Web exclusive posted March 3, 2008 at 1:40 p.m. CST

The Internal Revenue Service has announced that 312 projects are eligible to be financed with tax-credit bonds under the Clean Renewable Energy Bonds program.

Created by the Energy Tax Incentives Act of 2005, and the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, the CREB issued the first round of volume cap allocations in November 2006, which paid $800 million (some of which were subsequently relinquished) to 610 projects. Under the program, state and local governments, and electrical cooperatives were eligible to receive tax-credit bonds.

This year, governmental borrowers submitted applications totaling $728 million to finance 367 projects, with an average project size of approximately $2 million. Governmental borrowers in 28 states will receive $263 million of volume cap allocations, ranging from $15,000 to $2.95 million. Approved projects include 41 landfill gas/biogas facilities, three closed-loop biomass facilities and one open-loop biomass facility.

Cooperative borrowers submitted applications totaling about $170 million to finance 28 projects with an average project size of about $6.1 million. Approved cooperative projects include: four landfill/biogas facilities and one open-loop biomass facility.

The application deadline was July 2007. A total of 156 projects were proposed in California, 57 in Minnesota, 23 in New Jersey, 17 in Washington, 13 in Nebraska, 12 in Montana, 11 in Illinois and 10 in Wisconsin.

CREB volume cap allocations were awarded on a "smallest-to-largest" project basis. For a complete list of recipients, visit www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/creb_2007_disclosure.pdf.