Furthermore, the Transource letter sent to landowners  dated January 5, 2018 is inaccurate  and misrepresentative of the proper procedures set in place  under the Eminent  Domain  Code and public  codes of the Commonwealth. In  the letter, your company  stated it  has obtained utility status by Pennsylvania. While the Public Utility Commission (PUC) approved Transource's application for utility  status on December 21, 2017, your company  has yet to obtain  the appropriate certificate  and orders from  the PUC to  operate as a public utility  and conduct land surveys/assessments. Moreover,  even after obtaining the appropriate approvals,  Transource must follow the Eminent Domain Code  and issue a  10-day notice to all landowners before  accessing private property. As of today, Transource cannot  send such a notice until the proper certificate and approvals from the PUC.

I have received numerous complaints from constituents in my legislative district who experienced threatening behavior from your contracted land  services agent, Western Land Services. In communication with landowners,  agents from Westem Land  Services threatened to call the sheriff's office  and arrest residents who did not  sign letters granting access to their properties. This type of coercive behavior and  harassment by your contracted  agent is unacceptable  and illegal  at best. I  am requesting punitive actions be  taken to  ensure this type of disrespectful behavior  does not  happen again during  the remainder of  the project.

But after running out the clock with years of study, TVA President Bill Johnson said the utility would back out of the plan — leaving the Clean Line project twisting in the wind.

Late last month, TVA decided not to buy the wind energy it had been window shopping for nearly six years.

The deal was sealed after it became apparent to Clean Line that TVA had little appetite to complete a six-year-old memorandum of understanding to purchase the project’s wind power.

In the meantime, Clean Line founder and president Mike Skelly told RTO Insider, the company will focus on its four other long-haul HVDC projects.
“We’re adapting to the headwinds,” Skelly said. “You have to adapt.”

In response to several queries from Talk Business & Politics, Clean Line on Wednesday (Jan. 3) issued a statement saying a recent decision by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to drop its six-year-old interconnection agreement with the Texas partnership has put the project on hiatus.

“The need for low-cost renewable energy in Arkansas remains and the benefits the Plains & Eastern Clean Line will deliver to the state have not changed. Clean Line Energy is retaining all permits and acquired rights-of-way in Arkansas while we continue to evaluate energy markets and will respond accordingly,” said Clean Line Founder & President Michael Skelly. “Unfortunately, TVA’s reluctance to enter into an agreement with Clean Line … at this time has delayed our ability to deliver low-cost, renewable energy to the Southeast U.S. and jobs and investment to Arkansas.”

No terms of the deal were disclosed, but regulatory and court filings show that Clean Line appraised the value of its Oklahoma assets north of $1 billion.

But it was exactly two years ago Clean Line cleared its biggest regulatory hurdle in Tennessee when the TVA board unanimously voted to approve the Texas partnerships’ application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity to operate as a wholesale transmission-only public utility in Tennessee. At the time, TVA said there was a need to connect the supply of thousands of megawatts of new wind energy in the Oklahoma Panhandle with the increasing demand of utilities in the Mid-South and Southeast.

Clean Line has often touted TVA’s “letter of interest” stating that the project presented a valuable option for affordable energy for the Tennessee utility conglomerate, whose largest customer is the city of Memphis.

The nation's biggest wind generator, NextEra Energy Resources, has bought the Oklahoma portion of the proposed 700-mile-long Plains and Eastern Line to serve Oklahoma and Midwest customers. But for now, plans to bring wind energy from the windy areas of Oklahoma and Texas into the less-windy Tennessee Valley and Southeastern part of the United States are stalled and unlikely to be resurrected for years.

"Unfortunately, this represents a significant delay in our ability to deliver this energy in the Southeast," Skelly said of the decision not to actively pursue the project at this time. "TVA's lack of interest has certainly not been helpful."

Skelly said other utilities want to buy wind-generated power, and Clean Line is now focusing on its four other transmission projects in the Midwest and the Western part of the United States. NextEra will use the Oklahoma part of the Plains and Eastern line to begin serving parts of Oklahoma, Kansas with wind-generated power that NextEra plans to develop.

"We are hanging onto our permits and rights of way in Arkansas in the event TVA in the future says it might like this power somewhere down the line, " Skelly said. "But at this point it would take considerably more effort to get this project moving for TVA again."


"TVA obviously has to make its own decisions about its future power supply, and we understand that," Skelly said. "But for now, we've stopped the process [of pursuing an interconnection agreement with TVA] because TVA required a whole lot of money to continue in this process but they have not wanted to make any commitments to buy the energy off of this line."

But Skelly said other utilities have found that their projections about the costs of using a variable source of power like wind have often proven more than expected "and as battery and other storage methods become better, wind will prove even more attractive."

"We think we gave TVA a very good offer, but apparently they did not," he said. "We're still getting a lot of interest from other utilities that want to increase their renewable energy and see wind as a good way to achieve that at a reasonable cost."

Skelly said Duke Power and other Southeastern utilities have expressed interest in buying more wind-generated power, but TVA was needed to buy and/or readily transmit the 3,500 megawatts the line was designed to deliver to Memphis.

Skelly said he and his partners have been working on the Clean Line transmission project for more than eight years and have had to battle local landowners who didn't want to sell their land and regulators in Arkansas who balked at permitting the transmission line rights of way to a developer from another state.
"We've been able to overcome those obstacles, but we always knew when we started it wouldn't necessarily be easy or quick," he said. "But we do think it is the right choice in the long run."