EPA considers terminating $7B Solar For All program

• The Environmental Protection Agency is weighing the termination of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7 billion Solar For All fund, which has provided 60 grantees with funding to create new or existing low-income solar programs, Reuters first reported on Tuesday.
• The program had its funding frozen in February as the result of an executive order from President Donald Trump, but the EPA unfroze those funds the following month in response to court orders.
• “The EPA’s move to cancel Solar for All grants with dozens of states and nonprofits in 49 states and claw back contractually obligated funding is deeply alarming,” said Sach Constantine, executive director at Vote Solar. The projects funded by the program are “shovel-ready,” Constantine said.

EPA was not able to comment on whether or not a decision has been made to attempt to terminate the program, but a spokesperson said, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”

The OBBBA, which eliminated or curtailed much of the clean energy funding in the IRA, has been part of the Trump administration’s toolkit for reversing the Biden administration’s energy transition policies and priorities.

The attempt to cancel Solar For All is “part of a larger series of efforts by the administration to claw back IRA and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds appropriated by Congress and, in many cases, already obligated under binding contracts,” law firm Foley Hoag said in a Wednesday blog post.

“The EPA’s purported basis for terminating the awards is not yet known. The termination letters could be sent by the end of this week,” Foley Hoag said. “This recent news represents a considerable escalation on EPA’s part. EPA’s termination efforts are likely to invite strong legal challenges” and may stand on the same legal ground as challenges from recipients of frozen Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funding, the firm said.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality says in an undated alert on its website, “Section 60002 of the OBBBA repealed the section of the Clean Air Act that created the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and rescinded ‘unobligated balances’ under the Fund. As our Solar for All funds are obligated to DEQ, EnergizeNC’s award agreement is still in effect, and we continue to move forward with program planning.”

EnergizeNC received a $156.1 million Solar for All grant, earmarked by EPA to “transform solar growth in the state, enabling the rapid deployment of distributed solar and associated storage with meaningful benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a release that if the Trump administration moves forward with this attempt to strip funding, “we will see them in court.”

SELC’s release noted that Georgia just launched its Georgia BRIGHT no-cost solar program for “about 900 households with low incomes across the state … Nearly 500 households signed up within 24 hours of the no cost solar plan’s launch.”

That program was created by Solar For All funding recipient The Capital Good Fund, a Georgia nonprofit that was awarded a $156 million grant.

Other Solar For All funding recipients include state departments like the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and nonprofits like the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

According to EPA, recipients had their funding earmarked for purposes including residential zero-interest loan initiatives for solar, or to “mobilize financing and private capital by enabling community development financial institutions, credit unions, rural electric cooperatives, and municipal utilities to gain expertise in administering a revolving loan fund without incurring significant risk,” in the case of several green bank nonprofits.