On Earth Day, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House jointly announced 60 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) Solar for All awards, including 49 state-level awards, six awards to serve tribes, and five multistate awards. The Solar for All awards, totaling $7 billion, will be deployed over the next five years to bring the benefits of solar energy to over 900,000 low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. Read a press release from EPA here: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-announces-7-billion-solar-all-grants-deliver-residential 

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) congratulates all awardees on their successful applications, and thanks EPA and the White House for their leadership in delivering this historic program. 

Solar for All, a flagship program from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has been enthusiastically received across our nation as a generational opportunity to provide American households access to savings, wealth-building, health improvements, and climate benefits and to foster vibrant local solar economies in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. The program will facilitate the deployment of over four gigawatts of new solar capacity, exclusively to benefit disadvantaged communities and households. This will include solar for single-family homes, multifamily affordable housing, and community solar.

“The Solar for All competition represents an investment in solar for disadvantaged communities the scope and scale of which has not been seen before,” explains CESA Senior Project Director Vero Bourg-Meyer. “For some states, this is an acceleration of work they have supported, with much more modest resources and variable levels of success, for years. For others, it is an entirely new endeavor, now enabled by the IRA. Indeed, 25 states and territories will have access to LMI solar program funding for the first time.”

Solar for All holds transformative potential. The selected programs promise $350 million in savings annually, or about $9 billion over the course of a standard 25-year solar project’s asset life. In addition to removing the barriers to solar access faced by LMI households and disadvantaged communities with financial and technical assistance, CESA expects Solar for All to derisk private sector investments and to train investors, developers, and other stakeholders in ways that will continue far beyond the five-year performance period, providing benefits and savings to yet more households. 

The map below highlights amounts awarded by EPA to states, nonprofits (including nonprofit green banks), and one municipality for state-wide programs. It does not include multistate awards that will cover geographies that have not received state-wide awards, tribes, or overseas territories. A detailed list of awardees, including tribal and multistate awards, is available here: https://www.epa.gov/greenhouse-gas-reduction-fund/solar-all  

CESA | www.cesa.org