CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY BOND allocations should be made in September, the IRS said.

The agency is sifting through the more than 700 applications it received for $800 million in total bond authority. The deadline to apply was April 26.

Clean renewable energy bonds are bonds that state and local governments, municipal utilities, electric cooperatives, US territories and possessions and Indian tribes can issue to finance new wind farms and other alternative energy facilities that they will own. No interest has to be paid on the bonds. The bondholders receive federal tax credits instead. Bonds can only be issued for projects that would have qualified for production tax credits if they were privately owned.

The IRS plans to allocate the bond authority to the project that asked for the smallest dollar amount of bond authority first, then to the next smallest request and so on until all the bond authority is used up.

The IRS had still not added up the total dollar value of the requests as the NewsWire went to press. It had entered about half the data from the applications in the computer and was moving rapidly to enter the rest.