S. 2183 — Community Wood Facilities Assistance Act of 2025

This section revises the Community Wood Energy and Wood Innovation Program—providing competitive grants through the Forest Service for community wood energy systems (i.e., thermal energy production using primarily forest biomass to heat public and private facilities) or innovative wood product facilities (i.e., manufacturing advanced wood products such as mass timber)—renaming it the Community Wood Facilities Grant Program and making the following changes: (1) increases the maximum federal cost share to 50 percent (from 35 percent) of capital costs; (2) sets a uniform maximum grant amount of $5 million (previously $5 million for energy systems or $10 million for product facilities); (3) modifies evaluation criteria to include market competitiveness in addition to cost effectiveness; (4) expands eligible activities in priorities to include construction, use, or retrofitting of forest products manufacturing facilities (previously limited to sawmills); (5) raises the small project priority threshold to 15 megawatts of thermal energy (from 5 megawatts of thermal or combined energy) and increases the priority allocation for such projects to 50 percent of funds (from 25 percent); and (6) authorizes $50 million annually for FY2026 through FY2030 (previously $25 million annually for FY2019 through FY2023).

This section modifies the Wood Innovations Grant Program administered by the Forest Service to support innovative wood products. Specifically, it (1) revises grant selection priorities to favor proposals including the construction, use, or retrofitting of forest products manufacturing facilities (previously, use or retrofitting of existing sawmill facilities) located in counties where the average annual unemployment rate exceeded the national average by more than 1% in the previous calendar year; and (2) reduces the non-Federal matching requirement to 50% of the grant amount (from 100%).