Financial Opportunities for Energy Projects
Financial Opportunities for Energy Projects. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
All this month we have been looking at various opportunities farmers and businesses have for getting into clean energy projects. The State of
TORRES: We’re the only state in the country that offers a business energy tax credit for conservation and renewable energy projects. We also have a residential energy tax credit that also provides tax credits for residents and other citizens of the state as well and very popular programs. These are projects that could be anything from lighting improvements to putting solar panels on your house.
Torres says those project can also include things like hybrid cars.
TORRES: We also have a small energy loan program that provides low interest, fixed rate loans for good energy projects. While we have more businesses take advantage of that, the individuals can as well. Then we do a lot of other kinds of things for K-12 schools and public buildings and working on building codes
There is an old adage that says you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, but Torres says that isn’t the case with these programs.
TORRES: Just on residential energy tax credits we’ve had something like over 40-thousand people that take advantage of the program and then on the business energy side, the business tax credit side we had over-I think 4,000 business tax energy credits last year and that almost doubled in about 3 years. We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the use of the program and I think part of that is because of the legislative efforts to increase and add more to the program.
These programs in
TORRES: All of the programs that we offer at the Department of Energy typically are just as good or better for those folks that live out in rural areas and agriculture communities and so forth. There’s tax credits for the use of biomass which has become very, very important. We also have solar water pumps for example, really trying to encourage people to take a look at those because they’re trying to get water out to areas of their ranch or farm and solar power can really do that very efficiently.
For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
