Low-Quality Energy for the LIDACs and $21.8 Billion in Waste from the EPA

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series of investigations into federal grants to nonprofits that Capital Research Center is conducting. We are pleased the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and others are exploring the vast forest of nonprofits trying to influence the U.S. government—an area that Capital Research Center has spent years mapping.

This article explores grants made by the Environmental Protection Agency.

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The question is no longer whether solar energy works. We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs. . . . The Department of Energy believes that photovoltaic cells can be competitive with conventional energy sources, perhaps as early as 1990.

—President Jimmy Carter (May 1978)

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As president, Jimmy Carter attached solar panels to the roof of the White House, but the bright “green” energy future he anticipated never arrived. After his presidency he honed another legacy building homes for impoverished Americans. Carter lived long enough to witness the collision of those visions: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved at least $21.8 billion in grants with 2024 start dates to encourage “LIDAC” Americans to rely on low-quality energy.

“LIDAC” is an acronym sometimes used by federal grant describers who don’t want to keep writing “low-income and disadvantaged communities,” a dozen syllables of official word salad that means “impoverished.”

Trimming the fat from federal spending, regulations (and maybe even babble-speak acronyms) is the work of President-elect Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.” It’ll be a tough job because literally every budget item has a constituency, and nothing is labeled “waste, fraud and abuse.” But for examples of relatively painless cuts that few will miss, not even the LIDACs, the DOGErs should examine how the EPA is frittering away $21.8 billion.

Who knows, maybe they can still claw some of it back?

A stash that big is enough to have written a $600 check to everyone in America living below the poverty line. A one-time payout of $2,400 to a household of four would be significant for just about every American family, let alone the most destitute among us.

So, what did the government do instead?

Paying for Electric Vehicles Rather Than Electric Bills

By definition, many LIDACs struggle to pay grocery bills and other basic necessities. They’re battling just to make car payments, rather than pay for pricey electric vehicles (EVs). A March 2024 Gallup survey revealed just 33 percent of self-reported EV owners are from households with incomes of less than $100,000.

Similarly, they’re not prioritizing boutique, weather-restricted energy systems. No state has more LIDACs than California, where 4.5 million are living below the poverty line and state websites boast of the “most ambitious” weather-dependent power deployment goals in America.

Not coincidentally, the Golden State also has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S., almost triple what is paid in neighboring Arizona and Nevada. There’s a joke about this: What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles? Answer: Electricity!

But while LIDACs nationwide don’t really need “credit unions to build and scale green lending programs,” that’s exactly what a nonprofit named “Inclusiv” says it will do with a $1.9 billion grant awarded in 2024.

Including Inclusiv, these “green” financing projects for LIDACs racked up more than $19.4 billion in EPA grant awards during 2024.

A nearly $7 billion grant was awarded to the Climate United Fund to create financing for greenhouse gas reduction projects in “AMERICAN COMMUNITIES, PARTICULARLY LOW-INCOME AND DISADVANTAGED COMMUNITIES.”

The Climate United “About Us” page explains their mission to “remove financial barriers to clean technologies.” The Climate United website is filled with photos of solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations. That’s probably not too exciting if you’re a LIDAC who can’t afford eggs.

A similarly worded, $5 billion grant was approved for the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC). The CGC website claims the group’s mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology” with a “targeted focus” on the LIDACs. The top of the CGC main page features an animated image of otherwise lush green hills covered with solar panels, wind turbines, and “A National Green Bank” to fund all that clutter. (Yea nature!)

The Opportunity Finance Network accepted a $2.3 billion LIDAC “clean” energy finance grant. The announcement of the grant has a photo of a rooftop solar installation.

Power Forward Communities received a $2 billion LIDAC grant last year. The nonprofit claims the loot will be used to “drive the decarbonization of homes that the climate demands” and “transform the marketplace for heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and wiring and weatherization upgrades that support them.”

The gas stoves they’re hoping to take away from the poor are preferred by wealthy homeowners, chefs and foodies. And electric vehicles are so undesired by everyone that since 2022 Ford has reportedly lost a cumulative $10 billion on its EV program.

Divided equally among Ford’s 89,000 American employees, the $10 billion flushed away on EVs since 2022 could have been paid as bonus checks that exceeded $112,000. Instead, during the last quarter, Ford reported a $58,000 loss for each EV it sold.

One of Power Forward’s main coalition partners is Rewiring America. Rewiring was born as a fiscally sponsored project of the Windward Fund, which is turn managed by Arabella Advisors. Arabella was described in a 2021 New York Times report as a “dark money” network that “has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes.”

The main page of the Rewiring website claims “going electric” is the goal, by which they mean “replacing appliances that use fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) with ones that use electricity.” But the Department of Energy reports that 60 percent of American electricity in 2023 was fueled with … coal, natural gas, and oil.

So, the federal government has forked over $2 billion to a coalition co-created by deeply partisan left-wing hacks who know less about electricity than a cat that has bitten into a live lamp cord.

More of these so-called “clean” energy financing grants for LIDACs were awarded in 2024 to the Justice Climate Fund ($940 million) and the Native CDFI Network ($400 million.)

If you’re waiting for the LIDACs to get lower electricity bills out of all this, then take a number and take a seat. It’ll be a while.

Covering the Earth with Solar Panels

Another $2.3 billion in EPA loot shipped out in 2024 was meant to finance solar panels for the LIDACs.

The biggest winner was Grid Alternatives, a strident anti-energy nonprofit that opposes oil, natural gas, coal, and even nuclear energy. This positions them against 88 percent of all fuels used to power everything Americans need, from light bulbs to heavy industry.

Grid Alternatives really means “Civilization Alternatives.” In May 2024, the group received two grants of $249.8 million and $62.5 million. Both grant descriptions explain the funding is supposed to permit LIDACs to “BENEFIT FROM RESIDENTIAL-SERVING DISTRIBUTED SOLAR ENERGY AND STORAGE PROJECTS.”

Similar language was used in two separate grants totaling $124.9 million sent to the aforementioned Coalition for Green Capital. (Last year was a good year for CGC, as these are in addition to the $5 billion grant previously mentioned.)

That solar energy for LIDAC’s grant language was also used for $249.3 million awarded to Inclusive Prosperity Capital. The nonprofit claims some of its “funding partners” are the Sierra Club Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and McKnight Foundation. Each is a left-wing funder of climate alarmists.

The Sierra Club’s website boasts that it is “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy,” putting the group on the bad side of our only source of scalable, safe, and reliable carbon-free electricity. Many of Inclusive Prosperity Capital’s other listed donor partners—such as MacArthur—are also major funders of the anti-nuclear movement.

Growth Opportunity Partners is one of eight EPA grantees in 2024 that received solar power grants totaling at least $150 million. The other seven were Groundswell Inc, Hope Enterprises Corporation (two grants of $93.7 million and $62.5 million), Clean Energy Fund of Texas, Nevada Clean Energy Fund, the Capital Good Fund, the Solar Energy and Loan Fund of St. Lucie County, and Oweesta Corp.

Growth Opportunity Partners, like many that have been awarded EPA grants, has a photo of a massive solar project adorning the top of its main webpage. It’s not clear why so-called environmental groups believe it is optimal to portray their products as crowding out so much green space—also known as “the environment”—but it is at least (though perhaps not intentionally) honest. The U.S. Department of Energy reports that solar energy systems need 75 times more land than a nuclear reactor to produce the same amount of carbon-free energy. (Natural gas power stations produce about half the carbon emissions of coal and use roughly the same land as nuclear.)

Smaller LIDAC grants of this type were awarded to the Indiana Community Action Association ($117.5 million), Center for Rural Affairs ($62.5 million), and the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association ($62.3 million.)

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

The Department of Energy lists the average capacity factor of American solar energy systems at 24.6 percent. The capacity factor is a measure of the amount of time an energy system is working at its full, rated capacity. American nuclear reactors top the list at 92.7 percent. Solar energy is the worst.

This is not surprising, as the Earth is always spinning, plunging all of us into darkness for some large fraction of our day. And the average capacity factor is just that: If you’re in sunny, often cloudless Arizona, it might be higher than 24.6 percent. If you’re in a rainy, cloudy place, it will be lower than average.

Portland, Oregon, is reliably ranked by multiple sources as one of the five cloudiest cities in the United States, sharing the distinction with such champions of darkness as Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska. Yet last year the Bonneville Environmental Foundation of Portland received three grants of $56.5 million, $43.7 million, and $30.3 million. Each of the three grant descriptions say the loot is to be used to help LIDACs “BENEFIT FROM RESIDENTIAL-SERVING DISTRIBUTED SOLAR ENERGY AND STORAGE PROJECTS.”

Long before he tore Jimmy Carter’s silly solar panels off the White House, Ronald Reagan was the host of GE Theater and received complimentary home appliances so that he could show them off during the commercial breaks in his weekly broadcasts. He was once asked by a friend if there was any GE product that he didn’t own and Reagan replied: “Well, I don’t really need a nuclear submarine . . . but I have one now!”

The Bonneville Environmental website explains that is also responsible for financing the EPA’s solar energy programs for LIDACs in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Those three sparsely populated states put together are home to roughly 500,000 fewer residents than Oregon.

So, there’s a lot fewer LIDACs to serve. But those three states also have a lot more land and scenery to spoil with solar panels that are needed by nobody, least of all the LIDACs, who need the money for just about everything else.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/low-quality-energy-for-the-lidacs-and-21-8-billion-in-waste-from-the-epa/