Nonprofit wholesale power supplier and the Village’s energy broker American Municipal Power broke down the above sources of the Village’s current energy profile. A little over 16% of the Village’s energy comes from the open market; the rest is generated via renewable energy sources. (Data via American Municipal Power)
What powers the Village?
- Published: June 7, 2026
Where does Yellow Springs get its electricity? How much of it is generated through renewable means? And how do our sources for electricity affect our monthly bills?
Village Council got answers to these questions and others ahead of the group’s last meeting, Monday, May 18, when Craig Kleinhenz, assistant vice president of power supply planning for American Municipal Power, or AMP, gave a presentation breaking down the Village’s current energy portfolio.
At present, about 84% of the Village’s electricity comes from renewable sources — wind farms, hydroelectric dams and gas emitted from landfills. Around 3.6% local energy comes from the Village’s own, one megawatt solar array on Glass Farm, which went online in 2017.
At that time, the Village’s portfolio consisted of more than 93% renewable energy. The nearly 10% decline over the last decade, Kleinhenz said, is mostly owing to decisions made at the federal level to divest from and altogether eschew renewable energy production.
According to AMP data, Yellow Springs has responded to those bigger politics by dipping into the general energy market for 16.1% of its total energy. Addressing Council, Kleinhenz described the market as a “giant lake filled with mostly natural gas, a little bit of coal, a fair amount of nuclear and a small amount of renewables.”
The Village consistently consumes roughly 37 million kilowatt hours, or kWh, of energy per year, per past News reporting.
About a fourth of that currently comes from Ohio’s Erie and Brown counties’ landfills. As organic waste decomposes, methane is generated and can be converted into electricity, natural gas or thermal heat. As Kleinhenz described it, the electricity from these two landfills provides the Village with “steady” electricity.
“Winter, summer, daytime or nighttime, it doesn’t matter,” he said, and noted that while our contracts with the two landfills are expected to expire in 2029 and 2032, they’ll likely be extended several times over, even well after they’re done accepting trash.
The Village gets just under half — 48.2% — of its energy from hydroelectric dams along the Ohio River and in upstate New York.
Along the river as it runs along Ohio’s state line, the Village reaps electricity from the Willow Island, Greenup and Meldahl facilities; westward along the Ohio River, the Village benefits from the Cannelton plant in southern Indiana and the Smithland plant in southern Illinois.
Kleinhenz noted that over the last several years, AMP brokered power purchase agreements on the Village’s behalf with several of these power plants — making Yellow Springs partial owners. By the same token, these are some of the Village’s most expensive energy sources, as the Village is among the municipalities responsible for paying off the mortgage for some of their construction.
“These dams are 10-story concrete buildings,” Kleinhenz said. “Skyscrapers in the middle of the river.”
The Meldal Locks and Dam, for example, took $685 million for the dam’s conversion into a 105 megawatt hydroelectric plan in 2016.
Then there are the two federal hydroelectric projects operated by the New York Power Authority from which the Village gets some power. Specifically, the Village gets 1.8 million kWh from the Niagara Project, which was built in 1961, and 820,000 kWh from the St. Lawrence Project, built in 1958.
Completing the pie chart, the Village gets 5% of its electricity from Blue Creek Wind Farm in Van Wert, in the far northwestern corner of Ohio. Of the 304,000 kWh generated by the site’s 152 wind turbines, the Village’s share nets 800 kWh.
After this portfolio breakdown, Kleinhenz pivoted to broach the ways in which local, regional and national variables affect electric transmission and capacity costs — ultimately hiking up local utility bills.
He touched on energy market speculation by large conglomerates, data centers’ impact on regional capacity and general energy consumption during particular rate-setting timeframes all as culprits for rising electricity costs — each of which will be addressed in forthcoming issues of the News.
Despite those broader, more existential threats to local electric bills, Kleinhenz said they could be a lot higher, were it not for the Village’s “diversity” of energy investments.
“We’re constantly surveying the market and [the Village of Yellow Springs] has room for more resources,” Kleinhenz said. “For example, you could fit in a couple more megawatts of solar; wind if you wanted to.”
Village Manager Johnnie Burns floated the possibility of investing more in local solar.
“And it would make more sense to have it behind the meter,” he said, referring to power generated and consumed on the customer’s side of the utility meter, bypassing the public grid. “That’s better than paying for the transmission costs on top of it.”
Council President Gavin DeVore Leonard suggested that more investment in energy production could help locals save money.
“This ties into our affordability goals,” he said. “For example, we can produce more electricity at a lower rate and therefore help people save money on their bills. Take the [Center for Business and Education] property that’s sat there vacant. Is there a point at which we could put solar there, behind the grid? Not to pick on the CBE, but this could be any Village-owned property.”
Though not all of the 35-acre, Village-owned CBE is vacant — with marijuana producer Cresco Labs and Antioch University Midwest on the property — approximately 20 acres have been for sale for nearly 15 years.
“With municipal solar, land is the biggest factor,” Kleinhenz said.
An article covering rising electric costs in Yellow Springs and elsewhere will appear in a future issue.
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