How affordable housing can still go solar, despite Trump turbulence

The Trump administration is making it harder for low-income households to access the money-saving benefits of solar — but hard doesn’t mean impossible. 

There’s a lot for developers of affordable solar projects to navigate at the moment.

The Trump administration has clawed back billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act funding for projects serving low-income communities across the country, including $7 billion for the federal ​“Solar for All” program. In July, the GOP-controlled Congress passed a sweeping law that will swiftly phase out the tax credits solar developers use to bring down costs. And for months now, the administration has held up $20 billion in federal green bank funding, which some organizations planned to use to make solar available to more people.

Still, some developers are forging ahead.

Take John Miller and Jessica Pitts as an example. The pair, which founded Flywheel Development in 2014, is still proceeding with all 35 of their planned low-income solar projects, which will deliver a total of 17.5 megawatts of solar power to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access the clean energy source. Miller and Pitts think organizations like theirs can withstand Republican attacks on clean energy programs — so long as other financing and policy partners pick up the slack.

Rooftop solar is an effective way for households to reduce their electricity bills. But for a number of reasons, many low-income households can’t install rooftop solar: They may not own their home, or if they do, the up-front costs might be too high or they could struggle to qualify for a loan. Meanwhile, solar power is a tough sell for most multifamily housing, particularly rental properties where landlords take on the cost of installing panels that primarily benefit tenants, who usually pay the lion’s share of utility bills.

Community solar projects like those developed by Flywheel and others can solve these problems. Low-income households are able to sign up to access energy from these shared installations, letting them tap into the benefits of the clean energy resource.

In places where community solar isn’t available, multifamily properties can still use on-site arrays to reduce their utility bills. Those savings can be used to invest in cost-of-living upgrades, as can lease payments paid to properties that are hosting solar systems.

How Trump has scrambled affordable solar economics

Federal action may not have completely foreclosed affordable solar aspirations — but in many cases, it has narrowed what’s possible.

“This is a drastically different world,” said John Fox, senior director of clean energy at Enterprise Community Partners. His organization runs Enterprise Community Development, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit affordable housing providers.

ECD has deployed 2.1 megawatts of solar at 13 of its properties in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. It’s working on another 7.6 MW of solar as well as various projects around battery storage, electric vehicle charging, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and energy-efficiency retrofits.

ECD had hoped to deploy 24 megawatts of solar across its properties by 2032. ​“Now, I think it’s going to be half of that, because that’s what’s cost-effective in this new environment,” Fox said.

And although Flywheel is pushing ahead with its full project pipeline, the financial calculus has gotten tougher due to Trump’s policy changes. The tax-credit phaseout ​“has a fairly significant impact on the timeframes for projects, and how we manage compliance,” Pitts said.

These policy headwinds are raising costs and cutting into the utility bill savings that developers can pass on to low-income residents, Fox said. ECD has historically offered average savings between 20% to 50%, and while Fox says the nonprofit can maintain that 20% level for systems that still qualify for tax credits, the ​“steep discounts of 50%” are not tenable in the current policy environment.