Project dossier · Dearborn County, Indiana

Manchester Township Solar Farm (proposed) Blocked by ban

Proposed ~1,200-acre commercial solar farm in Manchester Township. No formal rezoning application had been submitted as of the Feb 25, 2026 moratorium vote; this is the project that triggered the petition drive and moratorium, though the moratorium ordinance itself also covers data centers and battery storage. No data-center-specific project has been identified in Dearborn County as of Sept 2026 — the moratorium is preemptive for that use.

Key facts

Operator
Linea Energy
Size
1,200 ac
Location
Dearborn County, Indiana
Stage today
Blocked by ban

Source
read 2026-09-02

What to do next

Next step: Blocked by a local ban or moratorium - the project stopped at the ordinance, not at an application. Watch for the ordinance being challenged in court or allowed to lapse.

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What has happened so far (4 events)

  • 2026-02-25moratorium
    Dearborn County Board of Commissioners approves up-to-1-year moratorium on rezoning for commercial solar, BESS, and data centers, effective Feb 26, 2026. · source
  • 2026-03-03public-comment-open
    County opens public input process on new solar/BESS/data-center zoning ordinances. · source
  • 2026-05-01committee-formed
    Commissioners approve a resolution creating a 7-member (1 commissioner + 6 citizen) advisory committee on the solar ordinance; 26 citizens applied. · source
  • 2026-09-09hearing
    Dearborn County Plan Commission holds a special meeting to discuss the Draft Solar Ordinance; data center and BESS ordinance work remains paused until the solar ordinance amendments are finished. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 13 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 39.200, -85.000 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Recent news

10 stories tracked since 2022-09-04 across 7 outlets. 6× A community is pushing back on a nearby data center. 4× Local officials are moving to pause or block the project. Most recent: “Dearborn County community remembering couple killed in head-on crash” (WCPO 9 News, 2026-06-13).

Automated news aggregation, not human-verified — follow each link to the original outlet. Part of the story tracker, 10 headlines archived.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Indiana

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Manchester Township Solar Farm (proposed)”, aigridwatch.com/projects/linea-energy-manchester-township-in, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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