The Environmental Protection Agency froze Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds two weeks ago. Those funds are still frozen, though Politico reports some grant recipients have been able to access funds since the federal agency implemented the order.
The Inflation Reduction Act funded the $7 billion Solar for All program, which aimed to give low-income and disadvantaged communities access to solar energy generation.
“Every attempt to block funds from flowing into communities will cause projects to stall, lose private capital investments — or worse, stop development of projects,” said Luis Martinez, southeast regional director of climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a written statement.
Martinez said the delays will translate into higher energy costs for ratepayers in the long run. Solar panels can save homeowners money during the course of their lifetimes, according to some estimates. Low-to-moderate-income households often can’t benefit from those savings due to the high upfront cost of installation.
The EPA awarded North Carolina $156 million to start EnergizeNC last April. The program would fund residential, multifamily and community solar installations across the state. The state Department of Environment Quality had announced plans to launch EnergizeNC this fall.
However, the fate of the program remains uncertain. In the two weeks following the freeze, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality could only acess the grant funds intermittently. The department has not received a clear signal from federal regulators about the future of Solar for All funds.
Meanwhile, Charlotte received $800,000 in bipartisan infrastructure law funds for the Solarize Charlotte-Mecklenburg program. The Charlotte Office of Sustainability and Resilience responded Friday that the federal government had not signaled that Charlotte’s funding status had changed.
EPA purges environmental justice staff
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is under new leadership, and many career employees are not sticking around to see what that means.
The Senate confirmed Trump-appointed EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, drawing support from plastics, meat, mining and timber lobbying groups.
In addition to securing access to clean air, water and land for Americans, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said he would deregulate the auto industry, promote AI data centers and boost domestic energy production with an emphasis on fossil fuels.
More than 500 employees have left the EPA since the election, according to ProPublica. This includes toxicologists, engineers, emergency workers and water and air quality experts. Reuters found the federal agency placed on leave 168 environmental justice staffers.
The move drew criticism from environmental groups, including Sustain Charlotte. The nonprofit said that “rolling back environmental justice programs does not make pollution disappear;” instead, it leaves the most vulnerable out of the conversation.
“Environmental changes don't happen overnight,” said Shannon Binns, founder and executive director of Sustain Charlotte. “You need not just expertise, but people who understand how to make those changes and how to make them through federal policymaking and regulations.”
Binns pointed to the construction of roadways like Interstate 77, I-85 and Independence Boulevard. They fractured Black and low-income communities and cut them off from the opportunities new development can offer.
But Binns said these issues haven’t remained in the past. The state is currently planning to widen I-77 between uptown and South Carolina. Binns said widening the road won’t fix congestion in the long term — but that how the wider interstate is built matters a lot to prevent repeating the same mistakes.
“We think there's an opportunity to rebuild those bridges and overpasses to provide safe pedestrian and bicyclist connectivity across this barrier to reconnect neighborhoods that were heavily cut off by this,” Binns said.
