In contrast to the Midwestern Clean Line projects, the 2,100-megawatt SOO Green appears to be encountering little if any resistance.

Renewable energy is ready for prime time.  That is if -- like Michael Polsky -- you don't mind angering farmers and chopping up a few bald eagles.

Back in Chicago, Polsky leads an impromptu tour of the three floors Invenergy occupies at One South Wacker Drive in the pandemic ghost town that is downtown Chicago. It’s a Friday morning. Ordinarily, there would be dozens of people in open-plan workstations and offices, but only a handful are present, including the 24/7 crew manning Invenergy’s control center—watching, and even operating, 6,774 wind turbines spread across the country.

Sharing Invenergy’s digs are the offices of Polsky’s $150 million green-tech-focused VC fund, Energize Ventures. Among its 13 portfolio investments: Drone Deploy, which inspects turbine blades using infrared beams and drones, and Volta, which is building a chain of electric vehicle charging stations.

These days, Polsky has reluctantly traded the standing desk in his office for Zoom calls from his living room and quality time with his second wife, Tanya, 47, a former banker, and their three young children. “I’ve spent a lot more time with family than before,” the compulsive dealmaker admits. He seems to be enjoying it. “I’ve discovered being home, in a way.”

Then there’s that Grain Belt Express, which would install an 800-mile high- voltage line across Kansas and Missouri into Illinois at a cost of $7 billion. It was originally the brainchild of wind-industry pioneer Michael Skelly, whose Clean Line Energy was backed by the billionaire Ziff family, among others. Skelly’s team burned through $100 million fighting NIMBys and bureaucrats in its quest for permits and approvals. “After a decade, it was hard for us to attract capital,” says Skelly, now a senior advisor at Lazard.

Polsky agreed to take over Grain Belt on the condition of Invenergy winning those approvals—in other words, all he risked upfront was the cost of lawyers and lobbyists. “It’s much more complicated than just building a wind farm,” admits Polsky, who relishes the challenge. A bill that would keep non-utility companies like Invenergy from using eminent domain to take private land passed the Missouri state assembly this year but has been bottled up in the state senate. Meanwhile, two Missouri appeals courts have upheld the state public service commission’s approval of the Grain Belt Express.

Despite ongoing appeals, farmers like Loren Sprouse, whose family owns a 480-acre tract west of Kansas City that the high-voltage line would cross, are becoming resigned to the fact that soon Invenergy will be able to negotiate with the sledgehammer of eminent domain. “Once you get eminent domain, the price may still be negotiated, but they would have the right to do it,’’ he says.

Sprouse’s land is already crossed by three buried petrochemical pipelines, which he says transport warmed crude that “runs so hot it dries out the ground and kills the crops.” (Indeed, the proposed transmission lines would run along the pipeline right-of-way.) But Sprouse prefers the pipelines to the visual blight of hulking transmission lines, and he’s concerned about the health effects of electromagnetic radiation. Polsky is encouraged by Invenergy’s legal victories in Missouri, and expects Illinois approvals to follow. “It will be built. It has to happen,” he says.

Polsky is buying turbines from GE Power that are twice the size of those at Grand Ridge (at 700 feet, they’re taller than Trump Tower in New York) and generate up to 3 megawatts each. He intends to erect more than 1,000 of these enormous machines on 100,000 acres in Kansas, on what could become the nation’s biggest wind farm.

YOU HAVE ONLY YOURSELF TO BLAME
One big obstacle to green energy is spelled y-o-u. Technological advances have made wind and solar power cheaper than coal, nuclear and even natural gas. So why aren’t we using more of the stuff? Quite simply because you (and your neighbors) oppose and block the construction of wind farms and new transmission lines for green power.