For decades, the only regular visitors to the Twin Lake Reservoir in Lima, Ohio, were fishers passing hot summer evenings trying to snag a largemouth bass.
But today, it’s a hive of activity.
A team of 12 engineers and construction workers are busily connecting more than 3,400 solar arrays to small, floating docks and distributing them across four acres of the reservoir’s surface water.
The electricity generated by the floating photovoltaics will be used to power a nearby water treatment plant, where electricity-powered pumps run 24 hours a day, year-round.
“The water treatment plant is one of the city’s biggest energy costs; it only made sense to put the floating solar site here,” says Sara Weekley, deputy director of Lima’s utilities department.
“It also helps keep water rates stable by lowering energy costs.”
The project is part of an emerging evolution in the industrial midwest from heavy manufacturing to clean energy.
Electricity has turned into one of the most important commodities in the region, with utility rates increasing in recent years due to demand from datacenters, rising utility charges and the war on Iran, which has driven gas pump prices to $5 a gallon locally.
Consumers have been crying out for alternatives. And while floating solar projects are available only to those with access to waterways, states such as Michigan and Minnesota have some of the highest numbers of lakes in the country, not counting the massive Great Lakes system that borders Ohio and seven other US states.
The Lima floating solar project is the work of Florida-headquartered D3Energy, which, with more than 25 projects underway, has built more floating solar arrays in the US than any other company. Ninety miles northwest of Lima, the company has just finished building a floating solar project three times larger than this.
“Across most of the midwest, and in Ohio in particular, agricultural land is a critical piece of the economy – you don’t want renewable energy and food production fighting each other for the same acres,” says Stetson Tchividjian, D3Energy’s managing director.
“Floating solar resolves that equation.”
In winter, when temperatures fall below freezing, water from neighboring reservoirs is pumped in to prevent ice forming, which allows the solar arrays to continue providing electricity uninterrupted.
“Floating solar has a significantly smaller footprint than ground-mounted solar. A typical one megawatt floating solar system can fit on roughly two acres of water, compared to approximately five acres of land for a comparable ground-mounted system,” says Tchividjian.
Despite a reputation for being cloudy and grey, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ohio gets more sun than Oregon and almost as much as Alabama, a state hundreds of miles further south.
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, midwestern states Illinois, Indiana and Ohio respectively rank 10th, 11th and 12th nationally for solar capacity.
An hour’s drive north in Perrysburg, Ohio, First Solar has become one of the largest solar module manufacturers in the western hemisphere. Two years ago, it opened the largest solar R&D facility in the country, where it has spent $2.4bn manufacturing perovskite semiconductor-built solar technology that’s expected to usher in a new world of higher-efficiency solar energy applications.
“What it’s done is remind people why energy independence matters,” Tchividjian says of how the rise of solar applications in the midwest is simultaneously happening when 20% of the world’s oil consumption is blocked in the strait of Hormuz.
“Domestic generation that isn’t exposed to a single geopolitical event is more valuable, not less, in this kind of environment. Solar is a key cog in that wheel.”
All this is happening in the heart of the eastern corn belt where farmers, like elsewhere, are struggling to make a profit from growing crops.
For landowners and farmers, solar leases have become a route to guaranteed income at a time when the Trump administration’s tariffs regime is destroying demand for US agricultural products such as soybeans in China and beyond.
Still, solar faces reputational challenges in rural America.
The idea of huge sheets of glass and metal covering land that for centuries has provided food for millions of Americans and people around the world doesn’t sit easily with everyone.
In March, a tornado 180 miles west in neighboring Indiana destroyed large parts of one of the largest solar arrays east of the Mississippi River, and which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to repair, illustrating for some the inherent vulnerability of the technology.
For Doug Goyings and his family, who farm about 5,000 acres of barley, soybeans and corn in Paulding county, an hour’s drive north-west of the floating solar project in Lima, the solar experience – two acres of arrays that put out 130 kilowatts of power – has not been a good one.
“I don’t have to pay an electric bill at all, on the generation side. But the transmission and distribution [charges], it’s outrageous. They’re saving us all this money, but the electric company is not going to take a loss. They got these fees that they put on there,” he says.
Goyings recalls that in March, he produced 2,160 kilowatts extra that went back to the utility’s – American Electric Power (AEP) – grid. But doing so saw him charged $918 in transmission and distribution fees.
“I used no electricity from them,” he says.
Fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars on scare and disinformation campaigns that have resulted in city and county authorities banning large-scale solar farms from being constructed on agricultural land across the region. In 2024, AEP generated around 3.5 times as much electricity from coal and natural gas as from renewables.
Some rural residents oppose solar farms due to their alleged role in inflating the price of agricultural land for crop growers and farmers.
But others disagree.
“The tension around solar is often less about the technology and more about change to communities,” says Jeff Risley, executive director of Renewable Energy Farmers of America, a nonprofit trade association.
“Many landowners feel caught in the middle: developers want their signature; neighbors may be hostile and there is limited independent guidance to help them evaluate whether a project makes sense for their situation.”
And of the Indiana tornado incident, Risley believes that localized weather events don’t amount to systems fragility.
“The industry has developed technology specifically to protect against severe weather,” he says.
“They now have tracking systems with ‘stow’ modes that position panels at steep angles to reduce hail and wind damage.”
In Lima, a city better known for refining oil and building military tanks, the floating solar project on a reservoir that supplies thousands of residents with drinking water, marks a major shift.
When the project is finished this summer, it’s estimated to save the city and taxpayers around $10m over the course of its lifetime. On top of that, the solar arrays will help lower evaporation rates and algae growth in the water by providing a barrier to sunlight.
“It keeps the water cooler; we’re not using any additional land,” says Weekley.
“People like the idea that it’s not taking up any land and of us trying to save money.”
