10/26/07 Putting Energy Grants to Work

Putting Energy Grants to Work. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Last week we talked about the USDA's Renewable Energy Systems and Energy Efficiency Improvement Program and the grants that the Farm Bill makes available each year for a variety of projects. One of those projects is taking shape Echo, Oregon. Kent Madison is a third generation farmer who seems to be about as forward thinking as they come. MADISON: We've got a 17-thousand, 500-acre farm. About 8000 of that is irrigated the rest is dry land but we also do quite a few other things. We have a guest ranch called the Bar-M Ranch, we have a business that manufactures down hole control valves for aquifer storage and recovery, we have a biodiesel plant where we crush our own canola and the neighbors canola and make biodiesel so we do quite a few different things. Madison hired a grant writer to help apply for one of the USDA grants. He has some acreage that is prime ground for wind generation. MADISON: Our farm has a plateau area that has pretty good wind energy and about 3 years ago some people came into the country looking to develop wind and so we've been having met(erological) towers up and studying the wind and everything shows that it's going to go. From a distance, the giant wind turbines really don't look all that expensive. Just a pole with a propeller of sorts on the top but Madison says there is a lot more to it and the grant money is helping out. MADISON: It will be used to acquire wind turbines in the future; we haven't extended the grant since we're still in the development stage. Just as soon as we get the development done then we'll use it to acquire a portion of the turbines. Keep in mind that turbines are about 1.8 million per mega-watt is what it cost for a turbine  that's the installed cost. So a half a million dollar grant is great but it doesn't go very far as far as buying turbines go. So with that grant and the Business Energy Tax Credits that the State of Oregon has then it brings that turbine cost down to where it's extremely reasonable at that time. If you have a project in mind, Madison has some suggestions. MADISON: The grant process is extremely complicated. We actually hired a professional grant writer to do it and he did an excellent job and it's risky. I mean we spent 20-thousand dollars to have the grant written and the fact that we got the grant obviously was a great return on our investment but if we hadn't gotten the grant we would have been out 20-thousand dollars. You have to have a pretty assured project because you are competing with a lot of other people for those grants so it's not a real easy project. We were very pleased that we got the grant. 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