Ohio Supreme Court blocks state's largest solar project, hardening a regime that has killed 5.3 GW

Ohio Supreme Court blocks state's largest solar project, hardening a regime that has killed 5.3 GW An 800 MW permit reversal caps years of Ohio restrictions that have stalled gigawatts of clean capacity, even as US power demand climbs. The Ohio Supreme Court blocked a permit last week (week of 2026-05-25) for what would be the state's largest solar installation, the 800-megawatt Oak Run Solar Project, though the court reversed only part of the approval and the project still has a pathway to completion.⁵ That matters because Oak Run is not an isolated rejection. It sits on top of a body of Ohio law and local action that has now blocked roughly 5.3 GW of clean energy capacity, according to a report cited by Canary Media, at a moment when US electricity demand is rising and new supply is hard to bring online.⁵ The legal foundation is Senate Bill 52, which Governor Mike DeWine signed and which lets counties ban new solar projects above 50 MW of capacity and "economically significant" wind farms able to produce more than 5 MW.⁵ It handed local boards a veto, and they have used it. Eight rulings alone have killed more than 1.1 GW of solar generation.⁵ Developers then withdrew five other applications that would have added roughly another 1 GW, after adverse recommendations from the Power Siting Board's staff or local pushback made a full denial look likely.⁵ The withdrawals matter as much as the denials, because they show developers reading the board and folding before a formal vote. Wind has been constrained for longer. A 2014 law that more than doubled property-line setbacks for turbines effectively blocked over 3.3 GW of utility-scale projects, the report notes.⁵ Stack that against the solar denials and withdrawals and the 5.3 GW figure stops looking abstract. For traders, the read-through is on the supply side of a tightening market. The same demand wave that is reshaping US power, datacenter load, drove NextEra's $67bn agreement to buy Dominion Energy, a deal the companies billed as creating the world's largest regulated utility.⁴ When a state with Ohio's industrial base chokes off gigawatts of the cheapest new generation, the marginal megawatt has to come from somewhere more expensive or slower to build. That is the awkward part of Ohio's stance against the national trajectory. Solar carried most of the growth in global power last year, with annual solar generation up 30%, from 2,143 to 2,778 terawatt-hours, on IEA figures, and renewables produced more electricity worldwide than coal for the first time in over a century.³ US installed solar capacity is forecast to reach about 737.8 GW by 2035, up from roughly 231.4 GW in 2024.² Ohio is opting out of a chunk of that build. The state's own residents pay for it, Canary Media argues, through forgone generation and the avoided emissions and local air pollution the 5.3 GW would have delivered.⁵ None of this shows up cleanly in a screen price. It shows up in interconnection queues, in capacity auctions, and in where developers choose not to file. The counter-case is that demand growth is real enough to lift thermal margins regardless. Coal is still the world's largest single source of electricity at roughly 35% of supply, with over 2,000 GW operational, and retirement timelines keep slipping.¹ In a state blocking new renewables while load climbs, that incumbency is the point. The contrarian signal in the packet sits on German baseload, not Ohio, but the logic rhymes: when clean supply is throttled and demand firms, baseload power bids higher. Skeptics should be careful with the framing, though. Oak Run was only partly reversed, and the project retains a path forward, so this is a setback rather than a death.⁵ SB 52 is permissive, not a statewide ban; it devolves the decision to counties, which means the constraint is patchy and politically reversible rather than fixed.⁵ The signal to watch is whether more counties invoke SB 52 and whether the Power Siting Board's staff keeps steering applications toward withdrawal. Each withdrawn gigawatt is supply that never enters the queue, and in a demand environment this tight, that absence is the trade.⁵