Is the Solar for All program authorized?

In 2022, Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

One of the most controversial IRA programs is the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that required the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to dole out money (close to triple the agency’s budget) by September 30, 2024.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been trying to claw back $20 billion that the Biden EPA rushed to get out the door. This $20 billion is from two programs that the Biden EPA created to help implement the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund called the National Investment Climate Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Both programs are in effect EPA slush funds, and even worse, slush funds to empower a handful of nonprofits to create slush funds under their exclusive control.

But there’s another Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program that hasn’t received as much attention: the $7 billion Solar for All program.

Fortunately, the program is starting to get more attention. In fact, the EPA Office of Inspector General is launching an audit of the program.

One thing the EPA, its Inspector General, and Congress should be paying attention to is whether the Biden EPA created a program that is inconsistent with the plain language of the IRA.

There is no Solar for All program expressly listed in the IRA. The Biden EPA created this program to implement Section 134(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act (Section 60103(a)(1) of the IRA).

Here’s how this $7 billion appropriated under the IRA could be used:

[T]o make grants, on a competitive basis…to States, municipalities, Tribal governments, and eligible recipients for the purposes of providing grants, loans, or other forms of financial assistance, as well as technical assistance, to enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy or benefit from zero-emission technologies, including distributed technologies on residential rooftops, and to carry out other greenhouse gas emission reduction activities, as determined appropriate by the Administrator in accordance with this section.

The Biden EPA decided that this language gave them the green light to use all of the $7 billion for solar energy. Specifically, the EPA states “Under the $7 billion Solar for All program, the 60 grant recipients will create new or expand existing low-income solar programs, which will enable over 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from distributed solar energy.”

The problem is the statutory language that the Biden EPA invoked to create the Solar for All program isn’t solely focused on solar. The language says the money should be used for zero-emission technologies in general. If Congress wanted to limit the $7 billion to solar, it would have said so. Congress wouldn’t have created some broad requirement on zero-emission technologies and then expected the EPA to pick one technology.

The Biden EPA may have been focused on the clause “including distributed technologies on residential rooftops.” The 60 EPA grants under Solar for All appear to be in furtherance of this distributed technologies requirement. There may be some basis to focus on solar when complying with the “distributed technologies language” since solar is arguably the main technology that would fall under this requirement. The problem is Section 134(a)(1) isn’t limited to this narrow requirement.

Maybe the Biden EPA would have claimed that it wasn’t just looking at this narrow language, with some of the grants being broader in scope that just distributed technologies on residential rooftops. Even if this were true, this still wouldn’t change the fact that the grants are limited to solar.   

The only way that this solar focus could be justified would be if there were no other zero emission technologies that could have been funded. Yet this isn’t the case. For example, the EPA’s own Clean Communities Investment Accelerator program provides examples of other technologies that could have been included, from zero emission transportation projects to microgrids.

To clarify, as a matter of policy, it doesn’t matter whether the money under Section 134(a)(1) was being used for solar or for electric vehicle charging stations. It is wasteful and harmful central planning.

However, from a legal perspective, this unauthorized solar-only focus should matter and provides yet another argument against the Solar for All program.