Utility regulators in Missouri and Kansas have already approved construction of the line. An Invenergy spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to an email asking if the expansion plans required additional approvals.

“We heard that story over and over: ‘We want to see more of it brought to Missouri,’” said Shashank Sane, who leads Invenergy’s transmission business, after a Monday news conference in St. Louis. “It was really about bringing benefits to the state.”

Invenergy did not disclose which Missouri entities it expects will buy the additional power, but it is “confident that the customer base is there,” said Sane.

Invenergy did not disclose which Missouri entities it expects will buy the additional power, but it is “confident that the customer base is there,” said Sane.

The line is a so-called merchant line, meaning its costs wouldn’t be spread broadly across the region like most intrastate transmission lines. Instead, only utilities and other consumers that buy capacity on the line would pay.

Among those customers are more than three dozen small cities and towns across Missouri, which estimate they will save more than $12 million annually compared with coal plants that supply power under existing contracts.

FERC OFFICIAL AIMS TO TACKLE NIMBYISM: Elin Katz, FERC’s director of the relatively new Office of Public Participation, is thinking about how to avoid more disorderly forms of public engagement that have plagued FERC and the power sector in recent years — such as demonstrations and lawsuits against new energy infrastructure, including pipelines. She also hopes to better educate the public about the benefits of electric transmission in particular to mitigate the “NIMBYism” often associated with the large-scale power lines needed to decarbonize the power grid.

“One of my main goals is to provide a constructive outlet for public concerns,” she said during a webinar hosted by utility transmission group WIRES. “We've seen a lot of what I consider more disruptive activities around when the public becomes concerned about energy or infrastructure.”

On June 16, FERC issued issued a first step — technically called a “notice of proposed rulemaking” — that it aims to amend laws making it easier to connect sources of electricity to the grid.

The most productive geographical regions for wind and solar are generally far away from urban centers where the energy is needed.

There’s also the possibility of putting transmission lines underground, which, “is much more economic today than it used to be,” Gramlich said. But it’s still expensive, as much as ten-fold the cost, depending on the terrain you are trying to go through, according to Robb of NERC. In some cases, for example, putting a transmission line means blasting through granite. So, while “that’s a viable thing to do, it’s a very expensive thing to do,” according to Robb.

Overcoming NIMBYism on TransmissionLast August, the Niskanen Center and the Clean Air Task Force released a report that called for adoption of the “5 P framework” to overcome opposition to clean energy infrastructure. The construct builds on the transmission concept of “planning, permitting and paying.”

“We propose adding ‘participation’ as a fourth ‘P’ and then ‘process’ as [the fifth]. Because one of the challenges of transmission [is that] every single project is unique, because every state in every region is different,” said Liza Reed, Niskanen’s electricity transmission research manager for climate policy. “The reason that we raise participation up to an equal level with the other Ps … is that groups are really siloed in each of those policies right now. There is stakeholder engagement in planning. There is stakeholder engagement in permitting. There is stakeholder engagement in paying. But different stakeholders get brought in at different points, and that’s when groups start getting frustrated. And I think when folks hear the word ‘participation,’ they think angry town halls and lawsuits. But the whole point of bringing participation into a consistent process is to avoid that.”
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Joseph Rand offered an observation from his analyses on the siting and community impacts of large-scale wind and solar.
“What the wind energy developers have learned over time is that we need to move away from a process that people call ‘decide, announce, defend,’ [to one] called ‘consult, consider, modify, proceed,’ so that you’re meaningfully engaging local stakeholders in that process and being open to actually modifying your proposal,” said Rand, senior scientific engineering associate for the lab’s Electricity Markets and Policy Group.

To spur grid expansion, the federal government should consider a tax credit for large scale transmission investment in current budget reconciliation policy discussions and the FERC proposed rule for expansion, he said.

Congress needs to act to give a federal agency, either the Department of Energy or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), authority to site transmission lines. “They could pass a statute that’s about one page long,” Pierce told CNBC in a phone conversation at the end of May. “This is not hard to accomplish if you’ve got the political will.”
Pierce knows that there will be opposition to such a federal authority, to which he says: Too bad.
“You cannot allow the citizens of a single state to block actions that are imperative for the welfare of the citizens that the whole country much less can you can you afford to allow the citizens of one little town or one landowner to,” Pierce said. “It’s just frustrating."

Also, Gramlich sees a potential path forward in upgrading existing transmission lines. There, you don’t have the siting battles. “Reconstructing or replacing the old lines with new lines is a is a major opportunity,” he told CNBC. “There’s very little public opposition to transmission over existing corridors.

“As we look to the future, we worry that federal and state policies, as well as market changes, are causing an imbalance of electric supply and demand that jeopardizes our ability to fulfill this commitment.”

“Put simply, this is because generation capacity has been reduced while peak demand is projected to increase—decreasing supply while increasing demand,” he said. “A concerning pattern is forming in which baseload generation such as natural gas, coal and nuclear energy is prematurely retired and then replaced primarily by intermittent generation like wind and solar.”

But preventing outages is only getting harder as fossil fuel emissions heat the planet, extreme drought drains hydropower reservoirs and worsening wildfires disrupt power lines.

Thomas said the failed 700-mile HVDC Clean Line transmission project from Oklahoma to Arkansas, which the U.S. Department of Energy agreed to support, “had higher negatives than gonorrhea.”

“We have battle scars from that,” joked Michelle L. Manary, acting deputy assistant secretary for DOE’s Energy Resilience Division.

To avoid that problem in the future, Manary said DOE will focus not on transmission corridors but on specific projects.

“It’s much easier to study a specific project,” she said. “And I think it’s easier also for the states and utilities to comment on it and coordinate and facilitate with it because they know what we’re talking about — not just a broad swath of land.”

Missouri House Bill 2005 has been heralded as a win for farmers facing eminent domain from transmission line companies, but it won’t protect Randolph County farmers from the Grain Belt Express, Randolph County Commissioners said Monday.

But Commissioners John Truesdell, John Hobbs and John Tracy said the bill won’t affect eminent domain proceedings brought by Invenergy Transmission for its Grain Belt Express, a new long-distance transmission line in the works for the past 10 years.

The new law will not help farmers keep their land. “Grain Belt is not affected by this,” said Hobbs. “I, myself, say it’s hogwash. It’s not protecting the farmers on Grain Belt. It’s protecting the farmers for anything after Grain Belt.”

But Randolph County Commissioners say the company isn’t following normal procedure and has not contracted with local energy companies to provide energy at lower costs.

“You have to drop something of value in Missouri before you can do eminent domain,” Truesdell said. But the commissioners say they have yet to hear of any local utility company that has contracted with Grain Belt to move their product.

“I haven’t heard from the county coop that we’re going to get any energy,” Hobbs said.

Ivenergy says Grain Belt Express will play a major role in economic recovery and growth in the Midwest by delivering thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in energy savings, and tens of millions of dollars for local communities and landowners.

Randolph County Commissioners say they haven’t seen any contracts or data that make them believe that.

The company also has to have a financial plan, which it doesn’t have, said Truesdell. “We have a lot of red flags in Randolph County.”
Though the company doesn’t have permission from Randolph County, it has started construction off Highway 3, Truesdell said. “It’s how they do business.”
Randolph County filed a moratorium to stop work until Grain Belt complies with all regulations, said Truesdell.
“They went in and did some dirt work,” said Hobbs. The landowners signed a contract with the company.

“They didn’t act like any other utility company we’ve ever dealt with,” said Truesdell in May. The company struggles with communication; one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, he said.
A little over two years ago, Grain Belt was supposed to come visit with the commissioners, said Truesdell. It never did. The company has to have approval from the county to begin construction, which it doesn’t have, he said.

But what must be the most difficult pill to swallow is the legislators’ statements that House Bill 2005, which reforms eminent domain law for future transmission projects, represents one of the success stories of the 2020 session.

Lawmakers should be willing to call it what it is. Perhaps not a sellout, but a difficult compromise that comes at the expense of those landowners who are most affected and led this fight.

You could point to several benefits of Grain Belt, the 780-mile transmission project bringing wind power from Kansas to populations further east.

The customers on the receiving end get plenty of benefits. But who, exactly? Unlike something more tangible like gasoline, it’s hard to see where electricity is directed on the grid, but the fact that Grain Belt will end near Indiana suggests that many of its beneficiaries are there and not here.

Invenergy, the for-profit company building Grain Belt, could benefit nicely when it starts to sell the power.

This spring, the legislature passed a bill that clamps down on the use of eminent domain for transmission lines. The legislation, now headed to the governor’s desk, requires a company or an investor-owned utility to pay 150% of market value for an easement on agricultural property. It also requires a project to deliver a proportional amount of power to Missouri so that it doesn’t just use rural counties as an energy superhighway on the way to bigger cities.
But House Bill 2005 contained the following words: “These provisions will not apply to applications filed prior to Aug. 28, 2022.”
That means Grain Belt, granted regulatory approval in 2019, is grandfathered in.
“We thank our many supporters for their tireless efforts in ensuring that this legislation recognized the legal rights of Grain Belt Express as a previously approved project that will continue forward toward full construction,” said Nicole Luckey, senior vice president of regulatory affairs for Invenergy, in a statement. “Missouri lawmakers brought stakeholders together around this important legislative compromise, which will benefit Missouri families, farmers, workers and businesses for decades to come.”


That’s not how Rogers sees it.
“I have a hard time with the Legislature right now,” he said.