A 6-megawatt floating solar array on the Village of Monroeville’s reservoir, installed by D3Energy, is the largest floating solar system in Ohio and among the five largest in the United States.

Spanning 9,222 modules across three floating islands, it represents a different approach to that taken by roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties, which have restricted utility-scale solar since a 2021 state law gave them that authority. 

Monroeville’s array floats on 12 acres of water the village already owns. It would have needed 30 acres of Huron County farmland if it had been built on land.

“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 the second solar project for the village of 1,300. Its 4-megawatt 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.

D3Energy has now completed three floating solar projects in Ohio, giving the state almost 10 megawatts of operating floating solar, all of it on water already owned by the host utilities.

They include Del-Co Water array in Delaware, Ohio, and the City of Lima’s array on Twin Lakes Reservoir. That adds up to more than any other state in the Midwest.

D3Energy, which has built more than half of all the floating photovoltaic solar systems operating in the US, 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.”

Working exclusively in FPV, D3Energy partners with utilities, municipalities, and private enterprises to bring solar online without consuming land.