A federal court vacates the EPA's cancellation of the 7 billion dollar Solar for All programme

The United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island has vacated the Environmental Protection Agency's termination of Solar for All, the 7 billion dollar programme created under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to put solar on the homes of low-income households. Judge Mary S. McElroy granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on 18 September 2026 in Rhode Island AFL-CIO et al v. United States Environmental Protection Agency et al, docket 1:25-cv-00510, holding that Congress intended the agency to keep administering grants it had already obligated, and that EPA acted without statutory authority when it rescinded them.

The programme funded three asset classes: single-family rooftop solar, residential community solar, and paired battery storage. Awards went to 60 prime recipients, including state energy offices, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and multi-state non-profits, and each recipient was required to direct between 80 and 85 per cent of its grant to direct financial assistance (https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/09/21/federal-court-strikes-down-epa-cancellation-of-7-billion-solar-for-all-program/). EPA rescinded the funds in August 2025. At that point, 53 million dollars of the 7 billion awarded had reached grantees.

Plaintiffs included the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, the Rhode Island Center for Justice, Solar United Neighbors, an individual homeowner and solar businesses, represented by the Conservation Law Foundation, the Southern Environmental Law Center, Lawyers for Good Government and the Lawyers Committee for Rhode Island (https://www.selc.org/press-release/court-strikes-down-trumps-epa-cancellation-of-7-billion-solar-for-all-program/).

The decentralization question here is narrower than the headline suggests, and more interesting for being narrow. Solar for All is not a subsidy for generation in general. It is an attempt to place generating assets on and around the homes of people who cannot finance them, which is the single largest structural gap in distributed solar in any market: the technology gets cheaper every year and the population that cannot access it stays roughly the same, because the barrier is capital and tenure rather than cost per watt.

The ruling does not decide whether the programme works. It decides whether an executive agency may reverse it alone, after the legislature has obligated the money. That is a question about where the durable authority over a distributed build-out sits, and the answer the court gave is that it does not sit with the agency.

The ratio worth holding onto is 53 million against 7 billion. Less than one per cent of the money had moved when the freeze landed. A litigation win restores a legal entitlement; it does not restore sixty grant programmes that stood down staff, contractors and installer pipelines fourteen months ago. The interesting reporting from here is not the appeal, it is whether a household gets a system.

[UNVERIFIED] Whether EPA will appeal, and on what timetable any grantee actually draws funds, is not established. The estimate that the programme would reach more than 900,000 households comes from a party to the case and has not been independently checked. Note also that the pv magazine USA page gives the decision date as 21 September while the litigating organisations give 18 September; the opinion itself was not retrieved to settle the discrepancy.