By John Hult
April 22, 2024
The article is excerpted below. Read the full story here.
Tribal and rural areas in and around South Dakota are set to benefit from about $260 million in federal grants for solar energy projects.
A five-state, 14-tribe coalition was awarded $135.6 million for solar projects, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday. A Washington, D.C.-based “green bank,” meanwhile, pulled in another $125 million for tribal and rural projects across North and South Dakota.
The news about the EPA’s Solar for All program came on Earth Day.
The money comes from the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, created through the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Reinvestment and Jobs Act of 2021 and administered by EPA. The Solar for All program represents $7 billion of the $27 billion.
[…]
The other group awarded one of the 60 Solar for All grants is called the Coalition for Green Capital, a “green bank” nonprofit that uses public dollars to spur private investment in renewable energy through financing.
Green banks, according to the coalition’s website, “care about deploying clean energy rather than maximizing profit.”
That group was awarded $125 million to work on rooftop solar projects in the rural and tribal areas of both Dakotas.
The Washington, D.C.-based coalition will use the funds to “facilitate grant, tax, and low interest lending to develop solar units for multi-family dwellings,” according to the listing of Solar for All awardees, with priority given to low-income and disadvantaged communities.
It’s the second major federal award of 2024 for the coalition, which was founded in 2009 by Clinton-era Federal Communications Commission Chair Reed Hundt.
On April 4, the EPA announced a $5 billion award for the group, meant to help shepherd local and regional organizations that aim to start their own “green bank.” That award came from a different pot of federal climate money, the National Clean Investment Fund.
In its press release on the newly awarded grant, the coalition says it has more than $30 billion of demand for its award funds and believes that private-sector investors are prepared “to add more than twice that to the projects jump-started by public capital.”