Solar grants are being held hostage in the Pennsylvania legislature as demand soars

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

Charles Suppon has big plans for the Tunkhannock Area School District.

At any given time, the northeastern Pennsylvania district‘s chief operating officer can rattle off statistics about fields in which its schools excel: arts, AP classes and softball, as well as on-the-job training programs for future farmers, welders and more. Goats and chickens roam the high school‘s courtyards, where students also tend to koi fish; in the hallways just beyond, high schoolers tinker with tractors, build furniture to sell and offer free tax services for the broader community.

But Suppon speaks with vigor when he talks about the five-megawatt system he hopes to install across five solar arrays on the district‘s buildings and surrounding property. The solar panels will heat the district‘s pool and serve as the basis for new curricula and jobs training classes on the solar industry. For a rural district of around 2,000, Tunkhannock is punching above its weight class, he believes.

“We’re a smaller school district doing big things.”

Suppon’s district is in a bright red portion of Pennsylvania northwest of Scranton, narrowly outside one of the state’s more prolific natural gas regions. For him, solar is simply a pathway toward cost savings — just as natural gas, from which the district earns royalties off several leases, has been. Tunkhannock believes it could save upward of $1 million a year by switching to solar, money that could be used for student initiatives.

“It was always a financial decision,” Suppon said. “We wanted to be able to offset our energy costs, produce our own energy and only pay distribution [fees] back to the grid.”

There’s one catch: Tunkhannock‘s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition — a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D., Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state — labor, education and climate.

But that money for Tunkhannock might not come through because of the stiff competition for the limited funds. While last year‘s state budget gave the Solar for Schools program $25 million to disperse to school districts, the program received applications that add up to nearly four times that amount from schools and districts large and small, rural and urban and conservative and liberal.

“I was pleased, but hardly surprised,” Fiedler said in an email to Capital & Main of the demand.

The disparity between the grant program’s budget and the size of its application pool mirrors a broader reality within the state legislature: Despite clear and growing demand for solar energy, the political will to meet it has yet to catch up.

A 2022 poll of more than 1,300 Pennsylvanians conducted by Vote Solar Action, an advocacy group urging pro-solar legislation at the state level, found that 65% of Pennsylvanians support large-scale solar farm development in the state. More than 80% said they support rooftop solar, while 73% support natural gas and 52% support coal.

“I [have] visited nearly every corner of the state, from Waynesburg to Bethlehem, and in every place I met folks who wanted to save money on electricity, create good local jobs and preserve the beauty of their communities,” Fiedler said.

Yet the state lags far behind most others in solar development: Pennsylvania currently ranks 49th in the nation for its growth in solar, wind, and geothermal generation over the last decade, according to the nonprofit advocacy group PennEnvironment.

It has fallen behind other major fossil-fuel producing states, like Texas, the country’s second-largest solar generator in 2023; California, where solar and wind together comprise close to half the state’s energy generation; and New Mexico, which Environment America, the national organization behind PennEnvironment, ranked fourth in the U.S. for renewable energy production in 2024.

Just 3% of Pennsylvanians now have solar panels on their roofs, Vote Solar Action’s poll found — though 31% said they’d be interested in installing them.

The lag could be attributed, in part, to interconnection delays by the regional grid operator PJM — though many of its neighbors in the same system, like Washington, D.C.; New Jersey; and North Carolina, have eclipsed Pennsylvania’s solar production.

Because of increased demands predicted by PJM, utility bills in Pennsylvania are slated to increase this summer. Fiedler sees solar production as an antidote to what could be an oncoming energy crisis in the state.

“We must generate more electricity,” she said. “Nuclear, wind, geothermal, and gas power plants can all be part of the solution, but the fact is we need energy now, and solar is the fastest.”

But solar initiatives continue to hit gridlock in the halls of state power.

After making its way through the state House last summer, a bill that would have enabled community solar — a program that allows multiple residents to enroll in a shared solar array separate from their homes — died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The bill‘s author, Rep. Peter Schweyer (D., Lehigh), who introduced it as a way to make solar accessible for renters, apartment dwellers and those who can’t afford solar panels by themselves, has had to reintroduce the bill and start over again this session.

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s attempt to pass an updated renewables target also failed to gain traction in the legislature last session. Where a 2004 target required 0.5% of the state’s energy generation to come from solar, the new plan would have required the state to reach a 35% target by 2035 that included solar, wind and nuclear energy generation. He has reintroduced it as part of a broader energy package dubbed the “Lightning Plan.”

In a divided legislature, the fate of both initiatives is tenuous.

As renewable energy faces sweeping attacks at the federal level under the direction of President Donald Trump, states are stepping up to hold the line. Whether Pennsylvania will prove itself to be a meaningful player in this fight remains an open question.

“Climate change has become politicized,” said David Masur, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group PennEnvironment. “Which then potentially can create more powerful special interests who are opposed to common sense policies and have a vested self-interest in the status quo, and politicians having sort of a knee-jerk reaction to oppose things [that] are probably good even for their very own constituents.”

Case in point: Solar for All, a federal grant program initiated by the Biden administration that awarded Pennsylvania $156 million for residential solar installations on low-income households, was designed to save residents $192 million over the next 20 years in energy costs while averting 43 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of removing more than 9 million cars from the road for a year.

These funds quickly became a negotiating chip. During deliberations over the 2024 state budget, a line was inserted into an omnibus fiscal code bill that prevented the state from accessing the funds. Though the Solar for All program was just one of several dozen federal environmental grants Pennsylvania won under Biden-era initiatives, the budget bill specifically calls out that one program. It requires legislative approval for the program’s funds to be disbursed.

So, Fiedler sought out exactly that when she authored House Bill 362, a bill that would force the legislature to vote on allowing the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority, the state’s independent financing authority, to distribute funds it has already been awarded. Fiedler said the funds are already under contract with the federal government.

H.B. 362 passed the House Energy Committee, which Fiedler chairs, in March. It now sits in the state House, home to a slim one-vote Democratic majority, as a battle to free the money falters after being confronted with a last-minute hurdle.

Two days after the bill passed, Rep. Craig Williams (R., Chester County), introduced an amendment that would require the state’s utility regulator to promulgate regulations on net metering — a system that allows residential solar users to sell surplus energy back to the grid to incentivize the build-out of rooftop solar. Environmentalists fear the amendment could open the door to doing away with net metering — a major financial incentive for many residential solar owners.

Reforming net metering has long been a priority of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying firm that disburses model bills to states, including those fighting renewable energy and attacking environmentalists.

The group argues that paying solar owners for the energy they produce is costly for utilities — they pay them retail rates, rather than wholesale rates, and residential solar producers may end up generating enough energy to offset distribution fees they’d pay for the wires that move energy around the grid. Utilities then pass those costs onto consumers, and nonsolar users end up subsidizing their neighbors with solar panels, they argue. Williams has used similar language in opposing solar legislation; environmentalists generally disagree with this premise.

Critics were quick to point out that, before joining the Pennsylvania House in 2020, Williams spent more than 10 years as general counsel for PECO, a Philadelphia-based utility that has come under fire from environmentalists for neglecting to increase its share of renewable energy.

State lobbying and campaign finance records show the company spent more than $600,000 on lobbying in 2024, and donated $6,000 to Williams in 2024 between a failed run for attorney general and a successful campaign to keep his seat in the state House. The trade group that represents PECO and other utilities, the Edison Electric Institute, has long challenged net metering as states have grown their share of solar production.

“The more people who generate energy from their homes, the less [utilities] get to build out their larger operations,” said Elowyn Corby, Mid-Atlantic regional director for Vote Solar Action.

Williams’ amendment passed with support on both sides of the aisle. Environmentalists, however, consider it a poison pill — one that could weaken the state’s fledgling solar industry.

“In Pennsylvania, probably the best thing we have going for solar is net metering,” said Masur, the PennEnvironment director.

Minus Williams’ amendment, Fiedler‘s Solar for All bill makes common sense, Corby said.

“At its heart, the goal of this legislation is to make sure Pennsylvania doesn’t send federal money that belongs to our neighbors back to D.C.,” Fiedler said.

The Solar for All program focuses specifically on serving homeowners who might otherwise be unable to afford solar panels of their own. In Pennsylvania, funds are specifically earmarked for low-income households, who are guaranteed at least 20% savings on their electricity bills.

It‘s unclear whether Fiedler will push forward to advance H.B. 362 now that it includes a threat to net metering.

In the coming months, the state legislature may also vote on initiatives that would put solar panels on municipal and emergency response buildings; warehouses and distribution centers; and townhouses governed by homeowners associations.

Shapiro has proposed re-upping the Solar for Schools program’s $25 million appropriation in the 2025-2026 budget, set to be finalized by June 30. Though Fiedler said she’s pleased to see the program reinstated, she said “that that number is the minimum we should budget.”

Jim Gregory, a former state representative and now executive director of the Conservative Energy Network-Pennsylvania, has committed himself to convincing his former colleagues of the importance of renewables in a diverse state energy portfolio.

“If that money is going to be made available, we want to see it made available to low- and moderate-income families in rural Pennsylvania,” he said.

Gregory said he’s watched as attitudes toward solar among conservatives in state government have shifted.

“I don’t oppose anyone who wants to put solar on their rooftop or anything like that to help with utility bills,” said Rep. Kathy Rapp (R., Warren) at a recent meeting of the House Energy committee on Fiedler‘s bill. Rapp has, for several sessions, introduced legislation requiring solar operators to create end-of-life plans for their arrays, which has yet to pass.

Though far from an all-out embrace of solar, Rapp’s language offers a window into a softening stance on renewables. In 2019, Rapp wrote on her Facebook profile that solar and wind energy pose “serious environmental risks,” and called its supporters “radical Green New Deal proponents.”

Despite past roadblocks, Fiedler remains optimistic about the fate of solar initiatives in the state. She sees the Solar for Schools program as evidence of broadening support for clean energy.

“I believe there is political will for solar and all types of energy development in the state,” she said. “A lot of that success comes from the broad stakeholder coalition we built and from the support of colleagues on the other side of the aisle.”

For school districts like Tunkhannock, the state’s ability to reach consensus has very real consequences. With the fate of federal solar tax credits unclear, district leaders say they are currently on the edge of their seats. The Solar for Schools grant could end up being a lifeline.

“To say not getting potentially a million dollars in grant money wouldn’t affect us at all I think would be a lie,” said Suppon, the school district‘s chief operating officer.

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