A DC ruling sets aside the Solar for All cancellation for every grant
Victoria Shinder3 min readA US District Court judge for the District of Columbia has ruled that the EPA illegally terminated the $7 billion Solar for All programme. Judge Tanya Chutkan, in a ruling dated 22 September, wrote that eliminating the programme without congressional authorisation was "arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and in excess of statutory authority" - and held that what she set aside was the agency's policy-level decision, which applies to the cancellation of all Solar for All grants, not only the Harris County award. The suit was brought by Harris County, Texas, last October; Utility Dive's report is by Robyn Griggs Lawrence.
It is the second such ruling in a week. The US District Court of Rhode Island held on the Friday before that the termination was procedurally unlawful, in a case filed on behalf of downstream beneficiaries of the grants. The EPA says it is reviewing both and weighing an appeal. A third challenge - filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia in the Western District of Washington, also last October - was dismissed in January.
The money underneath: the Texas Solar for All Coalition was awarded nearly $250 million in 2024 through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created by the Inflation Reduction Act, with Harris County leading the coalition and securing more than $54 million. The EPA ended the programme in August 2025, citing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the complaint's position is that the OBBBA confers no such authority.
What it means
The difference between the two wins is the whole story, and it is easy to skim past. Rhode Island's ruling was procedural - the agency did it wrongly, which ordinarily invites the agency to do it again properly. Chutkan's is substantive and structural: the EPA lacked the authority at all without Congress, and the remedy reaches the policy-level decision rather than one grantee's award. A procedural defeat is a delay; a finding of no statutory authority is a different kind of obstacle, and it is why the scope sentence matters more than the dollar figure in the headline.
The dismissed 22-state suit is the useful counterweight against reading this as settled. Three courts, three postures, one of them already gone in January - which tells you the outcome here is about standing and forum as much as about the merits, and that the EPA has an appeal path in front of it. For anyone with a Solar for All award, the practical position today is a court order setting the cancellation aside and an agency saying it is considering options. That is better than August 2025 and it is not yet money moving.
The structural point for the sector is worth separating from this programme's fate. Grants made under IRA-created funds are now demonstrably reversible by a later administration and restorable by a court, on a timeline measured in years rather than quarters. Any project finance model that treated a federal award as a fixed input has just been shown its actual risk profile - and the lesson survives whatever the Court of Appeals does with these two rulings.