The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week launched a historic regulatory rollback, but so far the drive to review 31 key EPA rules does not directly target solar, based on surveys of public statements about the initiatives.
Yet, the agency’s overhaul announcement on Wednesday further boosts uncertainty on several federal-policy fronts touching on climate and energy, including solar. Many organizations and businesses say the uncertainty is chilling investment.
Also this week, the EPA announced that it had terminated $20 billion in grants from an Inflation Reduction Act program, informally known as a federal Green Bank, typically to supply low-cost loans to help finance clean-energy initiatives. The agency had frozen the grants in February based on its stated concerns about their oversight and allocation.
Termination of the grant portfolio came simultaneously with cancellation notices to individual grant recipients, The New York Times reported. Among cancellations were grants totaling nearly $7 billion to Climate United, which received notice just a half-hour earlier than the federal announcement of the portfolio termination, it reported. Climate United is among nonprofits that have taken legal counter-measures.
In the Green Bank program, low-cost loans and grants were to be made to enterprises undertaking climate-related projects, including solar installations. In Arkansas, for instance, the EPA terminated $31.8 million in Climate United financing to Scenic Hill Solar, a developer based in Little Rock, Arkansas, to build solar projects on University of Arkansas properties around the state to achieve a total production capacity of 66 megawatts.
Anne Evan, chief executive officer of Elevate, a non-profit dedicated to creating clean energy solutions for all, said in a statement that the EPA’s decision to stop the grants “is a devastating setback for communities striving for lower energy costs, job creation, and healthy places to live.” Elevate produces programs “to ensure that everyone has clean and affordable heat, cooling, power, and water in their homes and communities,” according to the statement.
As part of the overhaul, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin outlined what he termed the biggest deregulatory drive in U.S. history. The campaign to revamp EPA policies aims to curtail 31 important rules, including those restricting pollution from the smokestacks of coal-fueled power plants or the exhaust pipes of cars.
The overhaul also will take aim at the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding” that was adopted in 2009 to define climate change as a threat to human health and therefore mandate the EPA to curb greenhouses gases warming the planet.
But elimination of any of the 31 rules would require lengthy, intensive and contentious review, considering the preliminary rhetoric opposing the EPA initiative from many environmental nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Fund.
If it were successful, the new deregulatory drive would effectively dismantle much of the regulatory framework that the EPA developed over its nearly 55-year history and therefore constitute new policy on the environment, climate and energy.
What is more, the administration already is undertaking a 90-day review of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 including review of important solar provisions such as tax incentives for domestic production and deployment of technology employing content from domestic production. As scheduled, the review would last until late May.
Michael Parr, executive director of the Ultra Low Carbon Alliance, said the near-term policy action is unsettling investors, some of whom want to make bets on renewable energy in a U.S. market that is seeing rising power demand for the first time in years.
But Parr hopes the Trump administration, which wholly backs U.S. energy independence, will recognize solar as the fastest-to-market and lowest-cost form of new generation. In 2024, he said, solar added more than half of new generation.
“While there is a lot of current uncertainty about the Administration and solar policy,” Parr said, “solar is both consistent with and critical to the Administration’s energy policies.”
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