The Republican Party’s current infrastructure spending bill is missing one item: a provision establishing federal siting authority for electric transmission lines. Oddly, this idea has few champions in Congress and only tepid support from environmental groups.

Problematically, the best locations for wind and solar power plants are far from population centers—in the windy central plains or the sunny southwestern deserts.

More than ever, consumers want green power.

Conservatives claim that federal transmission siting authority would threaten state sovereignty or landowner property rights, but those claims ring hollow. Why are those values worth protecting against transmission lines but not against natural gas pipelines?

Michael Skelly, the company's president, told Arkansas Business that the direct-current project, which would have transmitted 4,000 megawatts of renewable energy from Western Oklahoma to eastern Tennessee, is basically on life support.

"Everybody knows that if you can delay a project, you can hurt it or force a different outcome," Skelly said after devoting nearly nine years and some $100 million in private investor money to the project, which would have crossed 12 Arkansas counties with 200-foot-high transmission towers. "We're ending up with an outcome that's just fine for us business-wise, but not as good for Arkansas."

Clean Line Energy spokeswoman Vicki Ayres-Portman explained the impact wind energy has had on local county budgets and what it would mean to be the member of a state that divests in wind energy at Monday's get-together.
Ayres-Portman was taking the place of originally scheduled speaker Mark Yates, Oklahoma director for the Wind Coalition.
“Most of you have probably heard there are two bills running on the floor of the house today that would have a detrimental impact on the future and possibly retroactive on wind development,” she said. “So Mark felt like he really needed to stay at the capitol today and asked if I would stop by on my way to the capitol and give you guys an update on wind energy in Oklahoma.”

Ayres-Portman detailed the well publicized and still working 9-year-old Clean Line project set to run from the Oklahoma Panhandle to Tennessee. The $2.5 billion, 4,000 megawatt project that was set to provide energy to customers in Arkansas, Tennessee and other markets stalled recently. The issues hamstringing the plans come after President Trump began pushing coal and nuclear power options.
"The market has really changed since Clean Line started this effort eight, nine years ago,” Ayres-Portman said. “At that time, the bioenergy centers to the East were really looking forward to more renewables. We had a new President elected. And although I agree with a lot of great things he’s done, one of the things, pushing coal and nuclear has really dampened the power purchase agreements from big utilities that were looking at doing renewables, whether that was natural gas, wind or solar.”
So those companies that had memorandums of understanding to come onto the Clean Line transmission line, have pulled away from those agreement.

... dedicated to fostering clean energy sources that best serve the needs of local consumers.

Protect our Pocketbooks supports clean energy, but we believe that energy infrastructure investments should be made locally.

A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other party or interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned. The front group is perhaps the most easily recognized use of the third party technique.

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."

The electric utility supply of the United States is based on a sharing of facilities and energy sources for both purposes of supply and reliability. There are two transmission corridors whose final sections exist for the benefit of Sudbury, Maynard, and Concord. One begins in Medway and passes through Sherborn, Natick, Framingham, and Wayland. The second, which begins in Waltham, passes through Weston. In effect, the citizens of Medway, Sherborn, Wayland, Weston, Waltham, Framingham, and Natick have had to sacrifice some of their environment for the benefit of Sudbury.

A large group in Sudbury, Protect Sudbury, opposes this line, either overhead or underground, if built along an existing MBTA right-of-way. The group also opposes any overhead line through any route in Sudbury. If only the citizens of Wayland and Weston could have successfully opposed the construction of transmission towers in their towns that supply Sudbury! No tower, no power!

Emotional challenges to a project can cause projects sponsors to respond with facts, but those facts are often drowned out if the parties are unwilling to compromise. In this presentation, we will have an in-depth analysis of how to respond to exaggerated or false claims and how to manage project opposition explained with real-life case study/scenarios.

Grain Belt’s case seeks to have the PSC divested of its role in exclusive role of deciding on whether utility projects are in the state’s best interest. “The urgency in answering this question is driven by a statewide financial impact on hundreds of thousands of Missouri electrical consumers who will pay higher power prices if the Grain Belt Express wind transmission line is not built,” the company said in its announcement.

No party to this proceeding is contesting the fact that before Grain Belt may build the line, at some point it must obtain the necessary County Commission consents under § 229.100. In fact, Grain Belt has conceded that point throughout these proceedings.

Thus the basic issue in this case is whether Grain Belt must obtain the county consents before the CCN may be issued, or whether it is allowed by law to obtain those county consents after the PSC issues the CCN. In either event, as Grain Belt concedes, the County consents are required before the line may be built.

Grain Belt Express has entered a transmission service agreement (“Services Agreement” or “TSA”) with the Missouri Joint Municipal Electric Utility Commission (“Joint Municipalities” or “MJMEUC”) to purchase up to 250 MW of capacity from the Project, which would save hundreds of thousands of electrical consumers millions of dollars annually.

The Project has received regulatory approval from the relevant utility commissions in Kansas, Illinois and Indiana. Each state independently determined the Project is in the public interest and issued certificates for construction of the Project across those states. Missouri is the final state in which regulatory approval is needed for the Project to proceed.

The Commissioners identified numerous benefits the Project would have had in the public interest: “lowered energy production costs in Missouri by $40 million or more”; “a substantial and favorable effect on the reliability of electric service in Missouri”; “positive environmental impacts”; “supported 1,527 total jobs over three years, created $246 million in personal income [including easement payments], $476 million in GDP, and $9.6 million in state general revenue for the state of Missouri, and $249 million in Missouri-specific manufacturing and personal service contract spending”; and resulted in “a total of approximately $7.2 million” in yearly property tax benefits to affected counties.

In contrast, § 229.100 is a non-PSC law that relates to county roads. It requires those who wish to erect poles and power wires, or lay pipes across public roads of any county to obtain the assent of county commissioners under rules established by the county engineer.

The Court should accept transfer to secure for all Missourians the full extent of the benefits identified by the PSC, including substantial and proper leasehold payments to landowners, and to allow Missourians to begin enjoying these benefits immediately.

The Services Agreement between Grain Belt Express and the Joint Municipalities allows the Joint Municipalities to purchase up to 250 MW of from the Project.

The savings expected under the Services Agreement are indicative of what other energy purchasers throughout the state would realize and will ultimately be passed on Missouri energy consumers.

The availability of these PTCs substantially lowers overall development costs of wind-generation projects, which allows Grain Belt Express to pass on the cost savings to its customers. Grain Belt Express, like many other industry members, is relying on the availability of PTCs to complete the Project as cost-effectively as possible to deliver maximum cost-savings to energy consumers. Without the benefit of the PTCs, the completion of Project is in jeopardy and the savings to Missourians at risk.

The goal is to alleviate congestion on the high-voltage electric grid, and benefit customers in the region, including parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, Transource said in a news release. 

Abby Foster, a community affairs representative for the company, said typical farming practices in both counties will be able to continue in the rights-of-way. She also said that based on the feedback from the community, Transource will use a monopole structure for the towers, instead of the lattice structure which was in the original proposal. 
“By including community members in the siting process, rather than engaging them after decisions were made, we were able to consider and accommodate many landowner requests,” said Transource Director Todd Burns.

Foster added that over the next couple of weeks the company will contact  landowners with property on the proposed route. She said during this time, owners can raise issues like potential crop loss during construction or access roads that need to be built, and negotiate compensation.
 
"They're really looking to minimize and reduce any impacts that might occur to any agricultural practices," Foster said on behalf of Transource.