Hot EPA Summer: New Competitive Grants Almost Here

Robin Dutta | LS4A Campaign Director

Not quite one year ago President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in this country’s history. There are so many new programs in the law, keeping states busy making sure they apply for every eligible dollar. Part of the law is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion fund consisting of three competitive grant programs. The Environmental Protection Agency will implement the grants for clean energy and climate projects aimed at lowering toxic emissions and benefitting low-income and disadvantaged communities in particular.

One of these grant programs is the $7 billion Solar for All competition. The potential of this grant scheme is enormous. In fact, it is a once in a generation opportunity to put the U.S. on track to catalyze long-term scalable and sustainable rooftop and community solar programs in low- income and disadvantaged communities across the country. It will be critical in advancing efforts to achieve a 100 percent clean energy grid at the lowest cost, because mainstream adoption of local solar and storage is how we get there.

The $7 billion in funding will provide up to 60 grants to States, Tribal governments, municipalities, and nonprofits for projects bringing community solar, rooftop solar, and battery storage to low-income and disadvantaged communities across the United States. The EPA is expected to open the application window this summer. That doesn’t leave much time for states to plan and draft their proposals for the competition.

Analysis from the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a member of LS4A, found that this $7 billion fund could catalyze enormous benefits including:

• 13.4 gigawatts (GW) of new distributed solar deployment;

• 2.7 million low-to-moderate income households with new, direct access to local, sustainable solar energy;

• $20 billion in direct savings to households from newly enabled projects with an average of 20% average monthly savings on energy bills; and

• 386.5 million metric tons of avoided CO2 emissions, accounting for $20 billion in total social benefit.

That is, this is all possible if state programs are effective in deploying new LMI local solar.

Every state has the opportunity to apply. As Local Solar for All reviewed the published guidelines, we found that states with open-access rooftop solar and community solar programs will be in the best position to compete for that $7 billion. In addition, we recommend that states follow these principles when drafting their applications:

• Ensure statewide eligibility for programs

• Leverage federal dollars as much as possible

• Deploy, deploy, deploy the greatest volume of new low-income solar possible

• Keep the program administration simple

• Ensure that new LMI solar creates meaningful household energy savings

When combined with the Low-Income Communities Bonus Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and other federal programs, states have a real opportunity to expand distributed solar and storage in disadvantaged communities. It couldn’t come at a better moment.

Over the last five years, much of the country has seen energy prices increase just as reliable energy service has decreased. In 2022 alone, RTO and utility warnings and blackouts due to capacity constraints affected 141.5 million people across 40 states.

With increasingly frequent, costly and deadly extreme weather events that make outages more common, the stakes are only getting higher. In fact, a recent study found that 216 people would die in Detroit if a multi-day heat wave coincided with a mass power outage. For a city in the desert like Phoenix, the estimated death toll jumps to 12,800 with nearly 800,000 needing emergency medical attention. Of course, it’s often low-income populations and communities of color that bear the brunt of the suffering from outages, experiencing them more frequently and for longer durations.

But local solar can make a huge difference. A clean electric grid with mainstream local solar and storage is $88 billion less expensive through 2050 than the grid of today. Even a 95 percent clean grid with mainstream local solar and storage can save $473 billion by 2050 versus the same clean grid without mainstream solar adoption. Given the investments and new programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, these savings could well be even larger.

Look out for new EPA announcements for the Solar for All competition this summer. They could be here before you know it!