A $190,000 federal grant will support Skamania County-based Wind River Biomass Utility LLC business operations, according to the office of U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
Wind River Biomass uses forest waste to produce energy, firewood and wood chips for sale to local campgrounds and other businesses.
“I support this project as a tool for economic development of a heavily forested county, for forest restoration and wildfire fuels reduction work, and for demonstration of benefits of remote combined-heat-and-power in terms of power generation efficiency,” Cantwell, a senior member of the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, wrote in her letter supporting the company’s application for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program grant.
Paul Spencer of Wind River Biomass Utility said the $190,000 will help Wind River Biomass acquire “some of the capital equipment needed to deploy our in-house gasification system for production of heat, electrical power and biochar from renewable resources, like non-commercial logs and slash from our forests.”
