A solar farm cleared every test in Ohio. The board killed it on fake comments.

A 94-megawatt solar-plus-grazing project in Morrow County cleared every legal test the Ohio Power Siting Board uses to judge an energy project: siting, land use, price. The board denied it anyway. The reason was not engineering, or land use, or economics. It was the comments. And the board acknowledged that many of them were not real.

Open Road Renewables, the developer behind Crossroads Solar Grazing Center, documented dozens of opposing submissions that turned out to be fabricated: names of people who never sent them, addresses that did not exist, signatures that matched no real constituent. The board's denial language cited "consistent and substantial opposition" while conceding the evidence of fakery. Open Road has twice sought reconsideration. The board has said no both times, and did not ask the Ohio attorney general to investigate who was behind the fishy comments.

The denial is the second time in two years that fabricated comments have shaped a major Ohio energy-siting decision, and the regulatory response has not changed.

In 2023, the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission received pro-fracking form comments that included nearly 150 names of people who denied sending them. The commission discarded the contested submissions and later greenlit drilling and fracking under state park and wildlife areas. The procedural pattern has now repeated, with the Crossroads denial this year.

The comments that land at Crossroads are typically forms submitted in real people's names, often by the hundreds, designed to overwhelm genuine input. The Ohio attorney general's office, then under Dave Yost, found that a Consumer Energy Alliance subcontractor had likely misled signatories. The AG sent a compliance letter and filed no civil or criminal charges. Then-CEA vice president for media and strategic communications Bryson Hull framed the result internally as a reputational win that pinned blame on a third-party vendor, according to a 2024 email reviewed by Canary Media.

The Consumer Energy Alliance pattern extends beyond Ohio. The Energy and Policy Institute has tracked the same group across Nexus pipeline comments in Ohio, a Wisconsin net-metering petition, and Dominion Energy acquisition outreach emails in South Carolina. In 2024, Forsyth County, North Carolina commissioners were flooded with hundreds of apparently fake emails supporting a petroleum pipeline. In each case, the volume of opposition did the work that real public engagement could not.

Common Cause Ohio now argues that fabricated comments corrupt substantive review, and they want the Ohio AG to take referrals. "If we don't address it, we're definitely not going to fix it," Catherine Turcer, the group's executive director, told Canary Media. Nagusky argues for a basic floor: identity check, bulk-submission flagging, opt-in confirmation.

Open Road Renewables' own deduplication analysis reportedly shows that nearly half of public comments from nearby towns approved the project once duplicate, anonymous, and unverifiable submissions were removed. That figure is the developer's analysis, not an independent count, and the Ohio Power Siting Board has not adopted it.

The Crossroads denial is a small decision with a large question attached. When the regulator can see that opposition is manufactured and still deny a permit on the strength of that opposition, without referring the matter to the state's top law enforcement officer, the comment record stops being a measurement of public will. The board's next move on Crossroads, and on the next Crossroads, is the test of whether that procedural floor changes.