The Supreme Court of Ohio on Tuesday overturned the state permit for Oak Run Solar, a 6,000-acre industrial-scale solar and battery project planned for rural farmland between Columbus and Dayton. The fractured ruling sends the Madison County project back for more review after the justices said regulators had not fully addressed how the facility would look from public vantage points.

The decision reverses a permit that state officials had previously granted and orders the Ohio Power Siting Board to more thoroughly examine the project’s visual impacts. Oak Run is being developed by Savion, a subsidiary of Shell, and developers have said it would generate 800,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, enough to power 170,000 households.

Four justices in the majority dismissed most of the broader objections raised in the case, including claims tied to aesthetics, wildlife and hydrology. But Justice Pat Fischer wrote that Oak Run failed to meet the board’s rules because it did not provide photographic simulations or pictorial sketches from public vantage points showing the substations’ support structures, which he said were among the project’s tallest features. The court said that omission was enough to require a new look at the site’s visual impact.

Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy sided with local governments in part and said the developers had not supplied enough information on water quality and fire safety. In a separate partial concurrence, however, she called the court’s opinion “arbitrary and unreasonable.” Justice Jennifer Brunner dissented, saying the Ohio Power Siting Board had already thoroughly considered the viewshed impacts of the project area.

For Oak Run, the ruling is a setback, but not necessarily the end of the road. Project spokesperson Samantha Sawmiller said the board’s approval was “largely upheld with only one clarification required,” and said the company looked forward to working with the board to address what she called the last open item so the project can move ahead.

The case lands in the middle of a broader fight over utility-scale solar in Ohio, where regulators and the state’s high court have created legal roadblocks for developers in recent years. The court has rejected lawsuits challenging several permits granted by the Ohio Power Siting Board, but it has not yet ruled on multiple developer lawsuits seeking to reverse board denials. For Oak Run, Tuesday’s ruling does not kill the project, but it does mean the permit cannot stand until the visual issues are addressed.