Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar For All program, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with the aim of delivering residential solar to low-income and disadvantaged households, has seen its funds frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s overall halt on certain IRA disbursements. 
• Though all IRA funding was approved by Congress, and the freeze has been subject to temporary restraining orders from two federal judges, funding associated with the Solar For All program remains frozen, said Vote Solar’s executive director Sachu Constantine.
• Solar projects are capital-intensive upfront, Constantine said, “and the way you justify those investments is if you know this funding is coming through. So as soon as the funding goes into question, a whole chain of activities and steps have to be held up. You can't keep moving forward.”

Dive Insight:

Regarding the freeze, “neither EPA nor the Department of Justice can provide further information on pending litigation,” an EPA spokesperson said Wednesday. 

The Solar For All program was in the process of disbursing $7 billion in grants to 60 awardees that included states, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and nonprofits, with the aim of delivering solar to at least 900,000 households in the U.S.

Despite the freeze, grantees are continuing to try to access this funding. Pennsylvania state representative Elizabeth Fiedler, D, on Tuesday introduced a bill seeking legislative approval for the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority to access the $156 million that it was granted to create a state Solar For All program.

The nonprofit Indigenized Energy announced Jan. 30 that the Chippewa Cree Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe had completed kickoff projects funded by their $135.5 million Solar For All grant, creating residential solar installations on tribal land “that deliver approximately 8kW of clean, low-cost power to participating homes .... The next round of SFA kickoff projects are planned for spring 2025 when weather conditions permit.”

Across the U.S., the projects and programs that were being funded by Solar For All are in different stages of deployment and implementation, Constantine said.

“Many were going to spend their money this year,” he said, and were working with EPA to finalize work plans and budgets. “But now the problem is, all of that is in question. We don't know how much money got out the door. We don't know how much money the administration can seek to claw back.”

Four Democratic members of Congress who serve on appropriations committees – Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. – sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday asking for more information about the funding freezes at EPA, including the freeze on Solar For All.

“Funding freezes – which the administration intentionally implemented before court intervention – devastate programs that protect public health and the environment while increasing costs for families,” they wrote. “The Trump Administration will be raising energy costs for families and businesses will be losing out on thousands of potential jobs as programs like Solar for All and Clean School Bus rebates are terminated.”

Constantine said that after the reelection of Trump — a critic of the clean energy industry — he anticipated aspects of the IRA would be clawed back, but is concerned by Trump’s robust anti-renewables agenda.

“I think elections have consequences, and that may be just a fact that we're going to have to deal with,” he said. “That doesn't mean we should allow progress to be halted on the deployment of solar or the transition to a clean energy economy …. I think it's fair to say that Solar For All was an idealized form of how we were going to do this, and so this is a particularly egregious threat.”