In Carlisle, a sleepy town in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country, solar energy appears to have escaped the black hole of partisan politics. Or at least, that’s been the experience of Carlisle Area School District superintendent Colleen Friend, who has met little resistance spearheading a project to install a solar array about the size of a football field at a local elementary school.
The project is itself the beneficiary of a political anomaly, the $25 million “Solar for Schools” initiative. The bill that created it last year made it through Pennsylvania’s divided state government even though basically nothing else on energy policy has reached the governor’s desk in recent years.
It also remains one of the few policy bright spots for clean energy advocates in the state budget deal struck on Wednesday, which saw the program re-upped for another year, even as Democratic leadership agreed to exit a potentially paradigm-shifting regional carbon cap-and-trade program…