KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On the heels of a historic cold snap that left thousands across the Midwest without power, Kansas and Missouri residents could soon reap the benefits of a massive high-powered transmission line delivering renewable energy.
Grain Belt Express, a project a decade in the making, is starting to acquire land along its route spanning across nearly the width of both states. But even so, landowners, local officials and some Missouri lawmakers are still raising red flags, arguing the project will be destructive to rural communities.
The proposed Grain Belt Express, being developed by Chicago-based Invenergy, would run from near Dodge City, Kansas, to Indiana, moving 4,000 megawatts of power per year.
In Missouri, 39 municipal utility providers have signed up and expect to save $12.8 million per year. Grain Belt promises thousands of jobs — both to construct and operate the line. The company could revise its plans to drop off more power in Kansas and Missouri, saving up to $7 billion a year over 20 years for up to $2.4 million residents.
And had Grain Belt been in operation this winter, said Nichole Luckey, vice president of regulatory affairs for Invenergy, the ability to transmit lots of power quickly could have helped prevent rolling blackouts seen in Kansas and Missouri. The line, she said, would serve as a “reliability backbone” for the Midwest.
“The outages in February are just more evidence that this line is really critical,” she said.
Luckey said the company believed the project offered landowners the most competitive compensation in the state’s history and noted the state government found it was in the public interest to build the line.
But even as Invenergy begins negotiations with farmers to compensate them for running the line across their land, it’s still facing resistance from both landowners and Missouri lawmakers. The Missouri House once again voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation designed to pump the brakes on Grain Belt’s plans.
The legislation would require projects — including Grain Belt — that use eminent domain to acquire land to show support from the county commission in any county where the project is expected to build.
Grain Belt already has approval from the Missouri Public Service Commission, granting it status as a public utility, but the legislation would make that retroactively dependent on its ability to persuade county commissioners in the eight counties the transmission line will cross, many of whom are vocally opposed to to the project.
John Truesdell, presiding commissioner in Randolph County, said he has advocated for bills to stop what he calls “eminent domain for private gain.”
Grain Belt, he said, is “nothing more than a big corporation trying to overrun little people, take their homes, take their land and pocket the money in their pockets at those other people’s expense.”
Meanwhile, in Kansas, the project has two more years to make progress assembling the land for the project before it loses its right to build there.
Missouri Rep. Mike Haffner, R- Pleasant Hill, is sponsoring the Grain Belt legislation. He argued to a House committee the project should not be allowed to use eminent domain.
“(It’s) supposed to be used by the government as a means of serving the public, and I think in this case it doesn’t serve the public,” he told a House committee hearing the legislation in January.
