What is biomass? The latest fuel source to get clean tech tax credits
Ottawa plans on expanding its clean technology and electricity tax credits to include heat and electricity produced by burning biomass, as outlined in its fall economic statement.
Biomass is a very broad term, but in this context, it primarily refers to pellets that are created by pressurizing leftover wood or agricultural materials from processing lumber or crops.
Ajay Dalai, the Canada Research Chair on Bioenergy out of the University of Saskatchewan, said Canada is “sitting on a gold mine in terms of biomass availability of products.”
“The amount of bioenergy that we produce in the country, I looked at the data, is about seven terawatt hours compared to one thousand terawatt hours worldwide coming from biomass — a very small fraction coming from the Canadian biomass.”
In 2018, Canada generated over 647 million terawatt hours worth of electricity. A terawatt is equivalent to one trillion watts. For a basic watt-hour calculation, a 100-watt lightbulb draws 100 watts of power at any given moment, so using it for one hour equals 100 watt-hours of power used.
The fall economic statement is proposing to expand eligibility to the 30 per cent Clean Technology investment tax credit to include “systems that produce electricity, heat, or both electricity and heat from waste biomass.”
It also proposes making the 15 per cent Clean Electricity Investment tax credit available for systems “that produce electricity or both electricity and heat from waste biomass, which would be available as of the date of Budget 2024 for projects that did not begin construction before March 28, 2023.”
The government estimates the tax credit would cost $853 million between 2023-24 to the 2028-29 fiscal year, and an additional $1.2 billion from fiscal
Read more on globalnews.ca
