Ohio has reviewed more renewable energy permit applications than any other state in a major new study — 61 projects across a six-year span. It has also rejected more projects than any other state, and seen more developers walk away before a decision was even made.
A Texas-based developer recently declared it would never build in Ohio again, comparing the experience to Russian roulette. New peer-reviewed research covering 19 states reveals what turned the nation’s busiest state permitting pipeline into its most hostile one.
A national study, one striking outlier
The peer-reviewed paper, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, analyzed 460 wind and solar projects across 19 states, covering applications filed from 2015 through 2024. Led by a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the study set out to understand timelines and outcomes for state-level permitting decisions. Nationally, the headline finding was relatively reassuring: states approved roughly 90% of applications, with a typical wait of about one year.
Ohio complicated that picture immediately. The state processed 61 projects — more than any other in the study — and posted an 80% approval rate that looks comparable to peers at first glance. But it also led all states with seven outright rejections and five developer withdrawals before any decision was reached. No other state came close on either count.
Senate Bill 52 and the shift that followed
The turning point was 2021, when Ohio’s governor signed Senate Bill 52, giving local governments authority to designate areas within their jurisdictions as off-limits to utility-scale wind and solar development. A grandfathering provision was included, intended to protect projects already in the permitting pipeline. Developers expected their path to approval to remain largely intact.
That expectation proved wrong. Even for grandfathered projects, the Ohio Power Siting Board began giving substantial weight to local opposition — unanimous opposition made approval effectively impossible, and majority opposition made success unlikely. The board had approved every wind and solar project before it prior to 2021. Rejections then began arriving in quick succession, starting with Republic Wind Farm and Birch Solar. Key lawmakers who helped pass SB 52 have since said this level of deference to local opposition wasn’t what they intended.
Developers push back — and walk away
Open Road Renewables, a Texas-based developer, became the most public example of the fallout. After one project was rejected and another withdrawn ahead of an anticipated rejection, vice president of development Craig Adair announced the company would pursue no further Ohio projects. “It’s become a game of Russian roulette, and we’re not going to play it anymore,” Adair said.
Open Road is among several developers with cases pending before the Ohio Supreme Court, challenging what they describe as an arbitrary and inconsistent standard. Adair described how opposition groups have learned to exploit the current environment — mobilizing at township and commissioner meetings to pressure local officials, effectively killing projects before any formal vote is taken. This is happening, he noted, as Ohio’s electricity demand is rising, making the loss of potential generating capacity a practical concern rather than a theoretical one.
The board’s defense and the numbers behind it
The Ohio Power Siting Board pushed back on the study’s framing. Spokesman Matt Butler pointed out that Ohio’s 80% approval rate is comparable to other states in the research, and that the state has approved more than 60 projects in total — more than any other state studied. Ohio now has 9,250 megawatts of utility-scale solar capacity and 1,550 megawatts of onshore wind.
Those figures are real, but they need context. The 80% approval rate spans years when the board approved every single project that came before it; the post-2021 rate is significantly lower, though the study’s structure makes a precise post-SB 52 figure harder to isolate. Comparisons to other states also have limits. Maryland, the second-busiest state with 59 projects and an identical 80% approval rate, had 34 projects still pending at the time of the study — the highest of any state — whose outcomes weren’t yet captured in that figure.
Beyond Ohio: what the research reveals about local barriers
Ohio’s situation is the study’s most dramatic finding, but the research points to broader gaps in what’s understood about renewable energy permitting. About 40 states have state-level boards or offices overseeing at least some wind and solar projects, yet many delegate authority to local governments, where decisions are far harder to track systematically.
The same research team is now examining local-level permitting in Massachusetts and New York. Early Massachusetts data — covering 26 projects with complete information out of 42 identified — found that 16 received permits while the rest were either canceled or caught in litigation. The average permitting timeline was 250 days. Doug Bessette, a Michigan State University professor who studies the social acceptance of renewable energy, called Ohio a case study in inconsistent and unfair regulation. “I often tell my students that if they want to see how not to do clean energy, look across the border to Ohio,” he said.
What comes next
The study has a temporal boundary worth keeping in mind: it doesn’t capture changes that may have occurred since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025, leaving open questions about how shifting federal priorities might interact with already-strained state-level dynamics in Ohio and elsewhere.
What’s clearer is the direction of the research itself. Expanding systematic tracking to local permitting decisions — where opposition may be even more prevalent than at the state level — could reveal a far larger picture of where and why renewable projects stall or die entirely. Ohio’s experience suggests that approval rates alone don’t tell the story. The projects that never reach a decision, and the developers who stop trying, matter just as much.