The Village of Minster in northwest Ohio’s Auglaize County is the home of the only large solar field tied to a huge lithium ion battery system used to stabilize the town’s distribution system and the high-voltage grid. Photo: David Dwyer, American Renewable Energy @ Power.
MINSTER — “David Dwyer, principal of Columbus-based American Renewable Energy & Power, which built the Minster solar system, credits Ohio lawmakers — who apparently still want to kill renewable energy and energy efficiency standards — with the village’s decision to add the lithium batteries.
‘Senate Bill 310 (passed in 2014) is the reason we got the storage,’ he said flatly of the legislation the lawmakers passed after months of hearings and just one week after Minster’s solar field began generating electricity.
The bill ‘froze’ the state’s renewable energy mandates for two years, giving the utilities a break from the annual increase in the amount of “green” power they have to sell.
The renewable standards had required power producers who didn’t want to build their own solar or wind turbine farms to buy renewable energy credits, or RECs, from companies that did generate electricity with those and other green technologies.
The passage of the legislation reduced the value of solar RECs to just about nothing, said Dwyer. “It reduced the revenues [of the Minster array] by $2.5 million over the first 10 years,” he explained.
That was revenue the company had pledged to finance the debt used to build the solar array. Rather than give up, Dwyer talked the village into allowing him to build the battery storage system, which then would sell to PJM.”
— John Funk, Cleveland Plain Dealer
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