H.R. 2517 — Community Wood Facilities Assistance Act of 2025

This section revises the Community Wood Facilities Grant Program (previously known as the Community Wood Energy and Wood Innovation Program), which provides competitive matching grants through the Forest Service to install community wood energy systems—producing thermal energy for public and private facilities using primarily forest biomass residuals—or to construct innovative wood product facilities that manufacture mass timber and other advanced wood products from low-value wood. (1) Increases the maximum federal cost share to 50% (from 35%) of capital costs and the maximum grant amount to $5 million (from $1.5 million); (2) specifies primary use of forest biomass (previously woody biomass) as fuel and limits eligibility to systems producing not more than 15 megawatts of thermal energy (from 5 megawatts of thermal or combined thermal/electric energy); (3) authorizes $50 million annually for FY2026 through FY2030 (from $25 million annually for FY2019 through FY2023); and (4) makes conforming and technical changes, including adding "market competitiveness" to grant evaluation criteria, expanding eligible activities to forest products manufacturing, and eliminating special matching rules and certain reporting requirements.

This section revises the Wood Innovations Grant Program (previously Wood Innovation Grant Program) by (1) updating the section heading to "Wood Innovations Grant Program"; (2) revising the grant selection priority to proposals that include the construction, use, or retrofitting of forest products manufacturing facilities (previously, use or retrofitting of existing sawmill facilities only) located in counties where the average annual unemployment rate exceeded the national average by more than 1% in the previous calendar year, and updating the subsection heading to "Expanding forest products manufacturing" (previously, "Incentivizing use of existing milling capacity"); and (3) reducing the non-Federal matching requirement to 50% of the grant amount (from 100%). (The program provides Forest Service grants to eligible entities—i.e., individuals, public or private entities, or state, local, or Tribal governments—to advance innovative wood products.)