Resident Urges County to Revoke Crossvine Solar, Battery Storage Permit

A public letter demanding the county revoke the Crossvine Battery Energy Storage System permit arrives at a moment when county commissioners have already put their legal position on the record: without documented permit violations, they almost certainly cannot act.

The letter, published April 1 in the Dubois County Free Press, calls on commissioners to rescind Permit No. 2024-02, the county-level authorization for AES Indiana's 85-megawatt solar farm and matching 85 MW / 4-hour battery storage system planned for Holland Road Northeast. The author urged officials to look "beyond short-term financial incentives" and pause construction for a full safety review.

What Permit No. 2024-02 actually authorizes is substantial. AES Indiana, which acquired the project from Lightsource bp following Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approval, is cleared to build a facility housing 92 lithium-ion battery enclosures on a site that sits less than two miles west of Holland Elementary School and Hummingbird Daycare Centers, and approximately two miles east of Huntingburg Elementary School, Southridge Middle School, and Southridge High School. The site also abuts Short Creek, a tributary with a documented flooding history. At full capacity, the solar component is projected to generate enough electricity annually to supply the equivalent of roughly 14,500 homes.

The legal bar for revocation is high, and commissioners said so at their January meeting. Because Dubois County operates without countywide zoning ordinances, relying only on baseline state standards, the county cannot retroactively block a project that has already cleared state permitting. County Attorney Greg Schnarr framed the constraint directly: "We have restricted ourselves and our ability to do a lot of things, which allows a lot of people to do many things." The county subsequently passed a one-year moratorium on solar projects, but that measure covers only new applications, not Crossvine.

The one opening residents have pressed is non-compliance. Commissioner Hostetter has drawn the clearest threshold: "If the permits are not in compliance, I would consider revoking the current permits." That standard matters because resident Lisa Bartelt Gogel presented commissioners with evidence that the project was resubmitted to the Indiana Department of Homeland Security after significant design changes. A January 8, 2026, IURC filing she cited shows the facility expanded to 92 battery enclosures, described as a "20-year overbuilt containerized solution" to guarantee full capacity at end of life, a configuration she argues departs materially from what the county originally approved. AES updated the Indiana DHS permit to reflect the new Fluence components on December 10, 2025.

The financial exposure runs in both directions. Revoking a permit without documented non-compliance would likely invite litigation from AES, a subsidiary of a publicly traded corporation. But proceeding without firmer conditions carries its own cost. Cass Township Trustee Jim Meyer told commissioners a single fire response truck now runs $500,000, up from $160,000 sixteen years ago, and no volunteer department in the surrounding townships carries specialized lithium-ion suppression equipment. Conventional water application can accelerate lithium battery combustion rather than control it, a particular concern given Short Creek's proximity to the site. More than 790 residents signed petitions opposing the project, combining over 400 online signatures with 390 handwritten ones collected locally.

AES has pointed to Pike County as a precedent, where it provided a fire truck to local departments alongside that BESS project. Commissioner Blessinger has suggested the county's most practical path may be to "go back to Crossvine to renegotiate the setbacks" rather than pursue revocation outright.

The question commissioners have not answered publicly is the one the letter implicitly demands: what specific safety conditions, suppression standards, or setback requirements would satisfy the county and close the dispute before it reaches a courtroom. The Huntingburg Board of Zoning Appeals voted unanimously on March 11 to affirm that Crossvine's development plan within the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction has expired, a parallel legal setback for AES that could add negotiating leverage if county officials choose to use it. Until commissioners name a concrete threshold, the fate of Permit No. 2024-02 is likely to be decided by a circuit court judge rather than at any Monday-morning commission meeting.