The story of Colorado's solar industry in 2025 can be explained as a tale of two roofs.
Both roofs are at Specialty Products, a global auto parts manufacturer based in Longmont. Roof Number One is at the company's headquarters, a 50,000 square foot industrial building off I-25, which houses the company’s offices, warehouse and assembly facility.
The first roof is a sea of solar panels, sparkling in the sun.
“The whole roof is covered with the solar array,” said Chief Operating Officer Mina Cox. “It will provide enough energy for everything that we do in this building.”
Over the course of a year, this formidable solar array will save Specialty Products roughly $50,000 on energy bills. The company finished building it last summer with help from a grant from the US Department of Agriculture – the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) – which covered 40% of the half-million-dollar price tag.
“We wouldn't have done it without the grant,” Cox said. “It just was not financially feasible for us to do it.”
The solar project on Roof Number One was so successful that Cox and her partners decided to replicate it on the second roof in this story: Roof Number Two, at the company's manufacturing plant, a few miles up the road. The 40,000 square foot building is where the company does its heavy manufacturing: dozens of industrial mills, lathes, laser cutters and welding robots turning raw blocks of aluminum and steel into precision pumps and suspension components.
“These are all very large machines, cutting metal,” Cox said. “It takes a lot of energy to cut steel or aluminum.”
Late last year, the team put together a second REAP grant application, for an even bigger solar array at the second location.
“We thought, oh, this would be great for manufacturing,” Cox said. “We were going to put solar arrays on to be able to capture the energy that we would need to run all the machinery in this building.”
Cox and her partners were taking advantage of a large wave of Biden-Era incentives, that channeled billions of dollars for solar development to Colorado, much of it targeting rural areas. The USDA offered REAP grants to agricultural producers and small businesses in rural areas to fund commercial solar installations, and Empowering Rural America (New ERA) awarded funding to rural electric cooperatives for utility scale renewable development. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar for All program was intended to fund solar projects for low-income and disadvantaged communities.
Collectively, all the federal programs were set to bring over $7 billion to Colorado for solar development, hastening the state’s transition to a carbon-free electric grid.
But everything changed once the Trump administration took over. President Trump issued an Executive Order on January 20 declaring a national energy emergency and pledging to supercharge fossil fuel development. The EPA halted the Solar for All program, although, according to state energy officials, that decision was reversed several weeks later. Then the USDA froze REAP and New ERA funding. In an emailed statement, USDA officials said they were reviewing the programs to “ensure they comply under the Trump Administration executive orders.”
Suddenly the solar industry’s momentum turned into strong headwinds.
“Not only is the Trump administration talking about doubling down on fossil fuels, but it’s also expressed an open hostility towards renewables,” said University of Colorado Boulder law school professor Chris Winter. “It's almost like a 180-degree flip from where we were, with the prior administration.”
The uncertainty has put the kibosh on a lot of solar projects in Colorado, according to Mike Kruger, the outgoing executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association – especially large, grant-funded commercial projects, the ones at Specialty Products.
“The solar industry is in a very strong hold pattern,” Kruger said. “People aren’t investing, they’re not hiring. They’re generally just holding onto their cash, holding onto their projects in the hopes that we get more certainty and less chaos.”
In addition to the frozen grant funding, the local industry is also facing uncertainty about tariffs and concerns about the future of the 30% federal investment tax credit for solar projects. The termination of federal employees at the USDA, the Department of Energy and other agencies only adds to the confusion.
“The folks that we need to help site projects, permit projects, get projects over the finish line are all now potentially not there anymore,” Kruger said. “Honest to goodness, just one of these alone would be enough to make any business owner nervous. Now you’ve got all these things. And ultimately, there will be higher costs for all electricity consumers across the state.”
Solar projects in limbo
While the New ERA grants, which target rural utilities and total in the billions, have a significantly greater impact on the scale of solar development in Colorado, the freezing of REAP grants – for agricultural producers and small businesses — is particularly disruptive to individuals and communities at the local level.
According to information publicly available on the government spending tracker USASpending.gov, dozens of small businesses in Colorado held signed contracts with the federal government for REAP projects at the time the funding was frozen.
That includes Good Vibes River Gear, a small outdoor gear manufacturing company based in Craig, which won $20,000 in funding last September to install a 7.3 kilowatt (kW) array on the roof of its plant. Co-owner Meagan Veenstra said she wanted to do the project to improve the company’s environmental footprint and because it made business sense.
“Our bills would be a little bit more level throughout the year being on the solar,” Veenstra said. “I am a seasonal business. In the winter, my bills get pretty high and my revenue drops pretty low. It was exciting for us to be able to streamline the amount that we spend every month.”
Veenstra said the project was nearly ready for installation when her solar consultant called to inform her about the frozen grant funding.
“We were super disappointed and pretty pissed,” she said about the disruption. “This feels like a win-win for everybody for more businesses to get on solar. And I'm nervous as to whether we will ever get this project completed or not.”
Other Colorado REAP grant recipients described the discomfort of this limbo. One small agricultural business that declined to an interview did send KUNC an email stating that they already had materials on site and had been obliged to start paying back bridge loans to cover the project, with no guarantee that the money would be reimbursed by the federal government, as promised.
Diane Dandeneau owns a solar consultancy and contracting company based in Lyons. One of her clients won a REAP grant for over $350,000 last fall.
According to Dandeneau, her client had already spent over $100,000 on materials, equipment and professional services based on their signed contract for the grant when they learned their reimbursements were frozen and the client put the project on hold.
“It puts a lot of uncertainty into our business,” Dandeneau said. “It's horribly disconcerting to me and our team and creates fear and concern. It's really devastating to us.”
Dandeneau said the REAP project represents 18-20% of her annual revenue. If it doesn’t move forward, she’d have to consider reducing her own workforce.
“I'm trying to keep my employees positive,” she said. “But the reality is that I am concerned that all of this uncertainty is creating stagnation. ‘Well, we're going to wait and see.’ Our business can only go for so long, waiting and seeing.”
Uneven effects
The effects of all the chaos at the federal level vary across different sectors of the solar industry. Installers who focus on smaller-scale residential solar projects are not feeling the same pressure, at least not yet.
“We are actually seeing an uptick in our core business, which is direct-to-consumer homeowner projects,” said Jason Sharpe, CEO of Namaste Solar, a Denver-based installer.
His residential solar business is booming because customers want to get their projects done before incentives, like the solar tax credit — which Congress might cut later this year, disappear.
“That threat is causing this weird, short-term uptick in sales,” Sharpe said. “While the long-term uncertainty and fear of the future market is significant.”
The fate of Roof Number Two
Of course, the uncertainty may be the point for an administration that has been openly hostile to renewable energy development.
Which brings us back to Roof Number Two, at Specialty Product's manufacturing plant in rural Longmont. Late last year, COO Mina Cox applied for a second REAP grant to cover a large solar installation there that would offset nearly $20,000 a month in energy costs. She was still waiting for approval when the funding freeze came down.
At that point, Cox said she lost trust that the Trump Administration would stand behind the program. She and her partners made a business decision to withdraw their application.
“I don't see the support for alternative energy out of this administration,” Cox said. “It feels like a lot of rugs are being pulled out of small businesses and we don't want to be participating in a risk like that.”
It's not clear if, and when the grant funding will resume. At a recent meeting of the National Rural Electric Association, the US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the agency’s review of the REAP and New ERA programs was almost complete.
But Cox says it doesn't matter to her, because she won’t be doing business with a chaotic administration that might not fulfill its promise to reimburse project costs.
“We did not trust it,” she said.
So, for the foreseeable future, Roof Number Two remains bare.
Editor's Note: Namaste Solar, which was featured in this story, is a KUNC News underwriter. The spelling of Jason Sharpe's name has been corrected.
