Companies are getting a $282 million incentive to develop more climate-friendly ways of doing business in B.C.
The CleanBC Industry Fund has opened up applications for sustainable industry investment supplied by provincial carbon tax funds. Firms can apply to the province’s fourth edition of the fund in three areas:
- emissions performance, which supports emission reduction through commercial technology;
- innovation acceleration, which supports clean technology development to create solutions to emissions;
- and project feasibility studies opening April 1, which supports studies towards removing barriers and risks of potential emission reduction projects.
Industry applicants must have paid B.C.’s carbon tax and reported more than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted per year.
“Our government is accelerating the adoption of clean technologies to reduce emissions and support good, stable jobs for people across our province. Communities need the kind of low-carbon industry that will be here for the long haul, and these investments create more opportunities to meet that need,” George Heyman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said in a news release.
CleanBC Industry Fund has offered emissions performance funding three times previous. These iterations totalled $310 million from the province, industry and partners to reduce about six million tonnes of CO2 emissions over the next decade, according to the news release. An additional $282 million will be provided by B.C. towards the CleanBC Fund in the fiscal years 2022/23 and 2024/25.
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CleanBC Fund’s new innovation accelerator will help expand investment in the province’s competitive tech sector, said Foresight Cleantech Accelerator Centre CEO Jeanette Jackson.
“By connecting large corporate leaders to innovation in a way that incentives the implementation of cleantech, and through investing in B.C.’s green future, we will see remarkable economic growth. B.C. is already a global leader in cleantech, and this will truly accelerate by building on existing strengths and capabilities,” she said in the release.
According to a report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the government of B.C. provided more than $1.3 billion in fossil fuel industry subsidies ranging from royalty reductions, to tax measures to direct transfers during fiscal years 2020/21 and 2021/22.
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