Colorado officials denounced an EPA proposal to scrap a major solar funding program, threatening $156 million dollars in funding for renewable energy in Colorado.
The Solar For All program is a $7 billion clean energy initiative authorized by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It’s meant to fund single-family and multifamily rooftop and community solar garden installations as well as solar job training. In Colorado, the funding was projected to help 20,000 moderate-to-low-income families access cleaner, cheaper, solar electricity.
The Trump administration signaled its intention to terminate the program last week.
“The Trump Administration is seeking to rip cost-saving solutions out of the hands of hardworking Coloradans and push us backwards into an over reliance on non-renewable resources,” Governor Jared Polis said in a press release. “In Colorado, we will continue exploring avenues to fight this illegal termination of congressionally appropriated and duly obligated funds.”
This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to interfere with Biden-era clean energy investments. Earlier this year, funding for the program and several other clean energy initiatives were temporarily frozen, and key federal renewable energy tax credits were eliminated with the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill. The new tariff regime is also expected to impact the industry.
“What we see is a targeted effort by the administration to slow down and try to stymie the installation of the lowest cost sources of electricity that are and cleanest sources of electricity that are available,” said Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office.
KC Becker, CEO of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association, calls the move an attack on clean energy.
“It’s just one more step in a long line of attacks on renewable energy,” said KC Becker, CEO of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association. “Which has the impact of destroying jobs, leading to higher bills and ceding energy dominance to China. It's just such a bad policy all around. Renewable energy is cheap. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars to stop it. Communities were really going to benefit from lower cost, affordable, clean energy.”
The Colorado Energy Office spent the last year building a new team to administer the grants and making initial plans for how to spend it.
“We hired seven new staff. We just finalized our workforce development plan,” said Ida Mae Isaac, the Colorado Solar For All director. “We have three large grant solicitations that we are ready to go out the door.”
Those solicitations will have to wait, for now. Which means tens of thousands of Colorado families will have to wait on power from the sun.
“We've seen the appetite for it,” said Yesenia Rivera, vice President of solar access and affordability at the national nonprofit Solar United Neighbors. “People that thought they would never be able to access solar because of cost suddenly have access to solar because of programs like this.”
Rivera said losing the program would be a major blow to solar expansion in Colorado and nationwide.
“(Solar For All) was meant to change the market,” she said. “It was meant to throw this infusion and change the way we access solar, installing solar at such a pace that it would reduce the cost of going solar for a lot of families, so that at the end of the day, they wouldn't even need the incentives or the assistance to go solar.”
Most likely, the courts will decide the ultimate fate of Solar For All. According to Toor, the termination is illegal. The state already has a legally binding, signed contract for the Solar For All funding dating back to July 2024.
“We don't believe that the EPA has any legal grounds for doing this,” Toor said. “We would certainly anticipate that there will be multiple litigants around the country who will be challenging this and that ultimately the courts will direct them to continue this funding.”
