Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who has long expressed concern about the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Program, has sent a letter to Secretary Jennifer Granholm demanding that DOE's "eleventh-hour funding" of Grain Belt Express be reversed.
The letter says that the project is doomed to failure and cannot survive without government intervention. Senator Hawley tells the DOE that the project has no customers. A decade after first advertising its project to secure contracts with customers, GBE is still batting zero. If the project was actually needed, there would be voluntary customers.
He also says that the conditional approval issued by DOE's Loan Program office on November 25 is jumping the gun because none of the financial or environmental studies that would be the basis of a decision have been completed and won't be completed for more than a year, at best.
How can the DOE know that GBE meets all the criteria for a loan when it hasn't yet completed studying it? It's an approval based on politics and a "hurry up" knee jerk reaction to the re-election of President Trump. Is this how $7B of taxpayer money should be spent? On a project that has no commercial viability? I hope this boondoggle is one of DOGE's first cuts.
Hawley also pans DOE's National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor process, which proposed creating a corridor across the Midwest that would give the federal government backstop siting authority in the event that GBE could not get state approvals. It is DOE that tied its loan to the designation of a NIETC, requiring a much longer process for loan approval. Even though Invenergy is now running away from NIETCs as fast as possible, it can't run away from this one.
Who remembers what happened to the Clean Line Plains and Eastern project, tied up at the DOE when President Trump was elected the first time? Apparently DOE needs its memory refreshed... that project also could not find customers and its approval to participate in a different DOE program was quickly cancelled. The writing is on the wall for GBE. The sooner Invenergy realizes the impossibility of getting this project built within the next 4 years, the less money they'll lose overall.
Read Senator Hawley's full letter here. Bravo, Senator, for being a desperately needed agent of change in Washington DC. We hope you can work with the new President and Secretary of Energy to clean house!
The letter says that the project is doomed to failure and cannot survive without government intervention. Senator Hawley tells the DOE that the project has no customers. A decade after first advertising its project to secure contracts with customers, GBE is still batting zero. If the project was actually needed, there would be voluntary customers.
He also says that the conditional approval issued by DOE's Loan Program office on November 25 is jumping the gun because none of the financial or environmental studies that would be the basis of a decision have been completed and won't be completed for more than a year, at best.
How can the DOE know that GBE meets all the criteria for a loan when it hasn't yet completed studying it? It's an approval based on politics and a "hurry up" knee jerk reaction to the re-election of President Trump. Is this how $7B of taxpayer money should be spent? On a project that has no commercial viability? I hope this boondoggle is one of DOGE's first cuts.
Hawley also pans DOE's National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor process, which proposed creating a corridor across the Midwest that would give the federal government backstop siting authority in the event that GBE could not get state approvals. It is DOE that tied its loan to the designation of a NIETC, requiring a much longer process for loan approval. Even though Invenergy is now running away from NIETCs as fast as possible, it can't run away from this one.
Who remembers what happened to the Clean Line Plains and Eastern project, tied up at the DOE when President Trump was elected the first time? Apparently DOE needs its memory refreshed... that project also could not find customers and its approval to participate in a different DOE program was quickly cancelled. The writing is on the wall for GBE. The sooner Invenergy realizes the impossibility of getting this project built within the next 4 years, the less money they'll lose overall.
Read Senator Hawley's full letter here. Bravo, Senator, for being a desperately needed agent of change in Washington DC. We hope you can work with the new President and Secretary of Energy to clean house!
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