Solar for all. That’s what we were about 45 years ago at the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. While solar thermal panels were getting a lot of attention then, rooftop photovoltaic systems were exceedingly rare, generated tiny electricity output, and were frightfully expensive. A cohort of us were anxious over how long it would take for improved technology to bring the price down to the point where most Americans could afford one. Prices have come way down since then, especially since 2005. But the upfront costs—around $20,000 depending on where you live—remain daunting for a large portion of the population.
To help remedy this, on Earth Day this year, President Biden announced a real Solar for All, a $7 billion grant program overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency to make solar energy available to more than a million low-income and disadvantaged American households, saving them at least 20% on their electricity bills. All 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico are included in the 60 selected programs chosen for grants. States, tribes, municipalities, and non-profit groups will use the grants and low-cost financing to provide solar and energy storage for single-family homes and multi-family dwellings. As Biden could rightly say, this is a BFD.
The money is part of the $27 billion the Inflation Reduction Act includes in what is called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Early last month, $20 billion was awarded to get a national network of green banks up and running. This is another attempt to lower energy costs.
Of Solar for All, Warren Leon, executive director of the Clean Energy States Alliance, told Alison F. Takemura that “There’s never been an initiative anywhere near as big for expanding solar for the benefit of low- and moderate-income households across the country. This is going to give a tremendous boost to an important share of the solar market that has not received sufficient attention in the past.”
For people in 25 states and territories, this will mark the first time they’ll have access to low-income solar programs. For other states the grants will help grow existing programs. The EPA plans to issue the money over a five-year period, with a goal of adding 4 gigawatts of rooftop and community solar power. To qualify for a grant, a project must cut customer electric bills by at least 20%. That, the administration calculates, will save 900,000 households $8 billion during the estimated 25-year lifespan of the solar installations.
In addition to these grants, the IRA created a new tax credit of 40%-50% to lower the costs of community solar projects if they directly benefit residents of affordable housing (IRA section 13103). Non-taxable entities like cities and non-profit housing companies aren’t usually eligible for tax credits, obviously, but IRA section 13801(d) makes an exception. Additionally community solar interconnection costs are now also included in the federal investment tax credit.
Simply put, community solar allows multiple customers to get some or all their electricity needs from a solar array, but not one installed on their dwellings. Community solar programs can be run by municipalities, utilities, private third parties, or cooperatives. In this way, people who can’t buy or install their own solar panels can still get the clean energy they provide. That doesn’t mean just renters. The National Renewable Electricity Laboratory, the successor to the Solar Energy Research Institute, reports that only 1 in 4 residential properties is suited to rooftop solar for structural and logistical matters.
Community solar offers affordable clean energy to lower-income neighborhoods, apartment buildings, schools, small businesses, and government properties. This expansion of accessibility is one reason NREL so enthusiastically supported community solar back in 2010 with this report, noting that “the on-site solar market comprises only one part of the total market for solar energy … Clearly, community options are needed to expand access to solar power for renters, those with shaded roofs, and those who choose not to install a residential system on their home for financial or other reasons.”
The financial picture is stark. There’s truth to critics’ complaints that it’s mostly the elite who can afford solar installations. And that hasn’t much changed in the 14 years since the NREL report was published.
The disparity is a product of the high up-front cost of a solar installation and the fact that less affluent Americans are less likely to own their home. The federal tax incentive lowers costs, but availability depends on a household’s tax liability, and most lower-income people don’t have enough of that to get full advantage of the credit.
Community solar can go a long way in reducing that inequality. But it matters what kind of community solar. The we’re-all-in-this-together tone of the word “community” is violated in many cases of private third-party ownership of a solar array. Customers in such programs get far fewer benefits than they would if they owned the array. Utilities offering monthly billing credits to customers who subscribe to clean energy generated with community solar installations also get more of the benefits than customers owning or in control of their own systems. This is why it’s heartening to see the Biden administration encouraging cooperative ownership of community solar projects.
Now $7 billion is a lot of moolah. But to actually attain the goal of Solar for All, it will ultimately take a lot more than that. Given the caterwauling from Republicans about the IRA and the Democrats’ “radical green agenda,” it’s obvious—as on so many other issues—that keeping certain people out of office is essential to keeping, much less expanding the program.
Here are three examples of projects that will be receiving funds from Solar for All. You can see all of them here.
New Hampshire:
The New Hampshire Department of Energy (NHDOE), The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, and New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority have jointly designed a comprehensive and complementary approach to bring the benefits of residential-serving community solar to those least able to afford this new technology. The Community Loan Fund will target resident-owned communities through their existing program, which helps the residents of manufactured housing parks buy the park from owners and convert them into cooperatives. NH Housing will use funding to install residential-serving community solar on workforce housing projects. Lastly, the NHDOE, serving as the Coalition lead applicant, will scale up its existing community solar program with these funds, serving as a catch all to those communities or projects that do not neatly fit into any of those programs by the Community Loan Fund and Housing Finance Authority.
Wisconsin:
Through a combination of grants to homeowners, incentives, tax credits, loan offerings, and partnerships, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) will remove barriers to solar energy throughout Wisconsin. The main pathways of the program will assist disadvantaged communities in Wisconsin by installing solar on single-family and multifamily residential properties. Wisconsin SFA will ensure that participants have limited or no up-front costs to participate in solar programs. The overarching goal of the program is to reduce household energy bills. The strength of the Wisconsin Technical College System and other workforce partners will be leveraged as they are already training individuals for clean energy careers, particularly solar installation.
Three Affiliated Tribes (The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation)
The Northern Plains Tribal SFA program (NPT-SFA) will transform energy and economic systems in disadvantaged communities with deep and concentrated investments. Expanding to broader areas over time, NPT-SFA will focus first in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, with additional participation of tribes in Wisconsin, and Wyoming. NFP-SFA's strategy is based on a successful pilot program on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana and includes the establishment of Tribally-owned and managed portfolios of solar systems sited at the homes of Tribal members. The high electricity prices, frequent power outages, and inefficient housing stock will be leveraged as opportunities for deep, impactful programs. Innovative apprenticeship programs, education, and training partnerships will also attract industry leaders, building capacity in the region to deliver continuing benefits that will endure long beyond the period of the grant.
Related Stories Community Shared Solar (EPA)
Inside Community Solar: Benefits and Challenge
How To Tell A Good Community Solar Program From A Bad One
Biden Hands Out $7 Billion to Expand Solar Access
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RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEF
Lisa Gross at Inside Climate News has written a wonderful story about Andrea Vidaurre, one of the seven winners of this year’s prestigious Goldman Environmental prize, which comes with a $200,000 award, an addition first made to the prize in 2019.
Community organizer Vidaurre spent years persuading regulators at the California Air Resources Board to pass truck and rail standards to protect communities of color from toxic freight emissions. Those years meant “watching massive warehouses being built right next to homes, schools and parks, seeing homes bulldozed, and green spaces paved over. When she heard about families being harassed and bullied out of their homes—which is still happening today—she was outraged. So she got to work,” Gross writes.
This week’s award ceremony was the 35th annual presentation of the prize, also known as the Green Nobel. It is given to grassroots environmental activists from six geographic reasons around the planet. The prize was created in 1989 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman. They saw it as a way to demonstrate the international nature of environmental problems and draw public attention to the global need for action. The idea, according to a summary at the prize’s website, was that by “rewarding ordinary individuals for their outstanding environmental achievements, the Goldmans hoped to inspire others to emulate the examples set by the Prize recipients.” Reviewing the work of all the prize winners shows that most of them are anything but ordinary even if their backgrounds are.
Winners are chosen by an international jury who receive nominations from a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals. Prize winners join together for a 10-day tour of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., the awards ceremony and presentation, media briefings, and meetings with political, public policy, financial. and environmental leaders. At the awards ceremony, a short documentary video of each winner is shown. Through 2020, these were narrated by Robert Redford. Since then, Sigourney Weaver has handled the job.
Here are the other six winners:
Marcel Gomes
Marcel Gomes, Brazil: Gomes, a journalist , worked with colleagues at Repórter Brasil to coordinate "a complex, international campaign that directly linked beef from JBS, the world's largest meatpacking company, to illegal deforestation in Brazil's most threatened ecosystems. Reacting to his win, Gomes said: "This award recognizes the impact that journalism can have to protect the environment and ultimately improve people's lives.Repórter Brasil was able to track the Brazilian meat chain from the farm to supermarkets abroad, which companies said was not possible to do."
Alok Shukla, India: Shukla "led a successful community campaign that saved 445,000 acres of biodiversity-rich forests from 21 planned coal mines in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh."
Andrea Vidaurre, United States: Vidaurre's "grassroots leadership persuaded the California Air Resources Board to adopt, in the spring of 2023, two historic transportation regulations that significantly limit trucking and rail emissions."
Murrawah Maroochy Johnson
Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, Australia: Maroochy Johnson, a Wirdi woman from the Birri Gubba Nation, "blocked development of the Waratah coal mine," a "carbon bomb" that "would have accelerated climate change in Queensland, destroyed the nearly 20,000-acre Bimblebox Nature Refuge, added 1.58 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over its lifetime, and threatened Indigenous rights and culture."
Sinegugu Zukulu and Nonhle Mbuthuma, South Africa: Zukulu and Mbuthuma "stopped destructive seismic testing for oil and gas off South Africa's Eastern Cape" by "asserting the rights of the local community to protect their marine environment," safeguarding "migratory whales, dolphins, and other wildlife from the harmful effects of seismic testing."
Teresa Vicente, Spain: Vicente "led a historic, grassroots campaign to save the Mar Menor ecosystem—Europe's largest saltwater lagoon—from collapse, resulting in the passage of a new law in September 2022 granting the lagoon unique legal rights."
ECO-TWXXT
HALF A DOZEN THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
The EPA’s Crackdown is Finally Here by Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins (podcast). One of the most important pieces of the Biden administration’s climate policy has arrived: On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules restricting climate pollution from coal-fired plants and natural gas plants that haven’t been built yet. The rules will eliminate more than a billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution by the middle of the century. They are the long-awaited “stick” in the Biden administration’s carrots-and-sticks climate policy. So how do the rules work? Why do they emphasize carbon capture so much? And is this the end of coal in America? On this special episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse dig into the regulations and why they matter to American climate policy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer is founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins is a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back by Trevelyan Wing. Despite some public protestations to the contrary (the main opposition CDU party declared in January that Germany “cannot do without the nuclear power option at present”), in private few political leaders think the country will, or even realistically can, reverse course. As an industry insider told me, talk of reintroducing nuclear to Germany is “delusional” because investors were “burnt … too many times” in the past and now “would rather put their money into safer investments”. Moreover, “it would take decades to build new [nuclear] power stations” and electricity is no longer the sector of concern, given the rapid buildout of renewables, with attention having shifted to heating and transport. Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023 – the month before the phaseout – the distribution of German electricity generation was 53% renewable, 25% coal, 17% gas, and 5% nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60% renewable, 24% coal, and 16% gas.Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
German nuclear power (purple) has largely been replaced by renewables (yellow), not coal (black and brown).
A Uniquely French Approach to Environmentalism. The biodiversity police might just work by Jess McHugh at The Atlantic. On a Wednesday morning last December, Bruno Landier slung his gun and handcuffs around his waist and stepped into the mouth of a cave. Inside the sprawling network of limestone cavities, which sit in a cliffside that towers above the tiny town of Marboué, in north-central France, Landier crouched under hanging vines. He stepped over rusted pipes, remnants from when the caves housed a mushroom farm. He picked his way through gravel and mud as he scanned the shadowy ecru walls with his flashlight, taking care not to miss any signs. Landier was not gathering evidence for a murder case or tailing a criminal on the run. He was searching for bats—and anything that might disturb their winter slumber. “Aha,” Landier whispered as his flashlight illuminated a jumble of amber-colored beer bottles strewn across the floor. Someone had been there, threatening to awaken the hundreds of bats hibernating within. Landier is an inspector in the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), an entity that was given sweeping powers to enforce environmental laws when it was founded, in 2020. Its nationwide police force, the only one of its kind in Europe, has 3,000 agents charged with protecting French species in order to revive declining biodiversity in the country and its territories. Damaging the habitat of protected animals such as bats—much less killing a protected animal—is a misdemeanor that can carry a penalty of 150,000 euros and three years in prison. It’s a uniquely draconian, uniquely French approach to environmentalism.
Chart: Heavy industry is the next big climate problem to tackle by Maria Virginia Olano at Canary Media. America’s industrial sector is on track to become the nation’s biggest source of planet-warming emissions by 2035, according to Rhodium Group. While the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy and electric vehicle subsidies are set to drive significant emissions reductions in both the power and transportation sectors over the next decade, industrial emissions are expected to remain stubbornly high. With the policies currently in place, the report projects that overall U.S. emissions will be between 32 and 51 percent below 2005 levels in 2035. The main driver of that decline will be the power sector, where emissions are expected to plummet over the next decade as more and more wind, solar, and storage projects plug into the grid. Transportation is the next biggest contributor. Rhodium Group forecasts the sector — currently the biggest source of carbon emissions in the U.S. — will cut its emissions by about 23 percent between 2022 and 2035. The industrial sector’s outlook is far less optimistic. By 2035, heavy industry will still emit the same amount of CO2 as it does today — and account for one-third of all U.S. emissions.
Will New Leader End Progress in Saving Indonesia’s Forests? By Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360. Indonesia is already in the midst of a mining boom. It produces half the world’s nickel, a metal vital for the batteries used in electric vehicles. The International Energy Agency says that Indonesia could up its share of total supply, while demand for the metal expected to double by 2040. Nickel will help other countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But it does the opposite in Indonesia, where most of the metal is mined from beneath rainforests and is refined using energy from coal-burning power stations. On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, over a third of the forests now lie within nickel mining concession areas, according to a study published this month by Mighty Earth, a global advocacy group with offices in the country. Now newly elected President Prabowo Subiantowants to expand mining and refining further. “By processing our natural resources domestically, I’m optimistic that we would be able to witness double-digit economic growth,” he said shortly before the election. But at what price for the rainforests? Some environmentalists fear the worst, as mines and refineries proliferate. But there are optimists who argue that the Western investors and manufacturers that Prabowo will need to fulfil his economic promises could leverage more sustainable development. “Nickel mining is a dirty industry,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who runs Mighty Earth’s program for protecting forests from commodity trades, “but with the political will, Indonesia can clean up the nickel supply chain.”
To Protect New Fossil Fuel Waste Rule, BLM Cuts 95% of its Climate Benefits by Martin Lockman at Climate Law, a Sabin Center blog. In November of 2022, when the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management proposed new rules to control venting, flaring, and leaks from oil and gas leases on federal land (the “Fossil Fuel Waste Rule”), they noted that these leasing rules would have an enormous ancillary climate benefit. While the proposed rule had been designed to protect taxpayer royalties from public lands mineral leases, BLM expected that, in complying with the rule, oil and gas companies would eliminate $427 million per year of climate-related harms. However, when BLM published its final rule on April 10, 2024, revisions to the proposed rule had eliminated nearly all of its ancillary climate benefits. In its final form, BLM estimates that the Fossil Fuel Waste Rule will prevent just $17.9 million of climate damage a year—less than 5% of its initial estimate. This blog post provides a brief history of BLM’s Fossil Fuel Waste Rule, and explains why and how the ancillary climate benefits vanished from the final regulation. In doing so, it highlights the skeptical approach some courts have taken to climate action by non-environmental agencies, and the tension between this skepticism and President Biden’s all-of-government approach to addressing the climate crisis.
ECO-QUOTE
“Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people.”—Jared Diamond
ECOPINION
UAW’s Latest Labor Victory Is a Huge Climate Win, Too by Katie Myers at The New Republic. Climate regulations and the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous incentives are now stimulating electric vehicle manufacturing. Despite the Biden administration’s pro-labor economic agenda, IRA funding—and thus billions of dollars in public and private investment—has largely gone to areas with low union density, spurring worries among autoworkers that the EV shift could create a second tier of lower-paid, nonunion workers spearheading the transition to electric vehicles, working in dangerous conditions with flammable elements like lithium. In 2022, Volkswagen broke ground on EV production and assembly; the same year, the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—UAW’s next battle, organizers tell me—began manufacturing an electric SUV. In the most recent union contract between UAW and the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Stellantis agreed to allow joint-venture EV manufacturing plants under the union umbrella, and now, Tennessee may be the next step. Since the beginning conversations about reducing dependence on fossil fuels—a necessary transition that nonetheless could have deleterious impacts on workers across steel, coal, oil, auto, and building trades industries—workers have demanded a “just transition”: an energy transition that prevents as much of the workforce as possible from being dislocated, allows for training and opportunity, and provides jobs equal to or better than the ones that came before. Environmental organizations have taken up the demand, too, seeing that a united front for labor rights and environmental justice is more powerful than keeping the two at loggerheads, as right-wing politicians might prefer. A just transition is what workers in the South are demanding as the IRA funds flood in.
Stan Cox
We've Been Warned: Infinite Growth Can't Continue on This Finite Planet by Stan Cox at TomDispatch. This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling: “As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.” What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.
Student Protests Have Always Terrified Powerful Interests by Amy Westervelt at Drilled. For me, after working for the past 18 months or so on a series about the global crackdown on climate protest, it's also hard not to see parallels between the campus crackdowns and the push to criminalize protest more broadly. Particularly when I look at Senate Bill 4136, introduced by Texas Senator John Cornyn last week: it would revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit thought to be "supporting terrorism," and Cornyn and his co-sponsor Angus King (I-ME) claim it's necessary to stop funds flowing from U.S. organizations to Hamas. Lest we ever miss a chance to turn a war into an excuse to strip citizens of their rights. Financing terrorism is, of course, already illegal and there are plenty of laws on the books to deal with it. This one would just make it really easy to accuse any organization of "supporting terror." It's the same type of law we've seen used to shut down civil society groups and repress climate and social justice activists in Mozambique, India, and the Philippines. As in those places, the only function it would serve here is to further repress free speech, something Cornyn and his old pal Ted Cruz supposedly care so much about preserving. What we're seeing in the reaction to U.S. protests against the Gaza genocide—from the campus arrests to the TikTok ban to this ridiculous new law to "counter terrorism"—runs absolutely counter to the First Amendment; it's part of what we've been calling the real free speech threat. To put an even finer point on it: it's fascism. People really balk at the use of that word, but I don't use it lightly. I'm genuinely not sure what other word one would use to describe a university president calling the police to arrest their students for peaceful protest, a government trying to shut down a media channel because it can't control it, or a law that makes it easy to brand any civil society group a terrorist organization and shut it down.
G7 offers tepid response to appeal for “bolder” climate action by Matteo Civillini at Climate Home News. When UN climate chief Simon Stiell addressed climate and energy ministers from the G7 group of rich nations on Monday, he issued a frank message: “It is utter nonsense to claim the G7 cannot – or should not – lead the way on bolder climate actions”. He added those countries should be “leading from the front” through much deeper emissions cuts and bigger and better climate finance. A day later, the gathering of the most powerful industrialised democracies responded with a tepid outcome, serving up a new commitment on ending coal power generation – weakened by a loophole in the language – a rehash of previous pledges and nothing new on climate finance, this year’s top priority in climate diplomacy. For the first time, G7 countries all agreed to end the use of coal power generation in their energy systems “during the first half of the 2030s”. While most members of the bloc are already planning to phase out coal before 2035, the commitment marks a step forward for Japan, analysts said.
Elliott Negin
Calling Out Climate Lies for a Living by Elliott Negin at the Union for Concerned Scientists.I have spent the better part of the last 12 years writing about lies. My colleagues call it “disinformation,” and I generally do, too, but let’s call it for what it is: lying. During this stretch, I have written more than 200 articles and columns, and most of them were either about CEOs who lie, experts who lie, scientists who lie, attorneys general who lie, legislators who lie, or a president who lies. And I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill white lies. I’m talking about lies that have grave consequences for the future of the planet. (I should add that I also wrote 65 columns featuring Q&As with scientists and experts who work for my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS. They don’t lie. They follow the science. The series is called “Ask a Scientist,” and the last one I wrote will run in mid-May.) After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods; his predecessor, Rex Tillerson; and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil, and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Electric vehicles are usually safer for their occupants—but not necessarily for everyone else • China Climate Chief to Visit US With Aim to Bolster Key Ties • Saying people support “steps” to address climate change is meaningless unless we specify what those steps are • Why climate might be a more powerful election issue than it seems • Biden’s Climate Cash Is Finally Pouring In
