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When Deborah Lewis moved from Silicon Valley back to her parents’ house in Hough, on the east side of Cleveland, one issue she thought about a lot was climate change: the increase in temperatures, drought, and wildfires.
“Fossil fuels will make us fossils,” she said. “We need to step up. We’re bigger than that. We were created for more than that.”
She wanted to do something about it.
Lewis and her neighbor started talking about how their community could move away from fossil fuels.
“We were sitting there years ago thinking, ‘How are we going to move into the future? What’s the legacy for us? How are we going to participate in solar? How are we going to do that?'” she said.
Adopting solar might be difficult because of the decades of disinvestment Hough. Parts of the neighborhood are known for dilapidated apartment buildings, abandoned homes and empty lots. It’s also well situated, just a short bus ride from downtown and the city’s arts and cultural district.
The legacy Hough is ‘moving past’
As a child, Lewis recalls local restaurants, a movie theatre and an entertainment venue.
“Everybody that you can think of, Little Richard, and the whole gamut came through there,” she said. She used to walk to Case Western Reserve University for summer programs. Mostly, she remembers her street.
“It’s always been a mixed street. Older, younger, white, Black,” she said. “The neighborhood hasn’t given up. It’s just a jewel. The location of the neighborhood is a jewel.”
Hough was first built with large homes for the city’s affluent residents, then over time, it transitioned to a blue-collar neighborhood. Starting in the 1950s, many black residents displaced by downtown development moved to Hough, but they were often denied the credit and loans needed to buy houses. Many homes were demolished for “urban renewal,” but few were built to replace them.
By the 1960s, Hough was decaying. Lewis remembers streets lined with tenement housing. The neighborhood is probably best known for a week of deadly race riots in 1966.
“Every city had riots, and Hough was that for Cleveland,” Lewis said.
Dr. Martin Luther King Junior toured Hough in the late 1960s. “When he came down the street and saw us, having, you know, toured the US, he literally said, ‘This is the worst slum in America,'” she said. “That’s the legacy that we are moving past.”
A community that sticks together
In her quest to be included in the country’s transition to clean energy, Lewis considered putting up solar panels at her own house. But, “it didn’t feel good to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to put up a solar structure on my property,'” she said, explaining that most Hough residents rent their homes and can’t install rooftop solar panels.
She wanted everyone to have access to solar energy.
“We’re from a neighborhood where in the old days, if you didn’t have water, knock, knock, knock on your neighbor’s door, ‘let’s get some water. We’ll run a hose, and we’ll do what we need to do,'” she said. “That’s what a community is.”
This sense of community is what Lewis and her neighbor wanted as they thought about creating solar capacity. “How could we participate in solar as a community?”
Getting started
They started exploring the idea of community solar, which is not on the roof of an individual home but located elsewhere off-site. In 2018, they formed a Block Club, and soon after they had their first meeting with Jonathan Welle.
“We were in the back of Algebra Teahouse in [Cleveland’s] Little Italy, and there was a bead of sweat dripping down my forehead,” Welle remembered.
Jonathan Welle, lead organizer and co-founder of Cleveland Owns, in 2024 at the teahouse where he first met the Block Club years earlier. Photo: Julie Grant / The Allegheny Front
Welle was a community organizer interested in shared public ownership of everything from credit unions to grocery stores to energy sources.
“Deborah had some really specific and tough questions about my motivations, what brought me to this work, why I thought this was a feasible idea,” he said. “And I remember feeling the heat a little bit.”
Lewis approached it as a job interview from her days in Silicon Valley, and she said he convinced her that day that he could do the job.
“Because the sweat stopped, and we heard some real information about the vision for solar, background about solar at that time. He was prepared for the interview,” she said.
From Welle’s perspective, he was pleased they wanted community ownership of a solar array. “That resonated deeply with the work that I aspired to do at that time in building community wealth through collective ownership,” he said. “And so here was out of the blue, a group just two miles from where I was living that shared this vision.”
So, they started working together in what, so far, has been a journey of nearly seven years. In 2019, they co-founded a non-profit called Cleveland Owns, with the goal of building projects owned by the community.
They attended city and community meetings, made connections, and got some small grants to fund their work. Within a year, they had a business and economic plan for a solar array at a brownfield site in Hough that used to be a chemical processing plant and is now owned by the city of Cleveland.
Getting people on board for the proposed solar array
In the summer of 2022, Lewis, Welle, and Sam Dickerson, another Hough resident, stood along an access road, looking at the site. The curb was lined with gnarly trees and tangled vines. But they were full of optimism. They planned to clear the land for a field of solar panels, mounted a few feet off the ground.
Allegheny Front reporter Julie Grant talks with Hough residents Sam Dickerson and Deborah Lewis in 2022 at the brownfield site they hoped to use for their community solar project. Photo: Jonathan Welle / Cleveland Owns
“I think 11 acres is what we’re planning on, so it’s a pretty large array,” Welle said, describing their vision. “If things go really well, underneath the panels we’d like there to be some life and activity. That could look like wildflowers blooming and filling the air with their scent and their color, bees in the area.”
It would generate 4 to 5 megawatts of power, enough for up to 5,000 homes. They wanted to put educational materials along the fence to help people walking by understand how the community solar project works.
“Individual households would subscribe to the array, which is as simple as signing your name on a piece of paper,” Welle said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a hard sell because we anticipate that as a subscriber, you’ll save money.”
The power produced by a community-supported solar array gets sent to the electric grid, and the utility company pays for it by giving subscribers a credit on their bills.
“When we first started talking about it, I thought they were crazy. I said, man, these people out of their minds,” said Dickerson, who didn’t realize how impoverished the neighborhood was until he and his family had already moved in. Since then, he’s become a mentor for some of the community’s younger men.
At first, he wasn’t sure what to make of Jonathan Welle and the plan for community solar.
“We’re taught as a community not to trust. And, then I was looking at Jonathan like, who is this white dude going tell us about our community, our neighborhood?” Dickerson said. “But Jonathan ain’t just no white dude. Jonathan is a person who’s very concerned about people. So that’s how Jonathan won me over because he was about justice and equality and making people understand the importance of this and how you can miss an opportunity.
Now Dickerson is part of the community organization in Hough and has become a big promoter of the solar garden.
Sam Dickerson, far left, talks with a group of local and out-of-town visitors who work in the solar industry, near where The Block Club hoped to build a community-owned array in Hough. Photo courtesy Cleveland Owns
After decades of neglect, he sees this project as part of the reinvestment going on in Hough: There’s a new library, $47 million being spent to renovate a vacant and blighted apartment tower, and new homes are being built, some for lower-income residents.
Dickerson thinks a community-owned power source would create even more local ownership.
“Because we want to empower people to understand that you can control your energy. It’s unfortunate that here in the city of Cleveland, residents within this area pay higher [electric bills] than other areas,” he said. “And we just want to even the playing field. We want to give people more economic understanding and empowerment.”
A community-owned solar array requires policy change
There were a lot of steps to get this project done. They expected it to cost $9 million to clear the site and build the array. They’re hoping to get in on some of the federal funds awarded for Ohio to bring solar to disadvantaged communities, like the $156 million from EPA’s Solar for All grant program announced in April.
But what was even more challenging than finding an investor and raising the money? Creating a legal mechanism to allow for community solar. More than 20 states have laws to enable community solar, but not Ohio. Right now, utility companies in Ohio can’t credit the bill of a subscriber for power generated off-site.
There are a couple of ways that could happen.
The local electric company, Cleveland Public Power, could allow for it. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb has said he supports this move, but that hasn’t happened yet.
State lawmakers could also do it. Legislation was introduced in Ohio during the 2023-2024 legislative session to create a community solar pilot program.
But, utility companies lobbied against it.
“The investor-owned utilities in Ohio are the biggest obstacle to progress on a just transition to clean energy,” said Welle last summer, sitting outside at that same teahouse where he met Deborah Lewis years ago.
One of those utilities was American Electric Power, which said in an email that community solar projects shift costs to non-subscribers. Welle thinks there’s another reason for their opposition.
“We know that they are looking out for one interest, and that is the interest of their stockholders and investors in New York,” he said. “They are not concerned with looking out for the interests of Ohio residents and certainly not for addressing the climate crisis.”
Republican lawmakers who sponsored community solar bills in the Ohio statehouse would not agree to an interview. The bills died at the end of last year.
So, that’s the end of the road for the solar garden in Hough for now.
“Until that policy is in place, it’s impossible for us to complete that project,” Welle said.
An architectural rendering of the community building in East Cleveland with the rooftop solar array that Jonathan Welle’s group hoped to install. Photo: Julie Grant / The Allegheny Front
Another idea, in a new location
Welle and his group have shifted focus to East Cleveland, a city outside of Cleveland that has been called disinvestment supersized.
Recently, there has been some movement toward change. New homes are being built for families with low incomes that include rooftop solar panels and electric vehicle chargers.
In August, a ribbon cutting for the opening of a new community center, renovated by the Cuyahoga County Land Bank in East Cleveland, brought new hope for Welle’s group. They started the Cleveland Solar Cooperative, which wants to build a solar array on the center’s roof and have residents become member-owners.
Unlike the community-supported solar garden in Hough, they wouldn’t get any credit on their energy bill.
“This project simply relies on the existing policy. We don’t need the legislature to pass any new policies,” Welle said.
“I’m excited about it,” said Darnell Jennings, pastor at Lakeside Bible church across the street from the new community center.
Pastor Darnell Jennings of Lakeside Bible Church, in East Cleveland, sits at a teahouse in Cleveland’s Little Italy. He’s talking with Cleveland Owns about a community solar project. Photo: Julie Grant / The Allegheny Front
“We’re kind of right on the cusp of this change, and I believe it will benefit our community tremendously,” he said. “When we typically have ownership in something, we take more pride in it.”
By last summer, 70 people had already chipped in at least $50 to become member-owners. But in the months since the opening, they had another setback: The new community center building is being sold. It’s unclear if the new owner will allow the rooftop solar project to be built.
The journey continues
Jonathan Welle is still hopeful. In December, he said it’s just a matter of time before Ohio joins other states in moving toward community-owned renewable energy and what he calls “energy democracy.”
In the meantime, he’s pleased with their work, even though it’s taking so long.
“The process is neighbors coming together, realizing that together they can do things they could never do apart,” he said. “It’s making new connections, learning about how energy works, and why solar has a bright future in Ohio. And we’re going to keep going.”
There are signs of hope. There’s talk of a new community solar bill being introduced in the state legislature. Welle said they hope to get some of the federal money coming to the region for solar projects, especially in disadvantaged communities. As for the solar array in East Cleveland, they are working with Pastor Jennings to possibly put it on the rooftop of his church.
