Funding Opportunities Investing in the Future Funding organizations can often be the difference between exciting innovations moving forward or sitting on a shelf. By David Manly B RITISH Columbia is well known for its natural resources, especially its beautiful forests that seem to stretch endlessly into the dis-tance. Therefore, it is no surprise that bio-energy and biomass have found a perfect home here. In mid-February, Canadian Biomass visited BC Bioenergy Network (BCBN), a not-for-profit society that specializes in funding bioenergy technologies and capacity-enhancing programs for indus-tries, private companies and communities throughout British Columbia. “Our mandate is focused on network-ing to build a world-class bioenergy in-dustry in British Columbia,” says Michael Weedon, executive director of the net-work. “And developing such an industry is really quite a huge challenge – you need assertive companies, creative communi-ties, and you need visionary policy, lead-ership and support.” BCBN achieves this by investing in and supporting companies and innovations through a $25-million grant provided in 2008 by the B.C. Ministries of Environment, and Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources. In the four years since it was founded, BCBN has allocated roughly half of its funding through investments, loans and contribu-tions for capacity-building projects. Since BCBN only funds a partnership portion of the total cost for each project, the accrued value of all investments is $78 million from spending a total of $13.2 mil-lion, or just slightly over half of its budget. By leveraging its investments with other partners at a ratio of 6:1, BCBN is able to invest in much larger projects than it would normally be able to do on its own. According to Weedon, the goal of these investments under the mandate is to ad-vance technology and thereby generate jobs, trigger economic and social develop-ment, produce real environmental bene-fits, and create a sustainable energy export business, with BCBN acting as a catalyst to help foster and grow these opportunities. GREEN TECHNOLOGY The projects that BCBN supports fall under three main categories: forestry, municipal and agricultural, with the bulk of initial funding split between municipal and fore-stry initiatives. However, each project has applications that can influence or improve the others. The network currently has 23 projects in various stages of development, with the distribution split into 11 large technological development/demonstration projects and MAY/JUNE 2012 32 Canadian BIOMASS
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