Pennsylvania’s solar ambitions face high federal and state hurdles

This article by Capital & Main is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

It was a Thursday when Pennsylvania energy regulators received a pair of letters. The first let them know that $156 million in solar grant money they’d received in 2024 had been revoked; the second ordered them to stop any work related to that money.

The Aug. 7 correspondence was sent to the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority, an independent financing authority for clean energy projects in the Keystone State. The agency was far from alone.

The Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority was one of 60 recipients, including state agencies, nonprofits, and Native American tribes, to receive termination letters from the Environmental Protection Agency alerting them that funds they’d received under Solar for All, a Joe Biden-era initiative to help low-income households access solar energy, would be rescinded. The recipients’ accounts containing the funds won in 2024 were frozen and the money removed, environmental advocates say. Most large fossil-fuel-producing states, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, had their funds pulled.

The same day that Pennsylvania received the news about its funding, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the cuts on X. ​“What a grift,” he said of the $7 billion program established under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature legislation.

But advocates and many Democrats say that Zeldin and the EPA are acting illegally. The Solar for All program, and the $27 billion funding bucket that underlies it, called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, was ​“Trump-proofed” before Biden left office, a move designed to ensure that an incoming Republican administration couldn’t legally claw back that money. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was established with the requirement that the money be ​“obligated” by Sept. 30, 2024 — before the end of Biden’s term — after which point it could not be revoked.

“That means that that funding is official,” said Elowyn Corby, Mid-Atlantic regional director at Vote Solar, a clean energy advocacy group. ​“It is real. It has gone to the states. Many of the grantees are already pulling down funds.”

Now, congressional Democrats are waging a war against the Trump administration to defend that stance, one supported by numerous environmental groups and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which sent a letter to the EPA on Aug. 28 asserting that the federal agency ​“does not have the authority to unilaterally terminate the [award] agreement.”

Zeldin defended the EPA’s right to withdraw the Solar for All funds by invoking language in HR 1, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was adopted July 4. That bill stipulates that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will be ​“repealed” and ​“the unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out” the program ​“rescinded.”

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, Democrats from Virginia, urged Zeldin to walk back the move. On Aug. 14, the two senators joined Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and 29 other colleagues, in arguing that freezing or pulling back the money is illegal, and that the line in the ​“Big Beautiful Bill” is predicated on a falsehood.

“It is not legally possible to claw back funding that has already been obligated,” Whitehouse and his colleagues wrote.

After Solar for All funds were rescinded, Vote Solar organizers launched a letter-writing campaign to 21 state attorneys general, urging them to ​“take swift action” against the EPA to protect the money. ​“EPA’s attempt to terminate Pennsylvania’s Solar for All program is misguided and unjustified,” says a letter the group, along with 30 other clean energy and conservation groups, sent to Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday.

Olivia Nedd, senior policy director of the group’s access and equity program, said their call was met with promising responses by Colorado and California, both of which have substantial investments in solar and other renewable sources of energy. But, she said, she’s not heard back from Sunday, a Republican, or his office.