Trump administration canceled a $4.9B loan guarantee for a line to deliver green power
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday canceled a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee for a new high-voltage transmission line for delivering solar and wind-generated electricity from the Midwest to the eastern U.S., but the company indicated that project would go forward anyway.
The U.S. Department of Energy declared that it is “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the first phase of Chicago-based Invenergy’s planned Grain Belt Express. The department also questioned whether the $11 billion project could meet the financial conditions required for a loan guarantee.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly derided wind and solar energy as unreliable and opposed efforts to combat climate change by moving away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy also said Wednesday that the conditional commitment to Invenergy in November was among billions of dollars’ worth of commitments “rushed out the doors” by former President Joe Biden’s administration after Biden lost the election.
Two prominent Missouri Republicans, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, have been vocal critics of the project, describing it as a threat to farmland and landowners’ property rights. Hawley said on July 10 that he had secured a pledge from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright to cancel the loan guarantee in a conversation with him and Trump.
“To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the agency said in a statement.
A federal loan guarantee generally makes borrowing money less costly. A statement issued for the Grain Belt Express expressed disappointment, calling the new transmission line “America’s largest power pipeline.” Construction has been set to start next year.
The statement added: “A privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs.”
Invenergy has said its project would create 4,000 jobs and new efficiencies in delivering power, and that it would save consumers $52 billion over 15 years. The line would deliver electricity from western Kansas about 800 miles (1,287 kilometers), across Missouri and Illinois and into Indiana, connecting there to the power grid for the eastern U.S. It could deliver up to 5,000 megawatts of electricity.
“When electricity demand and consumer power bills are soaring, it’s hard to imagine a more backward move,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan, Washington-based group supporting renewable energy.
The decision to cancel the loan guarantee came the same day Trump unveiled a plan for U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence that includes speeding up the permitting of new data centers and factories that will boost the demand for electricity.
“This gross mismanagement of our country’s energy needs will increase power bills for hundreds of millions of people while making the electricity grid less reliable,” said Laurie Williams, director of a campaign against fossil fuels for the Sierra Club environmental group.
Jigar Shah, who headed the Department of Energy office handling loan guarantees under Biden, said that if an applicant meets the requirements of a conditional commitment, the department is obligated to follow through.
“This decision is illegal,” he said in a post on the LinkedIn social media platform.
Hawley and Bailey have called the Grain Belt Express a “scam.” Critics object to what Hawley labels an “elitist land grab,” the company’s ability to use lawsuits against individual landowners along the line’s route to compel them to sell their property.
Online court records show that the company filed dozens of such lawsuits in Missouri circuit courts in recent years. The Missouri Farm Bureau’s president posted on the social platform X Wednesday that the project threatened to “sacrifice rural America in the name of progress.”
“We’ve won a major battle in the war for Missouri’s private property rights and farmers,” Bailey said. “At our urging, the DOE saw this boondoggle for what it was.”
Bailey acknowledged in his comments that the project still could go forward with private funding and no loan guarantee but added, “If Invenergy still intends to force this project on unwilling landowners, we will continue to fight every step of the way.”
By JOHN HANNA
Associated Press
