Nick Pope
Contributor
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is opening an audit into a $7 billion Biden-era solar deployment program, the OIG said in a Wednesday letter.
The OIG is auditing the Solar For All program, which is part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The Biden EPA used the program to route massive checks to sixty recipients — primarily state governments —around the country so that awardees could finance solar panel deployment in low-income areas. The Trump EPA is now following up on the program’s funding.
“Our objective is to describe the status of funds, top recipients, and potential risks and impacts of the EPA’s Solar for All program within the Office of the Administrator’s Office of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” the letter reads. “We plan to conduct work at headquarters and regions, if necessary.” (RELATED: Biden Admin Hands Out Hundreds Of Millions To Subsidize Solar In Some Of America’s Least-Sunny Places)
Gloria Taylor-Upshaw, an audit official for the EPA OIG, sent the letter to Julie Zavala, a deputy director of the EPA office responsible for implementing the GGRF.
Some of the states that received massive checks from the Solar for All program happen to be among the least-sunny states in the U.S.
For instance, the Executive Office of the State of New Hampshire received approximately $43.5 million from the program, and the Vermont Department of Public Service reaped nearly $62.5 million while the Maine Governor’s Energy Office raked in $62.1 from the Solar for All program. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Solar Radiation Database Physical Solar Model indicates that New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine are among the least-sunny states in the U.S.
One big winner of the Solar for All program was the Texas Southern University’s Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, which took home $156 million from the Solar for All program. Robert Bullard, the director of the center that bears his name, served as a member of the Biden White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council at the time the funding was awarded, The Washington Free Beacon reported in July 2024.
The Trump administration’s audit of this program comes as it faces a legal battle to terminate billions of dollars doled out by other GGRF programs. They allege that those funds were rushed out the door to politically-connected nonprofits in a fraudulent manner.
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I am cynical enough to consider the 27 Billion as money laundering, keeping party activists employed at best, and a pass through to the party at worst.
“No joke.” To quote (cough) a former (p)resident (cough) … time to instill disincentives in these naked money grabs that dole out money for purely political ‘patronage’ purposes.
Somebody should conduct a RICO investigation.
You beat me to it!
re: “The Biden EPA used the program to route massive checks to sixty recipients — primarily state governments …”
Let me guess, one of those states was ‘cloudy‘ Michigan (D)?
(Residents or former residents will know exactly what I mean.)
$156,120,000 from what I see here: Solar for All Grant Recipients (3rd page or so)
The MI Healthy SFA program is a comprehensive statewide initiative is designed to deploy residential rooftop and other solar projects to serve low-income and disadvantaged community households across the state. By addressing existing barriers, the program will increase accessibility to solar energy for eligible households. …
I wonder why the word “Healthy” is in that statement? Will those poor folks get healthier with panels on their roofs?
And if the roof collapses, is that healthy?
“The MI Healthy SFA program” – am I missing something here, or does “SFA” stand for something else in the USA. Here in Oz, S is for Sweet and A is for All. As in RTFM = Read The Manual.
Re: The MI Healthy SFA program
In Australia SFA can mean Sweet Fanny Adams or Sweet F*** All
Seems appropriate
A Brit speaking. Is there any way to get hold of the person/ team who did the doling out and get an answer to how the money to each state/agency was apportioned? If no paperwork = fraud. If no rigorous assessments of needs = fraud
THat is part of what is currently ongoing.
They do have paperwork to document what they did, but it’s not easy to get access to it. That’s what the Inspector General does. There will probably be rules and formulae that determine how the money was allocated. That is, there will be an objective method. But the method will have been engineered to produce the results that “they” wanted. It’s also typical, that “they” don’t do a good job of testing the method, which invariably leads to undesired results (because people trying to get the money have a much greater incentive to figure out all the ways to get the money, while people making the rules have no real incentives).
I’ll assume that the ‘GGRF’ and ‘IRA’ were actually included in Congressional bill(s) passed under the Biden administration. The question I have is were the specific dollar amounts, e.g., the $43.5 million ladled out to NH, actually spelled-out in the bill, or were they carved out of a larger block by the EPA’s bureaucracy? If it’s the latter, I would think that Zeldin’s ‘bureaucracy’ would be able to exercise some discretion and withhold such obvious slush money payments.
Almost every bill has the clause “if funding is available (money in the treasury) and not allocated elsewhere.”
There is no requirement that money has to be borrowed to pay for a specific program.
Ratepayers are also footing the bill for all this green fraud.
The GGRF seems to be obsessed with carbon.
Firstly, carbon isn’t a gas, and secondly, the Fund doesn’t make any mention of H2O.
Smells of fraud to me.
Neither stupidity nor religious beliefs are necessarily fraud. But when the government gets involved, it is nearly impossible to keep fraud out.
I live in northern Ohio – I know people who have installed rooftop solar because the numbers made sense. But they made sense only because the federal government pays for 1/3 of the initial capital cost! Talk about market distortion. I’d like to see our electric rates if the federal government paid 1/3 the capital cost of our coal/natural gas/nuclear plants!
If every house roof top in the USA has a Solar panel the fossil fuel use will only be decreased 1/3 (to ½ in some areas like SW USA). That quantity is based upon the assumption that there about 100 million homes and the average area of the south facing roofs.
Which is why so much solar is put on north facing roofs.
Not withstanding the Federal bribe, the only way residential solar made economic sense were the so called “feed in” tariffs mandated by state legislatures, Said tariffs forced the local electric utility to pay the owners of solar arrays the all-in retail price of electricity for any energy delivered back to the utility. In some cases, the owner of the solar array actually had no charges from the local utility, yet the utility still had to maintain all of the distribution infrastructure to the customer for those times when the customer’s solar array produced less than their internal requirements, you know, like at night. The rest of the customers who didn’t have the means to install solar arrays then got stuck with the costs of maintaining the distribution system. Eventually this pissed enough people off that the feed-in tariffs were changed to pay owners of solar arrays only the cost of the actual commodity (energy) portion of the bill. Suddenly the economics of rooftop solar don’t look so good. Of course, all of the grifters along the money chain are in despair but to them I say, “tough sh!t”
I worked with a guy who put solar panels on his house with batteries in his basement. He did save some on his electric bill but he said it would take 16 years before it would pay for itself.
PS He didn’t do it to save money. He had a survivalist bent and just wanted to have power for his house when Obama’s policies made the “S” hit the fan.
I have installed solar panels and battery (with government subsidy – sorry, taxpayer subsidy) as a hedge against escalating power prices. Two points: (a) I don’t like taking a subsidy for it, but I can only work with what government does. (b) I am actually helping others a little bit because my battery sells power back into the grid when it is most needed, thus giving others at least some power when there is no sun or wind and reducing the price they pay.
Those two points don’t change the overall equation, though: a proper reliable energy supply would still be way better.
I do so hope you fire proofed your battery.
“One big winner of the Solar for All program was the Texas Southern University’s Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, which took home $156 million from the Solar for All program. Robert Bullard, the director of the center that bears his name, served as a member of the Biden White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council at the time the funding was awarded, The Washington Free Beacon reported in July 2024.”
**************
Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at TSU gets $156 million while its namesake is serving in a like-named council in the Biden Administration. No conflict of interest there of course.
This audit should be immediately followed by criminal referrals for everyone involved in this blatant theft of US taxpayers’ money.
But, but, but don’t you know it is Federal Funds and has nothing to do with tax payers and their money.
/sarc
Two years ago the Electric Utility I use sent out a link with the bill to estimate my “decrease” in cost of installing a rooftop solar panel. I live in a one story ranch that is about 80 feet long. I selected a panel size using the length and width of the south facing area [16 X 50 ]. With a battery good for two days and the extra going to the utility the fact that I have a Heat Pump resulted in an increase in the monthly bill [using the level payment plan] from $250 to $385. I would still have to pay for the battery and panel on another monthly bill of over $200 for five years.
When I went to school $585 is more than twice $250 Or do Solar systems use new math?
“Or do Solar systems use new math?”
no.
no math required. only feelings. think how good you will feel knowing you are saving the planet.
1 + 2 = 2 …. How do you feel about that?
That is new math.
sad
Years ago it was offered by my wife as a joke.
Today it has become reality.
This would seem like a very good opportunity to use this year’s Budget Reconciliation to ax most of what was in the Biden/Schumer/Pelosi corrupt greenie giveaway under the lyingly named “Inflation Reduction Act”. Reconciliation cannot be filibustered by Democrats and it easily passes the Senate parliamentarian’s test of whether the subject has significant effects for the budget.
To try to excuse continuation of the misguided war on fossil fuels, the Deep State has apparently figured out how to obscure that water vapor increase can account for all of the climate change attributable to humanity. They deleted the web file that reported TPW anomalies thru 2023 and are not reporting the data for 2024. Calculations using data from the deleted record show that average global water vapor has been increasing more than two times faster than possible from just feedback from planet warming. The deleted file can be recovered via the Waybackmachine at https://web.archive.org/web/20250118043906/https://data.remss.com/vapor/monthly_1deg/tpw_v07r02_198801_202312.time_series.txt
graph
If there is no contract and no paper trail then there are some rather serious questions that must be answered.
Personally, funding NGOs through a 3rd party should be, if not already, illegal.
Solar and wind are a waste of money if they are intended for the grid. I am sure there is a place for solar and wind in some circumstances. There is no circumstance where the government should aid in their purchase. They are either the best choice for your needs or they aren’t. The point is buy the system that will serve your needs at the lowest cost, not the one that government will give you money for. I can’t afford to help you rich guys anymore.
Yes, Bob – it’s like automobiles.
First and foremost, they are a tool for transportation of personnel and their luggage.
You buy the most suitable tool you need to do the job at hand.
Any considerations after that are personal consumer choices / indulgences.
Governments have no business dictating what tools we need and choose to satisfactorily meet our personal situations and requirements.
A good thing would be to cancel the entire thing a huge waste of money.
Biden is a crook in more ways than we knew.
The Solar for All Progam does nothing to help solve the infaltion problem and is hence a scam. The federal government is deep in debt and cannot afford such programs. Funding for this needs to stop immediately.