The federal government killed a program that was designed to reduce the cost of electricity for low-income Vermonters by installing millions of dollars worth of solar energy across the state.
The state is set to lose $62.5 million in grant funding, according to a letter received by the state on Thursday evening from the Environmental Protection Agency.
That grant was part of a $7 billion national initiative called Solar for All, introduced by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program intended to pass on solar benefits to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities across the country. Approximately 60 grant recipients, including 49 states and six Native American tribes, are affected.
“The Department of Public Service, with the full support of Gov. Scott’s team, is working with our affected colleagues nationally, as well as the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, to pursue every opportunity including litigation to restore funding to this critical program,” Kerrick Johnson, commissioner of Vermont’s Public Service Department that received the grant, wrote in an email. “That work has just begun and so much more to come.”
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Sanders wrote on August 6 that the program “significantly reduces electric bills for nearly a million working class Americans, creates many thousands of jobs and cuts carbon emissions. That’s why the Trump administration wants to illegally cut it. We won’t let them.”
The state has spent roughly $150,000 on staffing, and they bill EPA on a reimbursement basis for expenses the month after they incur them, according to Melissa Bailey, director of the state energy office within the Vermont Department of Public Service.
The state has a grant agreement with Vermont Housing Finance Agency to support planning and implementation of one piece of the state’s Solar for All program, and that agency is incurring expenses that they would expect to be reimbursed, according to Bailey. More than a third of the $62.5 million grant was awarded in May to the agency, a quasi-public entity that acts like a bank for affordable housing.
From there, the funds would have been awarded to new affordable housing projects like multi-family apartment buildings, largely benefiting renters, in early 2026.
The EPA said it plans to reimburse states for money they’ve spent implementing the program so far, according to the agency’s August 7 letter.
Partners on the project, however, may not be made whole by a refund from the feds. While the state may attempt to subsidize those costs, the partners have built an annual program and staffing budget based on doing Solar for All work, Johnson said in an email. Those losses also don’t include “the potential loss of reduced energy bills for Vermonters due to this EPA action,” Johnson wrote.
The cancellation came on the heels of the July 4 passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. The law repealed grants from a $27 billion Inflation Reduction Act program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aimed to lower carbon emissions. One of the three programs within that fund was Solar for All.
In a video posted on Friday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said his agency “no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.”
He called Solar for All a “grift” with 15% of programmatic costs going towards “middle men taking their own cut.”
But for states like Vermont, the purpose of the program was to help low-income energy users.
“Towns with the highest energy burden in Vermont have the least amount of installed solar,” Johnson told VTDigger in May. The primary objective of the program, Johnson said, was to deliver the grant’s benefits to disadvantaged Vermonters, regardless of where they live.
