Corbett Administration Shifting Focus of Clean Energy Grants

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Last week, the Penn­syl­va­nia Energy Devel­op­ment Author­ity handed out the first round of clean energy grants, since Repub­li­can Tom Cor­bett took office.

PEDA was formed in the mid-1980s, but stopped dol­ing out grant money in 1995. Gov­er­nor Ren­dell brought the pro­gram back to life in 2004, and funded it with the Grow­ing Greener II bond issue, which pro­vided $10 mil­lion in grant money every year. From 2005 until the end of Rendell’s tenure, PEDA dis­trib­uted nearly $70 mil­lion to 140 clean energy projects. The agency falls under the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Protection’s domain.

Two of the 13 projects PEDA funded this year are nat­ural gas-related. Two of 13 may not sound like a lot, but it already dou­bles the num­ber of nat­ural gas ini­tia­tives PEDA gave money to dur­ing Rendell’s tenure.

The Author­ity is giv­ing $500,000 to Pitts­burgh, to pur­chase two nat­ural gas-fueled garbage trucks. (The city is pro­vid­ing match­ing fund­ing, increas­ing the order to four vehi­cles.) “By using the equiv­a­lent of 630,000 cubic feet of nat­ural gas, or 2.5 mil­lion cubic feet total, the project will save the city $38,400 per year,” the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion press release boasts. “In addi­tion, it will reduce the annual air emis­sions of CO2, par­tic­u­late mat­ter, NOx, VOC and CO by more than 200,000 pounds annu­ally.” PEDA is also giv­ing $250,000 to a Bed­ford County health cen­ter, to help pur­chase a nat­ural gas-powered heat­ing system.

Other grants pro­vide fund­ing for the instil­la­tion of energy-efficient light­ing at Mis­eri­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity and Ursi­nus Col­lege, a hydro tur­bine project in Greene County, and a com­post­ing effort in Lawrence County.

Of the 140 grants PEDA dis­trib­uted dur­ing the Ren­dell Admin­is­tra­tion, just one went to a nat­ural gas project: $1 mil­lion in 2009, for a nat­ural gas-powered gen­er­a­tor at a Williamsport hos­pi­tal. More solar projects won grant money than any other energy type. Bio­mass power came in sec­ond (17 grants awarded, com­pared to 34 for solar projects.) Fuel cell, energy effi­ciency ini­tia­tives and waste coal con­ver­sion efforts rounded out the rest of the Ren­dell Administration’s top five grant fields.

StateImpact’s infor­ma­tion comes from PEDA’s annual reports, which are avail­able online.

Do the Cor­bett Administration’s two nat­ural gas grants, cou­pled with a recent deci­sion to change the mis­sion of a DEP depart­ment focused on alter­na­tive energy, sig­nal a shift away from renew­able energy sources? DEP spokesman Kevin Sun­day said they’re sim­ply a reflec­tion of Pennsylvania’s chang­ing energy land­scape. “Over the last cou­ple of years, nat­ural gas has come to the fore­front [of Pennsylvania’s energy econ­omy],” he said, adding gas “cer­tainly suits all the goals of PEDA in assist­ing the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of clean energy projects.”

Sun­day said PEDA did not accept open bids for the most recent round of grants, due to time con­straints. Instead, the admin­is­tra­tion eval­u­ated pro­pos­als sub­mit­ted dur­ing the final months of the Ren­dell Admin­is­tra­tion, which had not been awarded grants, due to fund­ing constraints.