\/h2>\n
Does Monroeville run on solar now?<\/h2>\n
Ohio has three of these now<\/h2>\n