Fresh Loaf

State tax credits for a variety of energy-efficiency improvements and installations on homes and businesses are now available. The eligibility criteria is available for viewing at the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority’s website.

The perks cap out at $2.5 million each year and will be pro-rated among the applicants. The credits sprang from HB 670, a piece of legislation that Pam Davidson, one of the Republican candidates for the Public Service Comission, helped push through the notoriously un-progressive General Assembly this past session.

Here are some facts from a GEFA press release.

Consistent with Governor Perdue’s commitment to the Conserve Georgia campaign and the Governor’s Energy Challenge, the tax credit creates an income tax credit for a variety of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies including:

• Active solar space heating;

• Solar electric and solar thermal electric;

• Wind;

• Certain bio-electricity facilities (non-residential only);

• Geothermal heat pumps;

• Efficient lighting (non-residential only); and

• Energy efficient buildings (non-residential only).

“The Georgia Clean Energy Property Tax Credit is part of our state’s investment in a clean energy future,” said Chris Clark, executive director of the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority (GEFA). “This incentive will accelerate Georgians’ adoption of energy efficient technologies and will help them to meet the Governor’s Energy Challenge.”

Most credits are capped at 35 percent of the cost of the property or a certain dollar amount established by the statute. There are different credit limits for residential and non-residential installations. The bill also provides tax credits for wood residuals delivered to qualified renewable biomass facilities. The Georgia Forestry Commission will establish the value of the biomass credits.

A total of $2.5 million in tax credits are available each calendar year from 2008 to 2012. The Department of Revenue will provide quarterly updates about the amount of available credits via its website – www.dor.ga.gov. GEFA will provide annual reports on the energy and economic benefits of the tax credit.

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Sounds strange, but bear with me.

J.C. Bell, an agricultural researcher who lives in Tifton, recently made Internet headlines as the mysterious man who holds the answers to the nation’s energy problems. He didn’t shoot a hole in the ground and up came a’bubblin’ crude. He stood downwind from a gassy cow and smelled opportunity.

“Let me tell you, cows have a great ability to make gas,” Bell says during a phone interview.

The key to the cow’s talent, he says, is a bacteria living in its body that produces hydrocarbon. When it interacts with waste, it produces gas. After four years of under-the-radar research, Bell says he’s identified the bacteria and now plans to genetically modify and produce it on a mass scale, and in turn use it to convert waste into fuel. Bell’s operation is building several pilot plants and production facilities capable of pumping our 500-1,000 barrels per day from each.

He says the result, which he hopes to see by October next year, wouldn’t require a change in the energy infrastructure. Unlike electric cars, which would necessitate a sweeping retrofit of charging stations and a reexamination of the power grid, Bell claims his idea could be pumped directly into your gas tank. It wouldn’t replace our need for fossil fuels, he says, but it would ease our dependence on them. (more…)

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Energy experts are saying that Georgia’s potential to become a clean-technology leader is best realized in pine ethanol. The state’s abundant arboreal resources, they argue, could give us an alternative to gasoline as well as a revenue stream.

But there’s also wind. Studies conducted by Dr. Sam Shelton of Georgia Tech discovered that breezes off the state’s coast were sufficient enough to generate power. The turbines would be located more than 12 miles from shore and beyond the horizon, far out of eyesight of landowners and beachgoers. The ocean floor is shallow enough and the proposed turbine locations are outside hurricanes’ paths and migration patterns of the endangered right whale. Problems: It costs a lot of coin to run transmission cables along the ocean floor and takes a lot of time to obtain the permits to do so.

Maybe it’ll take raising public awareness to get Georgians to tell the utilities and EMCs to invest in wind power. Maybe this European commercial showcasing how wind feels so damn lonely just blowing in this world, adrift and without a purpose, might convince us to put out the call. (Warning: There is a brief shot of Mr. Wind using his supernatural powers to momentarily lift a woman’s skirt . That sentence I just wrote makes it sound worse than it is.)

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