Sunny to partly cloudy. High 87F. Winds light and variable..
Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Updated: June 13, 2026 @ 11:29 am
Cattle graze under solar panels Tuesday, April 28, 2026, at a farm in Christiana, Tenn.
Cattle graze under solar panels Tuesday, April 28, 2026, at a farm in Christiana, Tenn.
Along W.Va. 2 south of Ravenswood, you can’t help but notice acre after acre of solar panels. Those panels are part of a solar farm called BHER Ravenswood Solar 1. It’s a joint project of Precision Castparts Corp.’s TIMET titanium facility near Ravenswood and BHE Renewables to provide power for TIMET. According to Energy Information Agency data, the solar farm started producing power in February.
Drive a few more miles into Ravenswood, West Virginia, and cross over the bridge into Meigs County, Ohio. Turn left onto County Road 338A and you will find another solar power installation. This one is called the Great Bend Solar Project. It sits on a 370-acre site and delivers enough power to the regional grid to supply 9,000 homes. It was developed by Doral Renewables of Philadelphia.
Great Bend Solar is on or near land America Electric Power acquired a long time back in hopes another coal-burning power plant would be needed. A decade or two or three ago, a power plant using new coal-burning or gasification technology was proposed for that part of Meigs County, but it never got beyond the proposal stage.
If you prefer looking for solar power in Kentucky, there’s an operation called Cooperative Solar One a few miles east of Lexington. It’s been in operation since 2017.
Solar power in this region is more than rooftop panels on homes and businesses, and it’s more than small operations supplying supplemental power to factories such as Toyota West Virginia in Putnam County. In recent months, solar power has made its presence more noticeable, and given the secrecy of large-scale industrial developments nowadays, it’s difficult to say what projects are in the planning stages at this moment.
It so happens the Associated Press ran a story this week that solar has surpassed coal as a source of electricity in the United States.
“Data released Wednesday by global energy think tank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy,” the AP reported.
“In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.
The solar farms in this region have one thing in common. They are all in flat areas where hills and their shadows are far away. They are in some of the prime space that can be used for industry or farmland. Speaking of farmland, there has been controversy in Kentucky this year in at least two places where people have spoken against proposed solar farms that would take up land currently or potentially used for agriculture. Solar has its societal costs, too, apparently.
Solar is here, although not without critics. But no source of energy is critic-free. It’s a set of trade-offs, and – like it or not — for now, solar is on the rise and coal is on the decline. Even this close to coal country.
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