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

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.

...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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

...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.

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

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

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.” 
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“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.”

“In the waning, chaotic days of the Biden Administration — when the former president’s mental decline had grown to such a severe state that we now know he was not actually running his own White House and often signed documents without even knowing what they contained — left-wing bureaucrats seized the opportunity to advance their radical ‘green agenda,'” said Attorney General Bailey. “In the shadows of this confusion, far-left deep staters advanced a $4.9 billion green energy federal loan guarantee boondoggle to bankroll the Grain Belt Express (GBE), one of the most egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars in recent memory.”

The first paragraph of the Executive Summary states that in order to qualify for a loan, the project must be eligible under Section 1703 of Title XVII (the Clean Energy Financing Program), which 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)).
The DEIS makes this presumption: “The Project could also help reduce overall GHG emissions by allowing new renewable energy projects to access the electric grid, potentially leading to the replacement of existing fossil-fuel power plants, while providing additional power to expanding renewable energy markets.” (Table 3.1.1). Coulda, woulda, shoulda. This is a wish list that is not backed up by facts. The DEIS does not name or study the projects that could use Grain Belt Express to access the electric grid and the DEIS determines they are not reasonably foreseeable actions and therefore are not included in the cumulative effects analysis. (Sec. 4.3.2.2).


Here’s the bottom line. Without signed legal contracts with generators, it cannot be presumed that Grain Belt Express will transmit renewable energy from wind or solar generators. Under its Negotiated Rate Authority from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Grain Belt Express may negotiate contracts with customers who will pay the company to use its transmission capacity, either generators or load serving entities.
Grain Belt Express has not made a compliance filing demonstrating to FERC that is has signed contracts with any generators, in Kansas or elsewhere, therefore any generator may negotiate a future contract, including those that use fossil fuels. It is just as likely that a new or existing gas- or coal-fired generator may sign a contract as a new solar or wind generator. Grain Belt Express may not discriminate against generation types when negotiating contracts and cannot evaluate connection requests using generation source as a factor. All sources of generation must be allowed to negotiate contracts under open access transmission rules.
Because potential generators have not signed contracts with Grain Belt Express, it simply cannot be determined that Grain Belt Express will reduce greenhouse gases as required to qualify for the loan. Furthermore, without signed contracts with generators, Grain Belt Express is just a transmission line. Transmission lines, by themselves, do not reduce greenhouse gases. A transmission line that is not connected to a generation source is just like an extension cord that isn’t plugged into anything. Grain Belt Express does not reduce greenhouse gases and therefore it is not eligible for the proposed loan.

DOE is considering this process for designating NIETCs in recognition of the fact that such designations would occur in areas experiencing the greatest need for immediate transmission development and would unlock new financing and regulatory tools to spur investment in those areas. The recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) and Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) contain new public-private partnership and loan authorities that DOE can use to spur construction of transmission projects in NIETCs. In addition, section 216(b) of the FPA, as amended by the IIJA, allows the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) to issue permits to site transmission facilities within NIETCs when certain statutory conditions are met.

In many cases the solution will be constructing new transmission facilities, and the NIETC designation can unlock key federal financing and permitting tools to facilitate such transmission infrastructure. 

A NIETC designation unlocks critical federal financing and permitting tools to spur transmission development, including direct loans through the TFF program, public-private partnerships through the Transmission Facilitation Program, and Federal siting and permitting authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in certain limited circumstances. Developers and state and local siting authorities may also be able to leverage the environmental analysis conducted by DOE as part of the NIETC designation process to complete local siting and permitting processes, which could ultimately accelerate siting and permitting for transmission projects in these targeted, high-priority areas. 

Invenergy’s primary interest in securing NIETC designation for the Midwest-Plains corridor is for Grain Belt Express to be able to access additional federal financing options that support competitive rates for energy end users. Efficient and attractive financing sources are important as Grain Belt Express is a merchant transmission project principally funded via bilateral negotiated contracts with willing offtakers and not automatically via RTO, ISO or transmission owner cost allocation to ratepayers. As such, access to competitive financing supports the provision of lower-cost, competitive rates to prospective customers.

​The DOE’s Loan Programs Office is currently conducting federal loan guarantee and environmental reviews for Grain Belt Express Phase 1. Invenergy’s interest in accessing the Transmission Facility Financing program, enabled by NIETC, is to support Grain Belt Express Phase 2. However, given the inherent uncertainty in any regulatory permitting process, Invenergy supports designation of the full Midwest-Plains corridor to secure additional financing pathways for both Grain Belt Express Phase 1 and Phase 2.​

​The Federal Government prohibits conflicts of interest to safeguard the taxpayers against selfdealing, collusion, and fraud by Government officials and Government contractors. In the private sector, each party has a “baked in” economic incentive to watch, track, and account for its own dollars. That economic incentive does not exist in the public sector, where Federal dollars are more likely to be treated as “monopoly money.”

 In making a decision on the application, DOE LPO is preparing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). 

 DOE is using the NEPA process to assist in determining whether to issue a loan guarantee to the Applicant to support the Project.

​To understand the effects of the Proposed Action, the EIS must also analyze the No Action Alternative, allowing for a baseline for comparison. Under the No Action Alternative, DOE LPO would not provide federal financial support (a loan guarantee) to the Applicant for construction and energization of the Grain Belt Express Project, with the assumption that the Project would not be constructed. By comparing the Proposed Action with the No Action Alternative, the EIS will transparently demonstrate the effects of the Proposed Action on the environment.

If care is taken to make sure that host communities benefit in the short and long term from the energy projects in their backyards, they will be less inclined to oppose them, leading to faster timelines for clean energy and transmission projects. 

Community opposition to large-scale wind and solar projects is growing across the United States. There are many reasons for this trend, including misinformation about renewable energy, concerns about project impacts, and concern that most of the benefits flow outside of the community while the burdens fall within. Communities often see hosting renewable energy projects and transmission (which touches multiple communities) as an impediment to their goals, such as preserving community identity, land preservation, and in some cases ensuring ecosystem conservation. While some landowners see these projects as a potential source of revenue from leases, others worry that the projects will reduce the value of their land. Finally, in many communities, while there may be both supporters and opponents of clean energy projects, the opponents are often more vocal, better resourced, and more passionate than the supporters. Because of all these factors, an alarming number of communities are adopting restrictive zoning and land use ordinances that effectively ban the siting of clean energy projects.

​This rise in opposition highlights the importance of ensuring that developers and local officials disseminate accurate information about potential projects and that the permitting process allows engagement from a broad range of voices so that decision-makers can accurately assess the environmental impacts as well as benefits of projects. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that host communities share in the benefits of projects in their own backyards.

Several states, including New York, California, Illinois, and Washington, have enacted laws that improve the siting process for large-scale renewable projects and provide potentially powerful models for similar legislation in other states. Among other things, these laws modernize the permitting process and explicitly provide benefits to host communities via mechanisms like utility bill discounts. States should be encouraged to adopt model siting and permitting laws that expand community engagement while limiting the ability of localities to unreasonably ban all wind and solar projects.

​Bringing communities from opposition to support—or at least to open-mindedness—is a major challenge to renewable energy growth that needs sustained effort, engagement, and thought. Our recommendations provide a starting point.

Coalitions should work together to build support for well-sited projects that benefit the host community. In cases where developers have done their due diligence as outlined in the preceding recommendations, environmental and conservation groups, labor groups, local landowners and businesses, and other stakeholders—including, where relevant, environmental justice and tribal groups—should form coalitions and work together to support the project. A key part of this support should be highlighting the community benefit agreements, payments in lieu of taxes or other mechanisms for benefit sharing, the creation of local jobs, and addressing other ways to compensate local landowners for any perceived or actual diminution in property values.

“I think that really, really rankles people here in Port Isabel, to see somebody from another city writing a letter saying, ‘hey, you know what? You ought to hurry up and put this polluting, dangerous facility in somebody else's town,’” Port Isabel City Manager Jared Hockema told TPR.