Is the Deep State Conspiring with Grain Belt Express?

It didn't take long for the deep state at DOE to "resist" Secretary Wright's cancellation of Grain Belt's conditional loan guarantee by spilling to some obscure fake news media outlet.  In doing so, they really step in it... deeply!  Secretary Wright ought to investigate these leakers... and fire every last one of them.  They admit to breaking the law and conspiring with Grain Belt Express to hide the truth about the project in an attempt to fool President Trump and to push through a loan guarantee whose application process was not complete.  The DOE never finished GBE's Environmental Impact Statement, which is supposed to guide its decision on whether or not to take an action (such as making a conditional loan guarantee).  The admissions here are stunning.  Is the DOE Deep State really that ignorant about energy laws?  Or was this done arrogantly and on purpose with full intent?  I'd like to ask these leakers some questions...

The Energy Department pulled the project's $4.9 billion conditional commitment against the advice of its attorneys — and without career staff.

You say that like it's a bad thing, but is it because they're the Deep State who issued that conditional approval as an attempt to guarantee the loan even though Grain Belt Express had not completed its EIS?  And then the Deep State conspired with Grain Belt to hide the project's true purpose from the incoming administration!

When the second Trump administration took office, LPO staff worried that a requirement to secure wind and solar contracts for a certain portion of the line’s capacity could prevent the loan from moving forward — particularly after the publication of an executive order that made it much harder to build wind power. Right up until the last few weeks, sources told Latitude Media, both the office and Invenergy were discussing how to bring the Grain Belt Express agreement more in line with the administration’s priorities, by expanding offtakers beyond wind power.

So, let me get this straight... the DOE staff was advising Invenergy to remove all reference to wind (and solar) from its website and to leak that bogus story about building a gas plant and negotiating with coal-fired generators?  And the DOE staff did this knowing Grain Belt's eligibility for a DOE taxpayer-backed loan is tied to Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) (42 U.S. Code [U.S.C.] 16513), as amended. Section 1703 of Title XVII (the Clean Energy Financing Program) defines eligible projects as those that, “avoid, reduce, or sequester air pollutants or anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases [GHGs]; and employ new or significantly improved technologies as compared to commercial technologies in service in the United States at the time the guarantee is issued” (Public Law [P.L.] 109-58, Section 1703(a)).  When Grain Belt's "clean energy" premise went away, so did its eligibility for the loan.  How was DOE staff planning to explain how a transmission line carrying gas- and coal-fired power was avoiding, reducing or sequestering air pollutants or greenhouse gases?  Or was DOE planning to have two faces... one for Trump and his administration, and one for the public and the courts?  How did they ever think they would get away with this?  Fact is, they didn't.  

But, even when their horrible duplicity could have been buried forever and forgotten, these same Deep Staters decided instead to parade it around like a virtue and thumb their nose at everyone, drunk on their own power.  These are people who survive on your tax dollars, arrogantly doing whatever they want.  It's time to clean house at LPO, and probably a lot of other places, too.  It's not "resistance", it's insubordination and law breaking.

​And what else here breaks the rules?

...LPO staff worried that a requirement to secure wind and solar contracts for a certain portion of the line’s capacity could prevent the loan from moving forward ...

That requirement by DOE VIOLATES GBE's Negotiated Rate Authority issued by FERC.  In GBE's original Negotiated Rate Authority Order (which may or may not have been amended, extended, or renewed recently) the Commission was emphatic that Grain Belt Express could not use generation source as a factor when selecting customers.

Grain Belt Express has not proposed in its application, and we do not approve, selection or ranking criteria based upon the type of generation that a potential transmission customer might seek to interconnect.

If the DOE was requiring that GBE use generation source as a factor to select its customers, then that means that GBE has violated it's Negotiated Rate Authority and therefore has no authority to negotiate with customers.  And without voluntary customers... there is no Grain Belt Express!  So the DOE Deep Staters were also thumbing their nose at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.  How arrogant can those little government functionaries be?

​And here's another...

Notably, the agreement didn’t require the federal government to shell out direct funds; instead, LPO agreed to act as a guarantor for the project, reducing risk for private lenders, but not making any payments itself unless the project failed.

Let's go back to that same FERC NRA Order...

To approve negotiated rates for a transmission project, the Commission must find that the rates are just and reasonable.  To do so, the Commission must determine that the merchant transmission owner has assumed the full market risk for the cost of constructing its proposed transmission project.

The federal government using American taxpayers as a loan guarantor for the construction costs of Grain Belt Express means that the risk of the project has been shifted to taxpayers.  If the project fails, then the taxpayers will pay for it.  Taxpayers are being used as the insurer of last resort for a 100% voluntary, unneeded transmission line whose only purpose is to make a profit for Invenergy.  LPO doesn't have any of its own money, it simply plays Monopoly with OPM (Other People's Money).

That decision, Latitude Media has learned, was made against the recommendation of career attorneys inside LPO, who advised the agency that rescinding the conditional commitment would constitute a breach of contract, and would be illegal. It was also made without the involvement of career staff who worked on the deal.

Ya know what else might be illegal?  Issuing a conditional loan guarantee before the EIS was completed.  And completely ignoring a FERC Order that DOE was aware of.  And conspiring to thwart the intent of Title 17 of the EP Act.

In the case of Grain Belt Express, DOE is asserting that the project isn’t going to meet certain milestones that are required to finalize the loan. 
But Grain Belt Express, which has already gone through two years of due diligence with LPO, still had a window of at least four months to reach financial close. Indeed, in the early months of this year, LPO career staff believed the project was moving in the right direction. 

Right... was that during the time when DOE staff thought their cover up of GBE's windy purpose was working with the Trump administration?  Even if it had another four years, I don't think GBE could find enough customers to provide collateral necessary for this loan.  Wait... what?  Collateral?  Something pledged as security for repayment of a loan, to be forfeited in the event of a default.  Does this mean that DOE was planning to guarantee a loan using tax payers as collateral WITHOUT ASSURING THAT GBE HAD ENOUGH CUSTOMERS TO REPAY THE LOAN?  Due diligence, my ass!

...when Energy Secretary Chris Wright stepped in to order the cancellation of the loan guarantee in mid-July, DOE’s general counsel didn’t seem to look to offtake numbers for legal justification at all.

What the heck?  Offtake numbers?  That means nothing!  It's only signed contracts from customers obligated to pay for capacity on Grain Belt Express that matter, and GBE has exactly NONE of those.  The one contract GBE has said it has is completely optional and the Missouri municipalities can get out of it whenever they want.  Does this mean that DOE pretended that "offtake numbers" in the form of Memorandums of Understanding, or simply a utility's future renewable plans unrelated to Grain Belt Express, were used as a form of collateral?  No bank would ever rely on such flimsy collateral, and neither should DOE.  That's how DOE got into trouble before with Solyndra.

In the spring, the far-right Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri began to publicly take issue with the project and its impact on farmers...

Sorry, far-left reporters, but Senator Hawley has been concerned about Grain Belt Express for the past several years, at least.  Don't make it sound like he just found out about it.

The International Energy Agency estimates that nearly 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) of power lines will need to be added or replaced globally by 2040 in order to meet climate and clean energy goals

Well, there's another Deep State agency waste of taxpayer money.  The federal government doesn't currently have any climate and clean energy goals, therefore this statement is irrelevant.  

According to Rob Gramlich, president of the transmission and power markets-focused consultancy Grid Strategies, federal support could be particularly impactful for interregional transmission lines “where it’s hardest to find any other way to recover costs.” 
​
“It is very hard to find state regulators to approve cost recovery for a multi-state line like this,” Gramlich said. “I’ve always thought that DOE should have a big pot of money for interregional transmission, and that should be the main focus of DOE spending across all of its programs.”

Rob Gramlich is not the federal government.  In fact, he works for dark money organizations pushing a political agenda.  He continues trying to get "permitting reform" passed so that the federal government can control transmission permitting.  Doesn't look like it's going to do him much good right now, is it?  The Trump administration is intent on building power generation on site with those new data centers, not doing something as inefficient as trying to transmit it hundreds of miles from generation to load.  There's really no use for these kinds of transmission lines.

It's time to clean the Deep State out of our Department of Energy.  I'm betting Gramlich knows exactly who they are.  Who knows?  Maybe they're having cocktails right now celebrating their "resistance"?

That was a close call.  Never think that your vote doesn't matter.  It stopped this Deep State hustle in its tracks.