While it’s a great showing for a small community hosting its first solar home tour, it’s a tiny fraction of the number of people expected to attend the long-established Ohio Green Buildings tour. The event registered more than 6,400 site visits last year and it was terrible disappointment to organizer Bill Spratley.

“The weather will kill it,” said Spratley, who is with Green Energy Ohio. “Bad weather is a killer for an event like this.”

That’s what happened last year. Luckily, he said he’s expecting sunshine and temperatures in the high 50s and 60s for this weekend’s event.

“We have a very big tour this year,” Spratley said.

There are 234 tour sites in 137 Ohio cities, he said. Some areas, of course are bigger with greater concentrations. More than 30 percent of the tour sites are located in the northeast part of the state around Cleveland, Akron and Canton. There are 38 in Hamilton County, where Cleveland is located.

Spratley said the tour always used to focus exclusively on solar homes. But, it’s recently been expanding to include other renewable energy technologies like geothermal and wind. Ohio is home to a lot of good wind power with more and more utility-scale solar installations going in all the time, Spratley said.

“This is the first year we’re calling it the green building tour,” Spratley said. “People didn’t used to know what that means. But it’s gotten popular enough now.”

He said there are more sites every year and that’s even with some sites that participated in previous years dropping off the lists.

Ohio has an extremely active solar population.

“The Cincinnati Zoo has more solar than all the other zoos in the country combined,” Spratley said.

There are also several solar and wind manufacturing plants. The state ranks second in the nation for employing people in the renewable energy manufacturing sector, Spratley said.

The strong solar growth and culture in the state is largely due to a robust renewable energy portfolio standard, requiring utility companies in the state to get 25 percent of their power from renewable sources.

But the Ohio legislature is considering a bill to eliminate its portfolio standard, Spratley said.

“We hope that this event will help them realize how significant renewable energy is in Ohio and how important the portfolio standard is.”

Ohio’s tour, like the tours across the country, is focused on education and growing awareness.

Pictured: The Scharein residence in Medina, Ohio, will be open for solar tours.