BTEC urges inclusion of business credit in GREEN Act

December 23, 2019

BY Erin Krueger

The Biomass Thermal Energy Council sent a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., and Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., on Dec. 9 thanking the committee for its inclusion of the Section 25D residential biomass heating system tax credit in the draft of the Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act, which was released on Nov. 19. The BTEC, however, urged the committee to reconsider its exclusion of the Section 48 business tax credit for commercial sized biomass heating systems.

Both credits were included in the Biomass Thermal Utilization Act introduced in February 2019. “Since 2009, when the BTU Act was first introduced, the objective of the bill has always been to extend to both homeowners and businesses owners the same investment credit provisions that exist for nearly all other renewable energy technologies,” the BTEC said in the letter.

“Most commercial-scale installations of modern wood heating technology have been used in larger businesses for heating buildings, providing process heat used in food processing, or other manufacturing processes where heat and/or hot water is used for applications other than space heating,” the BTEC continued. “This is often the case in rural areas of the U.S. that have no access to pipeline natural gas, and thus conventional fossil heating fuel options are much more expensive. This is true of many business installations that consider modern wood heating as a way of reducing their operating cost in order to remain globally competitive. The 15 or 30 percent investment credit (two tiers depending on output efficiency) on the installed cost provided by the BTU Act would help improve the feasibility of this capital investment. This is the same incentive a company would receive for installing solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, or a small wind turbine to generate electricity. These are all high capital investments for which the ITC provisions of section 48 have long served as a beneficial incentive. We note that the GREEN Act did include consideration of biogas for the business credit, along with other new technologies not currently recognized for investment tax credits.”

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A full copy of the letter can be downloaded from the BTEC website

 

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