Cleveland pulls plug on Slavic Village solar farm amid standoff with Cuyahoga County

CLEVELAND, Ohio – A solar farm planned for an abandoned landfill in the Slavic Village neighborhood has been axed because Cleveland and Cuyahoga County couldn’t connect on an issue — literally.

The proposed solar array was part of a $129 million federal grant to build solar farms in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and Painesville. But the window to finalize the technical plans for connecting the solar farm on Harvard Road to Cleveland Public Power closed while Cleveland and Cuyahoga County were locked in a separate dispute over a solar project in Brooklyn.

Fearing the Slavic Village solar farm could become too expensive and cumbersome to connect to CPP; Cleveland pulled the plug in September, to Cuyahoga County’s surprise.

While the rest of the project moves forward, City Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer, who represents Slavic Village, said the neighborhood became a casualty of the dispute.

“Slavic Village got caught in the middle,” Maurer said to city officials. “We didn’t do the work that would’ve been needed to understand the scope of the project because there was a separate dispute.”

The original dispute between Mayor Justin Bibb and Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne surrounded a solar farm in Brooklyn, which would expand under the $129 million grant.

County officials wanted a long-term contract to sell power to Cleveland Public Power from the Brooklyn solar farm, but city officials instead wanted the project to go through a federal process outlined in the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act.

Cleveland Public Power has a monopoly over its customers, and residents can’t buy electricity from other companies. Bibb’s officials worried that if they went around PURPA for Cuyahoga County, they would also have to allow other electricity suppliers to sell on CPP’s grid.

County officials say they had proposed solutions that would allow the connection without opening the floodgates to other suppliers to get onto CPP’s grid.

This dispute broke into public view when Bibb wrote a letter to Ronayne outlining the standoff and urging the county to move forward. Eventually, Cleveland got its way, and Cuyahoga County will use the federal connection process.

Engineering work for the Slavic Village solar farm stalled amid the standoff. By the time that fight was resolved this fall, the project was axed.

Both sides argued at Cleveland City Council’s utilities meeting on Thursday over how exactly the project fell apart.

Cleveland Public Power Commissioner Ammon Danielson told council members that early analysis raised red flags. He said connecting the County’s solar farm to Cleveland’s grid could cost millions, require extensive upgrades and jeopardize CPP customers if it failed under federal scrutiny.

The $129 million grant has a timeline, and Cleveland was not convinced it could deliver on the project without making it expensive for Cleveland Public Power customers, Danielson said.

Cuyahoga County sees the outcome differently. Mike Foley, administrator for Cuyahoga Green Energy, said the county believed the Slavic Village project’s issues were solvable and said county officials were surprised when Cleveland removed the project from the $129 million grant.

Foley and others say the plans for Slavic Village and Brooklyn were all laid out in the original grant application that Cleveland agreed to before it was submitted to a competitive bidding process at the federal level.

City officials say the costs are much more expensive than the grant estimated, and the two other Cleveland solar farms are less risky — since they are on city-owned land and would be owned by Cleveland Public Power.

Councilman Brian Kazy, who chairs the utilities committee, said it would have been a disservice to Cleveland Public Power customers to move forward with the Slavic Village solar farm after officials realized it was expensive and could cost residents in the long run.

Foley said the county has secured federal approval for the project and still intends to build a smaller solar farm installation on the Garfield Heights portion of the landfill, south of Harvard Road.

More solar panels will be added to Cuyahoga County’s other solar farms, still using the full $129 million. Cleveland will receive about $15 million of that investment, while it initially would have gotten $20 million.

Two solar farms will be built in Cleveland, one at the Kolthoff Landfill adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, and another at West 11th Street and Spring Road in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood.

Cuyahoga County will build solar farms in Garfield Heights near its future jail and will expand the Brooklyn solar farm.

The largest solar farm will be built in Painesville at the site of an old chemical plant.

For Slavic Village, it means that an abandoned landfill will no longer become a solar farm as promised. Leaders from the Slavic Village Development Corporation told City Council that they have spent years pushing for a productive reuse of the sprawling landfill, which has sat in receivership for more than a decade and is plagued by methane issues, vegetation overgrowth and rock-crushing operations.

Executive Director Shauna Sanders said the organization still wants the city to outline how it plans to address conditions at the landfill now that the solar project is gone.

The silver lining is that CEP Renewables, the company building the county’s solar farm, still plans to buy the abandoned landfill site and clear some of the issues plaguing Slavic Village residents, like mountains of gravel and broken methane pipes, said Mike Wise, CEP’s Renewables’ head of government relations.

Maurer said the collapse of the Harvard Road project should be a warning sign for both governments, urging Cleveland and Cuyahoga County to tighten their coordination. She said the region cannot afford disputes that get in the way of building new infrastructure.