Business Review Features Viability for Grant Success, Industry Insights

on Nov 29 in Viability in the News

Holland company helps businesses go green
By Olivia Pulsinelli
Business Review West Michigan, Nov. 17, 2009

For companies that want to pursue energy efficiency or renewable sources of energy, financing the effort may be the biggest hurdle.

Holland-based Viability, an economic development consulting firm, provides consulting and grant-writing assistance for those companies. Last month, Viability helped five companies across the country win grants from the USDA’s Rural Energy for America Program. These federal grants fund portions of energy-efficiency or renewable-energy projects in designated rural areas.

Viability President Chris Byrnes has seen an increased interest in clean-energy grants, but those available directly to businesses are “few and far between.” Most of the incentives available for improving energy efficiency go to municipalities.

Even when companies are very driven to lower their energy costs or move away from using fossil fuels, renewable-energy systems often do not pay for themselves as quickly as many companies need.

“A lot of times, these projects are more expensive than the standard option, so it won’t meet those kinds of returns,” Byrnes said. “So if we can knock off 25 to 50 percent of the project cost, then all of a sudden, this project that has a lot of great merits to it — which is why they started looking at it in the first place — now starts to fit with their corporate-investment structure a little bit better.”

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