Dive Brief:

• Eight plaintiffs filed suit Monday against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its termination of the Solar for All program, alleging that the termination was unconstitutional and caused them harm.
• EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the rescission in August, saying in a post on X, “The bottom line is this: EPA no longer has the statutory authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.”
• “If Defendants’ unlawful termination of the Solar for All program is allowed to stand, nearly one million low-income households will lose access to affordable, resilient solar in communities in all states and territories, and hundreds of thousands of good-paying, high-quality jobs will be lost,” the plaintiffs argued.

Dive Insight:

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs are solar installation companies Sunpath Solar and EIS Solar, nonprofits Solar United Neighbors and Black Sun Light Sustainability, environmental consultancy 2KB Energy Services, trade union Rhode Island AFL-CIO, the nonprofit Rhode Island Center for Justice, and Anh Nguyen, a member of Georgia BRIGHT’s Solar for All advisory board.

“Plaintiffs are not direct grantees under the Solar for All program, but rather they are its intended beneficiaries,” the lawsuit said. “They are a labor organization, an individual homeowner seeking access to solar energy to reduce costs, nonprofit organizations dedicated to assisting low-income families with affordable energy, and solar consultants and installers.”

The eight plaintiffs “should have benefited directly from the Solar for All program’s provision of new sources of energy throughout the nation and its electricity cost savings,” according to the lawsuit.

In an August statement posted on YouTube, Zeldin referred to Solar for All as a slush fund and said there was “massive dilution” of the program’s funding disbursements, “as many grants go through pass through after pass through after pass through after pass through, with all of the middlemen taking their own cut.”

An April 2024 announcement from the Biden administration said the program was intended to “deliver residential solar projects to over 900,000 households nationwide” by “[providing] funds to states, territories, Tribal governments, municipalities, and nonprofits across the country to develop long-lasting solar programs that enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy and benefit from distributed residential solar.”

The plaintiffs argue that the executive branch didn’t have the statutory authority to rescind the $7 billion in funding, even after Congress “repealed large parts of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” in July, as it “did not repeal the Solar for All program retroactively.”

“Congress rescinded only ‘unobligated balances,’ which preserved all $7 billion of the obligated funding EPA already had awarded through its Solar for All grants,” the lawsuit said. “Instead of distributing the Solar for All funds as Congress directed, Defendants hastily and unlawfully terminated the Solar for All program,” an action the plaintiffs allege was illegal.

The plaintiffs said they are seeking an order “declaring the termination of the Solar for All program unlawful, setting it aside, and requiring Defendants to restore the program.”

The Solar for All program’s funding was originally frozen in February following an executive order from President Donald Trump, but the EPA unfroze those funds the following month in response to a court order.