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It’s a demonstration of the tech Oklo will use for its medical isotope business — not power plants — but marks a milestone nonetheless for the buzzy firm.
Oklo, a publicly traded small-modular-reactor firm backed by OpenAI chief Sam Altman, has become one of the highest-profile companies working on next-generation nuclear energy technologies. Two years ago, it debuted on the stock market and became retail investors’ go-to for betting on America’s atomic renaissance.
Yet while the company’s valuation rose at one point to nearly $24 billion and its plans expanded into recycling nuclear waste, fabricating its own fuel, and producing medical isotopes, it had yet to split atoms from one of its reactors.
That is, until now. On Thursday morning, Oklo announced that its Groves Isotope Test Reactor, a low-power unit the company built on private land south of Austin, Texas, as part of a Department of Energy testing program, had sustained a chain reaction. The reactor is a demonstration version of the technology Oklo will use for its new medical isotope business, though the firm says it will help its efforts to build reactors that generate electricity.
Known as achieving criticality, this chain reaction is a necessary if far from sufficient step toward commercialization for nuclear-energy aspirants. Today’s announcement — first reported by Canary Media — makes Oklo the fifth of the 10 companies in the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program to split atoms in the past two months. Construction on the Groves test reactor was completed in less than one year.
In 2022, Oklo’s application for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license was resoundingly rejected. It has yet to resubmit the paperwork for its proprietary 75-megawatt liquid-sodium-cooled power reactors, though the agency granted Oklo its first license to operate a medical isotope reactor in March.
As it stands, just two advanced nuclear startups — TerraPower and Kairos — are actively building out reactors in the United States. Oklo is preparing a site near the Idaho National Laboratory for its first small modular reactor but does not yet have permission to work on the reactor itself.
The Groves facility, located in rural Caldwell County, allows the company to essentially practice for when and if it gets the green light to build its first full-scale reactor. The test reactor will also grease the links of the supply chain that Oklo will use both for its medical isotope business, which is intended to generate early revenue, and eventually for its reactors. For example, Oklo bought the low-enriched uranium for the test reactor from a commercial vendor, the French reactor-fuel company Framatome.
In contrast to the four other startups that have announced criticality this year, Oklo’s project was built at “a greenfield site on private land” in a process that included “full-scale civil excavation and construction, commercially procured fuel and all major components, and developed its operating programs in-house,” co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said in a statement. All others happened at federal facilities or on public land.
“Reaching criticality in less than a year is an incredible milestone for our team,” DeWitte said.
In a statement, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the project would lay the groundwork for expanding “isotope production for critical medical therapies and reinforce Texas’ leadership in nuclear innovation.”
“Texas is leading America’s nuclear renaissance by advancing the technologies that will power innovation and strengthen our nation’s future,” said the Republican, who is running for reelection this year.
Offshore wind farms not only pose no threat — they provide national security benefits, in addition boosting the grid and economy, according to military experts.
When the Trump administration issued stop-work orders on all five offshore wind projects under construction late last year, it offered one justification: The turbines could compromise national security.
Experts were immediately critical of this assertion, not least because it came after months of unrelenting hostility toward the offshore wind industry from President Donald Trump. Plus, it’s standard practice for the U.S. Department of Defense to assess offshore wind projects, and each one under construction had been thoroughly vetted.
Now, some military experts are going even further, arguing not only that offshore wind poses no threat but that building it can bolster security.
“Offshore wind is not a national security threat — it is a national security imperative,” said Dave Belote, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and CEO of renewable energy consultancy Dare Strategies, at the National Conservative Energy Summit in Boston this week.
Belote was among a panel of energy experts with U.S. military backgrounds who said the Trump administration’s national security rationale is just plain wrong.
The courts have unanimously ruled against Trump’s stop-work orders, allowing work to resume on all five offshore wind projects. Three are now sending power to the grid. On Thursday, a court ruled against the Trump administration’s use of similar justifications to halt the permitting of more than 150 land-based wind projects, too.
In fact, experts said, offshore wind is vital to national security.
In the near future, for example, the U.S. military is likely to encounter wind turbines in and near the waters off China, where offshore wind is being built at a rapid pace. American wind farms, the panel said, should be considered vital training grounds where radar operators can learn to distinguish spinning blades from other objects, and submarine crews can practice navigating the underwater obstacles created by turbine foundations.
“You don’t get that unless you have an environment where you can practice that first,” said Kirk Lippold, a retired U.S. Navy commander who is now an outspoken advocate for clean energy and energy security.
He also pointed to countries including Belgium and Poland that are using turbines as platforms for additional radar sensors that can improve the ability to detect threats.
The panel also dismissed the Trump administration’s stated qualms about turbine blades making it harder to detect hostile drones. During the original federal approval process, any required national security mitigations were identified and agreed to. And software and well-trained operators can tell the difference between turbine blades and other equipment on radar, Lippold said.
“From a national security perspective, what the administration is saying just doesn’t hold water,” he said.
For supporters of offshore wind, of course, the national security question has always been a red herring. Planned wind farms have long been the cornerstone of the Northeast’s decarbonization and grid reliability goals. The installations already in operation — Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, South Fork Wind near Long Island, and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island — have helped keep the grid going with emissions-free electricity during heat waves and cold snaps.
There are other benefits as well. Hosting a land-based facility like an offshore wind port can have an economic impact equivalent to an auto manufacturing facility, said John Szoka, CEO of summit host the Conservative Energy Network and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. And the turbine foundations can create valuable habitats for fish and other marine life, he noted.
The panel’s comments give support to those who say Trump’s ostensible security concerns are just a last-ditch effort to kill the offshore wind industry he has been steadily weakening since he took office. Only 6 gigawatts of offshore wind are expected to be completed by 2035, per BloombergNEF — far fewer than the 39 GW the research firm anticipated in 2024.
Trump’s argument, Belote said, strained credulity from the beginning. The area slated for the five offshore wind farms targeted by the stop-work orders amounts to 0.016% of the total area of the Atlantic continental shelf, he said, noting that such a small area could not compromise an entire nation’s security.
“It was ludicrous on its face,” he said.
An update was made on Aug. 6, 2026, after Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon ruled that the Department of Defense must restart reviews for wind projects.
A federal judge issued yet another blow to Trump’s war on wind, ruling that the Defense Department must resume its review of onshore wind permit applications.
The U.S. Department of Defense has for months refused to conduct routine military evaluations of proposed onshore wind farms, creating a de facto moratorium on the clean energy source at a time of exploding electricity demand.
On Thursday, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump ordered the agency to resume its reviews — and put an end to that freeze on wind projects. The preliminary injunction requires the DoD to report to the court on its progress every 30 days while the legal case proceeds.
“The court just stopped the Trump administration from misusing a long-standing review process to block the clean, affordable power that Americans need,” Phelps Turner, senior attorney, U.S. Clean Energy, at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “For months, wind projects capable of supplying millions of homes and businesses with low-cost power have been needlessly obstructed, as electricity costs and demand soar.”
The DoD delays, which began in August 2025 and ramped up to an outright halt this spring, have affected more than 155 projects across 21 states. The Trump administration has cited national security claims to justify this freeze, echoing arguments it made when stopping work on five offshore wind farms late last year. Those stop-work orders were all rejected by the courts.
The renewable energy groups that brought the suit contend that the freeze was never about national security — it was about furthering Trump’s war on wind energy.
Demand for electricity is rising quickly as data centers clamor to connect to the grid. This mad dash for power threatens to drive further increases in electricity costs, which have already ballooned under Trump despite his campaign pledge to cut bills in half.
Wind energy could help ease those rising costs: The energy source already supplied 10% of U.S. electricity last year, and onshore wind is the cheapest form of energy generation to build, according to investment bank Lazard.
Nevertheless, Trump has doggedly pursued a different campaign promise: blocking all wind farm construction.
His administration has fallen short of that dramatic goal — in fact, in June, the largest wind farm in the U.S. went online — but it has notched successes, too.
The administration has crushed the offshore wind industry, with the exception of the five installations off the East Coast. It ripped away tax credits for wind developers in last year’s sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And in August of last year, it scrapped the beleaguered Lava Ridge Wind Project, a 1-gigawatt onshore wind project that the Biden administration had approved for construction on public lands in southern Idaho.
The DoD freeze is not the first time the Trump administration has used agency reviews to create delays for wind developers.
Last July, the Interior Department created a “choke point” for permitting new wind and solar projects on federal lands by insisting that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum personally sign off on certain permit approvals. In April, a federal judge ordered the Interior Department to lift its blockade while a lawsuit led by industry groups makes its way through court, though the agency appealed the decision in June.
These delays have real stakes. Wind developers that hit certain construction milestones before July 4, 2026, locked in federal tax credits before they expired. But they need to finish construction within four years to receive those discounts.
Further delays, whether from the DoD or from another tactic at a different agency, could cause developers to miss those deadlines — and put projects on shaky financial ground.
Cleveland-Cliffs got $500M for a big green-steel push. Under Trump, the firm is “rescoping” to work that perpetuates coal use and will boost local pollution.
Steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was supposed to use up to $500 million from a Biden administration grant to usher in cleaner steelmaking in southwestern Ohio. Now, the company plans to instead put those funds toward a project that locks in old coal-based tech for decades and amps up local air pollution.
In a July 23 earnings call, Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves confirmed that the company aims to redirect the 2024 grant — which Congress originally earmarked for work that accelerates industrial decarbonization — to align with the pro-fossil-fuel Trump administration’s priorities.
“We have made major progress on the re-scoping of the Middletown project in compliance with the Trump administration’s energy dominance goals,” Goncalves said.
The money from the Department of Energy’s now-dismantled Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was meant to build a new facility to replace a coke-powered blast furnace at Cliffs’ Middletown Works. Blast furnaces use the dirty, coal-based fuel to purify iron ore into iron, which is then made into steel.
The new “direct reduced iron” facility would have purified iron ore without coal or coke by employing ions from natural gas or hydrogen to strip away unwanted oxygen ions. Then, two electric melting furnaces would then have readied the resulting iron for the final steps of steelmaking in the plant’s basic oxygen furnace.
Cliffs had indicated it hoped to eventually use hydrogen at Middletown Works, and the DOE estimated the facility upgrades could have slashed greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1 million tons annually.
But last summer, amid the Trump administration’s clawbacks of Biden-era clean energy funding, Cliffs began reevaluating the plan. A February air-permit application submitted to the state revealed the firm’s new idea: Simply refurbish Middletown Works’ blast furnace so it can run for another few decades, and add a cogeneration plant that uses the furnace’s waste heat to generate electricity and steam for the facility.
It wasn’t clear back in February that this work would be funded by the DOE grant, given that Congress originally allocated the funds for “advanced industrial technology,” which is defined as something “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”
Goncalves’ comments in last month’s earnings call confirm that Cliffs does still plan to use the money for the Middletown Works, but to install run-of-the-mill technologies with questionable climate benefits.
“The Middletown blast furnace is due for a reline by 2030,” he said. “And this DOE grant will allow us to go further in optimizing the furnace and maximizing energy efficiency by capturing and using blast furnace gas to generate electricity on-site.”
Making electricity from the blast furnace’s gas is better than simply spewing it into the air, and would presumably offset some emissions from producing that power elsewhere. However, the project would still result in many more tons of greenhouse gases than the initial plan.
Goncalves noted that Cliffs would have another public announcement about the project within a month or so. Company representatives did not answer Canary Media’s follow-up questions about the work, its costs, emissions, or other issues.
Climate advocates are lamenting Cliffs’ walkback.
“The original proposal would have cut climate pollution, it would have cut health-harming pollution, and it would have created jobs,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at Industrious Labs, which advocates for decarbonizing heavy industry.
The cleaner-steel project would also have positioned the facility to compete favorably in markets where buyers still aim to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, she said.
“This is a horrible trade,” Lewis said.
Along with its climate impacts, Cliffs’ U-turn will result in its neighbors breathing in more dangerous chemicals.
Already, Middletown Works ranks in the top 10 polluters statewide for several health-harming contaminants, according to a 2024 report from Industrious Labs.
With the cogeneration plant and related upgrades, the plant is expected to annually emit 534 more tons of sulfur dioxide, 334 more tons of carbon monoxide, 179 more tons of nitrogen oxides, and 12 more tons of chemicals that increase smog, according to a draft permit issued by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in June. There would also be nearly 100 additional tons of different sizes of particle pollution.
Yet while projected emissions would be higher than those for almost all times during the past five years, the draft permit concludes net reductions will occur for all those health-harming chemicals except carbon monoxide.
That’s because instead of comparing the projected emissions with those in recent years, the Ohio EPA uses data from 2013 to 2015 as a baseline. Back then, Middletown Works still ran a hyper-polluting facility to make coke on-site. That group of ovens shut down in October 2021.
Comments filed by Industrious Labs and other environmental advocates challenge the Ohio EPA’s use of old data to calculate those offsets. They argue that if the agency had used emissions numbers from the past decade as the baseline, it might have found that the plan surpassed thresholds that would trigger further regulation or pollution limits.
Meanwhile, the Ohio EPA’s offset calculation offer little comfort for some area residents who have long felt plagued by the plant’s pollution.
“The cogen plant will reduce Cliffs’ energy use, saving them money, while they continue to harm [my] family and my neighbors’ health, and [with] even more pollution,” said Donna Ballinger, who lives approximately 1,000 feet from the Middletown Works and spoke at a July 9 public hearing.
Another local, Amy Wray, wrote to the Ohio EPA, “If it’s going to increase pollutants then we don’t want it. This town is already a toxic chemical soup.”
Still, Cliffs has substantial support from locals who see the plan as an environmentally sound way to keep the Middletown Works going.
“The proposed improvements to Cleveland-Cliffs will significantly reduce the facility’s carbon footprint while securing high-quality manufacturer and construction jobs for generations to come,” said Brian Kuhbander, who spoke for the Construction and General Laborers’ Local 534 union at the July 9 hearing.
It’s worth noting that the original green steel plan would have had big employment benefits, too. Besides protecting more than 2,000 existing jobs at the Middletown Works, the new facilities would have created 170 new permanent positions in addition to 1,200 construction jobs.
The public comment period on the draft permit is over, and the Ohio EPA expects to make a decision on a final permit by the end of this year, according to Dina Pierce, a public information officer for the agency. Cliffs has 18 months to begin construction once a permit is issued.
How long it may take to finish the project remains unclear. As power demand from data centers skyrockets, waiting lists for turbines needed for the cogeneration plant have grown to five years or more.
Lewis of Industrious Labs said it’s “not too late” to switch back to the earlier approach, particularly since the company did a lot of work to develop the cleaner-steel plan. A 2024 press release from Cliffs said it was prepared to invest more than $1 billion in addition to the government funding for that project, which would also have curbed its future production costs.
“They can — and they should — bring back that original plan,” Lewis said.
The Department of Energy has canceled or stalled funding for thousands of projects that would improve the country’s stressed grid — and not just in blue states.
In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.
In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling “the Left’s climate agenda.”
And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.
Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.
Some of those projects in “blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.
But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.
According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025, and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.
But the DOE has also stalled projects for “a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. “This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”
“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. “Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”
The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling, and “ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.
Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance “on a case-by-case basis to identity [sic] waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”
Then, in October, the DOE announced the “termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”
Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.
Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.
The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project appeared on the termination list in October, and the DOE has not disbursed money for it, according to federal records, though negotiations for resuming funding are underway.
This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.
According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains “at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.
“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.
All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. “You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”
Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.
The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.
Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50%. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy, and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.
Alliant “voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.
Alliant is “actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. “While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.
Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds.
That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capitol and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to “improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email.
SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD “has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. “We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”
In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation “grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.
The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to “improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”
“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility “recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”
At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. “Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”
Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.
The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.
In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE “will honor its $464 million grant,” which will “unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”
A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a “number of criteria,” including whether it has “achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it “remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it “continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”
The spokesperson added that “none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them “had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”
During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete, and that more than 80% of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.
But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the “blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.
The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.
“Once an Administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, “the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.”
A correction was made on Aug. 12, 2026. The story initially stated that a DOE grant to the California Energy Commission was terminated. That grant appeared on a list of grants targeted for termination, but was not officially terminated, according to the CEC.
The startup, newly valued at $13 billion, is now manufacturing batteries in Texas. It offers an affordable way for homeowners to get backup power and it helps the grid too.
Home battery startup Base Power seems constitutionally incapable of standing still. After raising $1 billion last October, the Texas company has raised another $1 billion, and upped its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion.
The latest investment, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, amounts to one of the largest validations so far for the theory that small-scale energy devices can play a role in meeting the nation’s ravenous demand for new power.
Households could easily spend more than $10,000 to buy their own batteries, but Base Power installs unusually powerful batteries at customers’ homes for an up-front fee ($95 to $695, depending on location) plus an ongoing electricity supply subscription. This model lets more homes access emergency backup power when the grid goes down, and cheaper power on normal days. In exchange, Base Power uses those energy storage systems to provide power to the grid when it’s most stressed — a service that makes money for the company.
Clean energy advocates have called for this kind of distributed energy model for years, saying that generating and storing power in homes and businesses can make more sense than relying on an increasingly expensive centralized grid, if only someone would compensate the systems properly. The market has been slow to heed their calls. But now AI companies are paying top dollar for energy wherever they can find it, and the idea of controlling thousands of dispatchable home batteries lights up investors like never before.
“There’s a real need on the grid for capacity in Illinois and Texas and frankly everywhere else in the U.S. now,” said Base Power co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Justin Lopas. “Distributed batteries are a way that we can add meaningful capacity to the grid.”
In less than three years of operating, Base Power has installed batteries at 17,000 homes, mostly in Texas but recently in Illinois as well. With the ability to provide more than 500 megawatt-hours of power, that aggregated fleet stores as much energy as one of the large utility-scale batteries you could find in the Texas countryside or the California desert. But those projects take years of development and permitting before they can enter construction, while Base Power installers add multiple batteries in a day.
The new funding will equip Base Power to expand its team and increase the rate of installs, Lopas said. But the company has also been working to speed deployments another way: by taking over its own supply chain.
Base Power has been installing batteries that were manufactured to its specifications by a “non-China” overseas supplier, Lopas said. Now, the company has multiple production lines up and running in the former Austin American-Statesman newspaper building in Austin, Texas. This means products can come off the line and go right on a truck for delivery, instead of getting shipped in from overseas.
Base Power’s engineers finessed their design to make life easier for the company’s in-house installers. Many home batteries are mounted on walls, but Base Power has decided to go a different route.
“Ours are installed on the ground, not the wall,” Lopas said. “That simplifies the install, and you don’t have to carry different screws for brick and stone and siding and all this other stuff.”
Base Power has a contract to begin sourcing domestic battery cells by the end of the year, and already buys all the data-processing “smart” components for the battery systems from the U.S., to improve cybersecurity. That also sets up the company to avoid bureaucratic snarls around electronics from China; the White House recently banned new foreign inverters on national security grounds.
The new Base Core model coming off the line in Austin also packs more of a punch in terms of energy. It can push 20 kilowatts of instantaneous power, and stores nearly 40 kilowatt-hours. That’s far beyond the conventional format popularized by the Tesla Powerwall, which discharges 5 kilowatts and stores 14 kilowatt-hours. Customers can stack more than one Base Core for even more storage.
“Our financial model is very aligned with our customers,” Lopas said. “They want as long a duration of backup as they can get, and we want to put as much energy as we can on the home.”
Now the company has a vast war chest to hire more installers, who will each install more energy capacity per visit. Different states are working on mechanisms to nudge AI hyperscalers to pay for distributed energy to meet some of their capacity needs. Those policies are in their infancy, but Base Power sees plenty of runway to grow using the current market rules in Texas and Illinois, Lopas said. The startup also works with utilities to set up home battery networks to solve grid problems, a model that could scale in the states that lack a Texas-style competitive power market.
Startup Zanskar has created one of the most productive geothermal wells in the U.S. by squeezing more life out of a power plant that had been in decline for years.
Geothermal company Zanskar bought a New Mexico power plant in 2024 that appeared from the outside to be failing. The shallow wells had been rapidly losing heat, and the plant was having trouble generating power as a result.
Now, after drilling a new well and operating the power plant for a full year, Zanskar says that it has made a complete turnaround. The Lightning Dock site, according to figures from the company shared exclusively with WIRED, has become one of the most productive pumped geothermal wells in the U.S., providing enough heat to run the power plant with no issues.
The productivity over the past year at the Lightning Dock site “fundamentally changes how people think about these types of systems that we really thought we understood in the past,” says Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards.
It’s the latest bit of good news for the long-neglected geothermal industry, which is experiencing an investment renaissance. Innovative drilling technology and artificial intelligence — along with a little bit of luck — played roles in the milestone. And while not all traditional wells may have the same set of circumstances as Zanskar had at Lightning Dock, the company says that its success is a wake-up call that old well sites are still worth further exploration.
Traditional geothermal energy relies on tapping hot water within the earth to generate electricity by pumping it to the surface and spinning turbines. In theory, it’s an excellent way of generating renewable baseload power: People have been harnessing steam from hot springs for thousands of years. But geographic constraints — power plants need to be situated on geothermal reserves, which are overwhelmingly in the western U.S. — as well as the difficulty and expense traditionally involved in finding new wells mean geothermal energy constitutes less than 1 percent of the electricity mix in the U.S.
Another challenge for the industry is that most wells gradually see declines in productivity. But Lightning Dock’s decline had been particularly steep, losing between five and 10 times as much heat each year as average wells, Zanskar says. When the company bought the site, temperatures in the original wells, which were less than 2,500 feet deep, had cooled some 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) to about 250°F by 2024. The on-site 15-megawatt power plant, which supplies electricity to New Mexico’s largest utility, was designed to operate at temperatures above 300°F.
While conventional geothermal wells usually go down 3,000 to 5,000 feet, drilling deeper wells can tap into hotter reserves of water to use for power. But tighter rock formations deep underground make drilling more challenging — and costly. Whether or not to drill deeper is “basically a question of economics,” says Roland Horne, a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. The cost, Horne says, is not linear: “If you drill twice as deep, it costs four times as much.”
To help make better bets on drilling, Zanskar uses artificial intelligence to identify what are known as hidden systems — that is, sites with ample geothermal potential but little to no signs of their viability on the surface. The company used the technology last year to make a discovery in Nevada, and it says that same modeling also helped pinpoint where to most productively drill at the Lightning Dock site. It combined those models with drill bit technology refined by the oil and gas industry, which helped it drill deeper holes 35% faster at what Zanskar says is a “competitive cost.” (The company didn’t provide specifics.) The new 8,000-foot well has been operating for a full year, with heat levels above where they were before the decline.
“We knew that if we were going to buy this field, we were committed to drilling deeper and going after it,” says Edwards. Edwards says that the new well is so productive that it has, on occasion, supplied “too much heat” to the existing power plant, suggesting that it could power a larger facility.
“We expect, if you look at peers of this well, it has the attributes to be productive for decades,” Edwards says.
Horne points out that by buying a developed site with an existing power plant, Zanskar offset a big cost sink compared to starting from scratch. Another company had also already drilled a deep exploratory well at Lightning Dock in 2022, which, Horne says, gave Zanskar valuable geologic information to help with its modeling. (Ben Brenner, Zanskar’s director of federal affairs, tells WIRED in an email that data from the other well was incorporated into its modeling, but the company “never saw that particular well’s data as somehow definitive or essential.”)
“They haven’t discovered anything revolutionary,” Horne says of the techniques used at the Lightning Dock site. Still, he says that the statistics provided by Zanskar “hold up” to make it one of the wells with the highest flow rates — a measure of productivity — in the U.S. While at least one other facility in Nevada has wells with higher flow rates than Lightning Dock, Brenner says that those wells are “much colder” than Lightning Dock’s, which will make them less productive over the long run.
“It’s a really good well,” Horne says.
This has been a big year for the geothermal industry, particularly for companies that are using new technologies to tap the earth’s heat. Enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy went public in May, raising $2.2 billion, although there has been a pullback in stock prices since its debut. Venture capital investors — who typically have veered away from geothermal — have also been putting money into the industry, says Stephanie Díaz, a senior associate at BloombergNEF. Venture capital and private equity investment in geothermal startups has hit $432 million through the first six months of this year, meaning that “2026 is shaping up to be the best-funded year for geothermal startups since BNEF began tracking in 2022,” Díaz says. That total includes Zanskar, which raised $115 million in a funding round in January, one of the largest raises in the sector this year.
Unlike what Zanskar is doing, enhanced geothermal uses a technique similar to fracking and requires hot rocks rather than hot water, opening up the possibility of drilling wells in areas that have been off limits. Because of this, companies like Fervo have been the focus of much of the recent investment and attention in the industry, Díaz says.
But Díaz says data-driven approaches like Zanskar’s can help de-risk traditional geothermal development. Lightning Dock, Díaz says, is also a good example of finding “adjacent areas to work that have worked historically.”
A federal appeals court finds the EPA acted improperly in terminating grants to boost clean energy projects. The Trump administration may appeal to the Supreme Court.
A federal appeals court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency acted improperly in terminating billions of dollars of “green bank” financing last year, setting up a potential showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court over one of the Trump administration’s earliest attacks on a key Biden-era climate program.
Tuesday’s divided ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is a victory for the nonprofit groups targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as part of a broader attack on the Biden administration’s clean energy and climate spending.
In March 2025, the EPA moved to freeze $20 billion in funding under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which was created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and is commonly known as the federal “green bank” program. The ambitious effort was meant to inject large-scale federal funding into climate and clean-energy lending pioneered by state-level green banks — lending institutions that have successfully enabled $21.8 billion in public-private investment to date.
The idea was to put federal money to work to boost financing for clean energy and climate-oriented projects in communities that have traditionally lacked access to it. That could spur a virtuous cycle that could yield between $150 billion to $250 billion in private-sector investment over the next 10 years, according to an April 2023 analysis by consultancy McKinsey.
That effort has been frozen in its tracks by the current EPA, forcing the nonprofits awarded grants to curtail operations. Those groups argued that the EPA’s actions violated the law by not spending money authorized by Congress.
“Despite efforts to harm the awardees with false allegations and misinformation, there remains no legal basis for terminating our grant award,” a spokesperson for Climate United, a consortium awarded $7 billion in GGRF funds, said in a Tuesday statement.
Before the EPA froze its funds, Climate United had committed hundreds of millions of dollars for solar projects for the University of Arkansas, financing to help small-scale trucking firms buy U.S.-built electric trucks in California, upgrades to shift buildings to clean energy and make them more efficient, and Native American–led clean energy projects. Only a fraction of those funds have been disbursed.
Because it hasn’t received its promised GGRF funding, Climate United — a partnership between investment firm Calvert Impact, multifamily affordable-housing financier Community Preservation Corp., and community-development financial institution Self-Help — has lost its CEO and had to reduce staffing. Meanwhile, plans have been scaled back at a network of state and county green banks and other community-development financing institutions that had counted on using federal funds.
In April 2025, a lawsuit brought by GGRF recipients won an early favorable ruling in federal district court, which the EPA appealed. A three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit Court ruled 2–1 in the EPA’s favor in September, but the full appeals court decided to take up the case for review, leading to this week’s decision.
That doesn’t mean grant recipients can now get their money, however. The EPA has several days to file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. The EPA did not immediately respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment on Tuesday. But Zeldin has vowed to fight to claw back the $20 billion in GGRF grants.
Another $7 billion in GGRF funds for the federal Solar for All program have also been terminated by the EPA, and legal challenges to that action are underway. The EPA has faced other recent legal defeats as it tries to terminate Biden-era climate funding.
GGRF recipients have continued to undertake smaller-scale financing deals and remain ready to resume projects if their full funding is restored, the Climate United spokesperson told Canary Media. “This program was designed to lower energy costs, create good jobs, and improve public health. We will continue to pursue every legal avenue available to us to unfreeze funds on behalf of the communities we serve.”
A new state law aims to spur agrivoltaics projects where crops or livestock thrive amid solar panels, as AI power demand booms and concerns about farmland loss rise.
As the world’s data center capital, Virginia faces a surge in energy demand that could spike power costs and lead to more polluting fossil fuel plants. At the same time, the state is seeing its farmland disappear at one of the fastest rates in the United States.
The two problems may seem unrelated, but Old Dominion leaders believe they could be mitigated by a common solution: Use the same plot of land for both farming and solar panels. That’s the idea behind a new state law that officially defines “agrivoltaics,” the dual use of land for agriculture and solar photovoltaics.
Proponents say the measure will spur more affordable, clean power to meet rising electricity needs while also helping farmers earn a living. Virginia is just the fourth state in the country to pass an agrivoltaics law.
“For years, the conventional wisdom has forced us into a zero-sum game, viewing solar panels as a replacement for crops rather than a partner to them,” said Josephus Allmond, the chief energy officer for Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, at a June bill-signing event in Loudoun County. “Today, we are rejecting that false choice. Agrivoltaics moves us from an either-or mindset to a both-and function.”
The new law, which passed the Democratic-led General Assembly early this year with bipartisan support, is taking effect as power-hungry data centers and large-scale solar fields have become flashpoints in Virginia and across the country.
Hundreds of data centers have already set up shop in the state, lured in part by generous tax credits. The giant computer warehouses have polluted the air and threatened to overwhelm the grid. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, estimates that the facilities could make up over half its sales by 2035. Legislators this year debated but failed to adopt incentives or mandates for tech companies to build their own clean energy.
Experts say solar is the cheapest, quickest way to meet the colossal needs of large electric customers like data centers. Plus, a 2020 law requires the state’s two largest utilities to build more than 16 gigawatts of land-based renewable energy, mostly solar, on their way to zero-carbon emissions by midcentury.
But early solar developers who failed to control their sediment pollution, combined with rampant disinformation, have helped tarnish the reputation of large projects. Though studies show that housing developments are bigger culprits, solar has emerged as a popular scapegoat for Virginia’s rapid loss of farmland. As of early this year, nearly two-thirds of Virginia counties outlawed or severely restricted large-scale solar.
There’s no evidence to suggest that solar panels ruin soil, and even without agrivoltaics, many farmers happily lease a portion of their property to renewable developers for extra income to help their businesses pencil out. But there’s no denying that solar panels are changing the state’s landscape: The vast bulk of large-scale solar energy is now on converted forest or farmland, and its footprint could triple to over 3% of former cropland alone by 2035, according to research from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Agrivoltaics, proponents say, can mitigate that expanding footprint. Sheep and other livestock can graze beneath solar panels — helping enrich the soil and stopping it from running off into waterways. Eggplant, kale, and other crops can also grow well under panels — something the Piedmont Environmental Council is demonstrating at its test farm in Loudon County. Some 13 agrivoltaics projects operate in the state today, according to the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
The dual use of agricultural land isn’t just about alleviating the impact — perceived or real — of solar panels. Jess Gray, CEO of Gray’s Lambscaping, says it’s also about creating new opportunities for small-business owners like herself. She and her husband sold their house and started a family farm five years ago in Pittsylvania County, in south-central Virginia. They began raising a variety of animals — sheep, chickens, cattle — hoping the venture would be self-sufficient. “The truth is, it’s hard to be a farmer,” Gray said. “Nobody likes to talk about that.”
They initially used their sheep for meat and for “cleaning up” the ground cover on their farm. But they soon realized they could boost their income by offering grazing to manage vegetation on solar fields. Today, their 1,500-some ewes service about 4,000 acres of solar panels, from their home farm all the way to Chesapeake. “We’ve grazed to the beach and back,” she said. The result is revenue they can reinvest in their farming operation. “We use our sheep to buy our cows,” she said. Very quickly, they went from two cows to 50. “We were on this 10-year plan that happened in two years.”
The Grays’ experience is an example of how agrivoltaics can help restore land to agriculture while also sustaining new farmers, says Lauren Glickman, the Virginia-based vice president of policy and communications for renewables developer Encore Renewable Energy. Production on roughly 150,000 acres of prime cropland across the state stopped between 1986 and 2018 because the economics didn’t work for farmers, she said. “Right now, there is real potential for solar to bring this abandoned farmland back.”
“Agrivoltaics,” according to the state’s new seven-line definition, is the intentional use of land for both farming and solar, is part of an agricultural business, and doesn’t “significantly displace farming activity,” among other provisions.
The verbiage is reinforced in another new law disallowing local solar bans, which prevents blanket and de facto prohibitions on solar while retaining the right of county governments to reject individual projects.
“Counties are going to be able to start using this definition to segment out good projects from bad ones,” said Del. John McAuliff, a Democrat from Loudoun County who helped write the agrivoltaics measure.
Separate from the law, Gov. Spanberger plans to convene an informal committee this year to recommend when, where, and how to advance statewide inducements and requirements for agrivoltaics.
“We can start to create incentives programs, tax credits, grant programs, et cetera,” said McAuliff, who worked in the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture before winning his seat in the House of Delegates last year.
The statutory definition could dovetail with a pair of new laws that require state utilities to build more community solar projects — small-scale installations that are subscription-based and designed for customers who, for various reasons, aren’t set up to invest in their own rooftop panels.
“There’s 39,000 farms in Virginia,” said Ashish Kapoor, senior energy and climate advisor at the Piedmont Environmental Council. “Imagine a world in which you put 1 megawatt of solar on each farm with battery backup. You have 39 gigawatts of energy.”
Even a tiny fraction of that would be significant and could be built quickly, he said. “That’s a gas plant — minus the pollution, minus the years of development, minus the fuel cost.”
Gray, of Gray’s Lambscaping, says the key is for Virginia leaders to be as expansive as possible, limiting neither the size nor the type of agrivoltaics projects, so long as it’s the default for new solar fields.
“We should say to folks, ‘We’re not going to build solar unless it’s paired with agriculture,’” Gray said. “It can look in any way. It can be sheep, it can be cows, it could be row crops, it could be flowers. There’s so much opportunity.”
The state’s solar equity program has been in place for nearly a decade, but it wasn’t until recently, after years of grassroots efforts, that participation surged.
Any time, day or night, parents experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, or other emergencies can drop their young kids off at the Crisis Nursery in Urbana, Illinois, and know they’ll be safe and cared for.
Funding is a constant challenge for the 45-year-old nonprofit organization. But it was able to create a bit of financial breathing room by putting solar panels on its roof back in 2020, leading to significant savings on its energy bills.
Crisis Nursery was one of the first beneficiaries of Illinois Solar for All, a state program to make the clean energy source accessible to households, nonprofits, and public facilities in lower-income communities and areas facing environmental injustice. Participants receive at least half the value of the energy generated by their solar array, with no up-front costs for buildings with four or fewer units, as well as no or low up-front costs for larger projects.
The program, created by a state law that took effect in 2017, was slow to get off the ground. The available funds went largely unspent for years, despite the savings on offer.
But in recent years, the program has become a success — and a lesson in the importance of long-term commitment and extensive grassroots engagement, as administrators and advocates see it.
During the initiative’s last cycle, from June 2024 to May 2025, more projects were approved than in its first five years combined, according to the Illinois Power Agency, the state entity that oversees the program. Last year, the Illinois Commerce Commission ordered a funding boost of $20 million, and every last dollar went out the door “almost immediately,” the Illinois Power Agency said in its latest annual report.
New application windows for Illinois Solar for All are open through September, for different types of projects, and program administrators expect heavy interest, including from those wait-listed in the last round.
State-level solar programs with an equity focus are especially important now, advocates say, given the Trump administration’s cancellation of the federal Solar for All initiative created by the Inflation Reduction Act. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans also slashed tax credits for residential and large-scale solar projects with last year’s megabill.
Just as Illinois Solar for All is coming into its own, the loss of federal incentives raises new challenges. Without those dollars, the state funding simply won’t go as far as it once did.
“It’s a big swing,” said Wade Halva, who has long advocated for clean energy in southern Illinois, as a pastor and associate director of programs for Faith in Place, an environmental justice organization. “Does it mean the state program has to change? Can we even do residential at a guaranteed savings rate without federal incentives?”
But Jennifer Schmidt, Illinois Solar for All senior program manager for the Illinois Power Agency, sees a silver lining. “A sense of urgency driven by the sunsetting of federal tax credits,” she said, has helped fuel the recent success of Illinois Solar for All — and she expects the momentum to continue.
At the beginning, Illinois Solar for All had an awareness problem.
Many Illinois residents — particularly those in rural areas where solar adoption was low — had never considered putting panels on their roofs. Others may have liked the idea but felt they didn’t have the bandwidth to manage a complex home upgrade like solar, even if it was low- or no-cost.
And plenty of residents were just plain skeptical of a government program that sounded too good to be true.
“The first hurdle was getting the idea that the program existed out there — that it was real and it wasn’t a scam,” Halva said. “We were targeting people on the residential side who had written off getting solar because there was no way it was affordable.”
Once households decided to move forward, some faced new challenges. One common example: Many applicants had old roofs that needed to be updated before panels could be attached. Last fiscal year alone, Illinois Solar for All funded 88 roof replacements.
Things were a bit different for nonprofits and public facilities. Even if those organizations wanted to take advantage of Solar for All in the early years, the economics weren’t always on their side, because, as tax-exempt organizations, they could not access the federal tax credits for solar. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act changed that — but it didn’t change the fact that these organizations were not very familiar with solar energy.
“So they hadn’t looked into it,” Halva said. “We ended up doing a lot of baseline solar education because we were reaching out to parties who had no market for it before.”
Crisis Nursery’s participation in the program is an example of this kind of outreach. Illinois Solar for All administrators contacted the nursery staff, encouraging them to participate and arranging a lease agreement with a solar developer in which the nonprofit paid nothing up front.
“We have a 10,000-square-foot building, so every little bit helps, especially during seasons when we are running our utilities” around the clock, said the nursery’s executive director Stephanie Record. “A lot of businesses may be able to alter their temperatures when people aren’t there to conserve energy. We have to be at that constant level of heating and cooling 24/7.”
Nearly 400 Illinois Solar for All projects went online last fiscal year, representing over 700 different building units.
There are now projects in almost every county in the state, unlike in 2023, when they were concentrated in the Chicago area, along with a band across the center of the state. Changes made in the past program year allowed projects for nonprofits and public facilities in census tracts adjacent to income-eligible and environmental justice counties to qualify. The areas designated as environmental justice communities also increased.
“These sorts of things matter a lot in who we can approach,” Halva said.
Illinois Solar for All projects can be developed only by solar companies that have been vetted and approved by the state.
In the program’s early days, few companies went through this process. Solar workforce training and entrepreneurship programs were created and funded by the state’s 2017 clean energy law, but it took a while for administrators to successfully create a system to match developers with trainees.
The workforce is much more robust today. Thirteen companies developed the Illinois Solar for All projects energized or developed last year, and a state website helps dozens of such approved vendors connect with clients.
Another key to the program’s success is its “grassroots educators” — community leaders paid by the state to raise awareness. Last fiscal year, almost $700,000 was awarded to 10 community organizations to hire grassroots educators for one-year stints. Nine of those groups have new funding for the work this year.
Three years ago, Aretha Berdell became a grassroots educator in the Garfield Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, after she got rooftop solar through a separate state program called Illinois Shines. She often recruits people at events run by the Garfield Park Community Council, where she works as a sustainable housing associate, or by other local groups. It typically takes six or seven conversations before residents feel comfortable moving forward with solar, she said.
“I always tell my story — I haven’t paid [local utility] ComEd since last year,” she said. “We’re getting the word out. Especially if they’re seniors and don’t have access to the computer, I’m just helping them out, moving them along.”
In and around the small southern Illinois city of Marion, the program — and Halva’s work as a grassroots educator — have led to solar arrays on a church, a local fire station, a senior center, a youth center, and a city-owned recreation facility called The Hub. The solar array on Zion United Church of Christ’s carport has saved thousands of dollars, which the church spends on its food pantry, providing hundreds of meals every Sunday and hundreds of bags of food each week.
Ellie Simpson, another grassroots educator, focuses on outreach to houses of worship, on behalf of Eco DioChicago, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago’s organization for environmental justice and “creation care committee” — responsible for acting as stewards of the Earth. She said multiple church representatives contact her each month, “interested in starting the conversation about what it means to care for creation,” and using solar to reduce their carbon footprint and redirect funds from energy bills to pastoral work.
The personalized guidance that a grassroots educator can offer is crucial in working with faith-based groups, Simpson noted, since they range from organizations with large endowments able to make big investments to small entities with board members cautious of approving any expenditures.
“Some move quickly, some move slower,” she said. “Nonprofits and churches all have their own pace.”
Illinois Solar for All is entering into a new era this fiscal year. It will be the first time that federal incentives are unavailable — and administrators are still figuring out how to adjust, Schmidt said.
One bright spot is that many of the program’s arrays are developed as third-party ownership arrangements, in which solar developers own an array and provide the energy to the resident or organization — and those projects can still access federal tax incentives if they are operational by the end of 2027, or if they started construction before July 4 of this year.
In any case, state law calls for $50 million in funding each year for Illinois Solar for All. With that in mind, Schmidt said the program will be able to adjust to fill some gaps left by federal changes.
“We look at different potential funding pieces of a project, and if things change, we update,” Schmidt said. “Illinois Solar for All is not going anywhere.”
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