Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in a video that he seeks to instantly terminate roughly $20 billion in clean energy grant programs. The funds are allocated by the Biden Administration’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated,” said Zeldin.
“We will review every penny that has gone out the door,” said Zeldin. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.”
The funds under review are part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), designed to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis, ensure our country’s economic competitiveness and promote energy independence while delivering lower energy costs and economic revitalization to communities that have historically been left behind.”
GGRF, created under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, includes the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), designed to extend financing for clean technology projects. Recipient organizations are partnering with private-sector investors, developers, community organizations and others to deploy projects, mobilize private capital at scale.
It also includes the $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA), which establishes hubs that provide funding and technical assistance to community lenders working in low-income and disadvantaged communities, providing an immediate pathway to deploy projects in those communities while also building capacity of hundreds of community lenders to finance projects for years.
The third bucket of grants is the $7 billion Solar For All program, which awarded funds to 60 grant recipients, including states, territories, Tribal governments, municipalities and eligible nonprofit recipients to expand the number of low-income and disadvantaged communities primed for distributed solar investment. The funds are expected to enable millions of low-income households to access affordable, resilient and clean solar energy.
pv magazine USA attended the RE+ Northeast solar and energy storage conference in Boston the day before Zeldin’s announcement. In a panel discussion of the Solar For All program, Vero Bourg-Meyer, deputy director of the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) expressed a business-as-usual stance from the industry. Bourg-Meyer said the funds have been committed, and the federal funding freeze onset by President Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order was in violation of U.S. law.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island said the White House has disobeyed his order to restore announced federal funds. The federal judge suggested that the White House is now acting in contempt of court.
Administrator Zeldin said the funding was “purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rushed job with reduced oversight. How do these organizations decide how to allocate funding? How much money have they given out so far?”
Zeldin questioned the transparency of the programs, suggesting there was uncertainty of how much money was disbursed and to whom. However, the Solar For All program, for example, was distributed via a competitive grant program. Each grant recipient has publicly released detailed action plans on where the funding will go, including economic and environmental benefit analysis. Read more about your state or jurisdiction’s action plan here.
At the RE+ Northeast conference panel, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority provided comprehensive, transparent overviews of the funding programs, explaining exactly how private solar businesses can access funds to spur economic growth in their state. Both organizations are allocating roughly 80% to 85% of the funds to direct financial assistance for low-income solar project access, ensuring a minimum of 20% bill savings for residential electric bills. The remaining 15% to 20% is allocated to community outreach and program administration, said the panel.
Watch Administrator Zeldin’s announcement here:
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The “waste and abuse” is solely coming from those who no longer represent the best interests of the public and the country. We need to fire them…beginning with those at the top of the abuse chain…and rehire true public servants. This fiasco is unbelievable.