10/19/07 Energy Grants

Energy Grants. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. The 2007 Farm Bill is beginning to come together and an important part of that legislation will be the availability of grant money for energy projects. One of those is the Section 9006 funding. According to Jeff Deiss, Oregon's state director of USDA Rural Development's Business and Coop Services the 9006 is a great way to help producers get energy projects off the ground. DEISS: We were successful in Oregon in getting 8 grants for Oregon projects totaling 1 million 641-thousand dollars. That's the most dollars anyone got in the nation. We were number 8 in terms of the number of grants received. That's a very competitive program, only half of our applications were selected. According to Deiss this year was an increase over last year. DEISS: That did represent an increase from last year when we had three grants total for just $579-thousand dollars so we had a considerable increase in the number and in the dollars compared to last year. The Section 9006 is different from other grants in that it's only a 25% matching grant. Deiss says there is a diverse range of applications. DEISS: We saw a lot of wind projects  a lot of wind projects were successful. Two were small wind projects, just 10kw wind turbines being put on the farm and then there were three large wind projects, 1.8 megawatt wind projects over in Umatilla County. But we're also doing some energy efficiency projects which I think is kind of cool. The overall dollars available nationwide is really a small fraction of what needs to be available for additional energy projects. Oregon has been quite successful in getting some of their projects off the ground and Deiss says the grant dollars are extremely important to the success of these projects. DEISS: It's not easy to get to that point where you feel like you can invest these funds when you are always looking at the bottom line and wondering if it's really going to make sense. And this program is really intended to help those small businesses and growers really get to a point where they say there's enough incentive here for me to take this on and do it  do something different. I think we are particularly fortunate in Oregon because we have a whole array of federal, state and local programs that are really making it easier for businesses t make that decision, to make that commitment to take on either doing renewable energy or energy efficiency projects. In the coming weeks, we'll take a closer look at some of the grant recipients here in the Northwest. 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