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Funding for green energy projects available in St. Lawrence County to help bring them to market

Posted 10/9/12

The New York Biomass Energy Alliance is inviting individuals, groups and businesses in St. Lawrence County and around the state interested in developing New York’s green energy sector to apply for …

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Funding for green energy projects available in St. Lawrence County to help bring them to market

Posted

The New York Biomass Energy Alliance is inviting individuals, groups and businesses in St. Lawrence County and around the state interested in developing New York’s green energy sector to apply for technical assistance grants.

Landowners looking to profit from uncultivated grass fields, business owners with start-up plans to provide centralized heating for rural communities, entrepreneurs in need of engineering expertise who are interested in developing biomass processing and storage facilities, and innovators with an eye toward developing biomass processing but needing to identify end-users are the sorts of people they are looking for, offering help to pay for the engineering, design, feasibility and financial analysis, and other technical assistance needed to move their projects closer to commercialization.

The grants are for projects that are past the concept stage, but not at a point that entrepreneurs can attract investment capital or financing.

The Technical Assistance for Customer-Sited Rural Biomass Energy Projects in NYS program is not a grant or loan program.

“The funding pays to connect project leaders with experienced professionals who understand energy production, combustion, heat transfer, sustainable feedstock crop handling, business model evaluation, end-user marketing, and regional economics,” says New York Biomass Energy Alliance Executive Administrator Alice Brumbach.

Applications will be accepted starting on Oct. 1. Technical assistance will be awarded on a rolling basis.

Successful applicants may work with specialists to assess and improve project design, to scale-up a project for commercial application using up to 20,000 tons of biomass annually, or to develop strategies for securing project financing and loans.

Projects must be in New York’s rural communities with populations of fewer than 50,000 residents and not adjacent to major metropolitan areas.

Projects in areas with unemployment higher than the state average and media household income equal to or below 85 percent of the state’s median household income and projects with the potential to create the equivalent of at least three full-time jobs will receive preferential consideration.

More information and the Technical Assistance for Customer-Sited Rural Biomass Energy Projects in NYS grant application are online at www.newyorkbiomass.org/default.aspx?PageID=3478.

The New York Biomass Energy Alliance is a membership organization operating under the sponsorship of the New York Farm Viability Institute.