Missouri rejects $2.2 billion wind power line

The Missouri Public Service Commission voted this week to deny a $2.2 billion transmission line project intended to carry enormous amounts of Kansas wind power to eastern power grids.

Backers, including environmentalists, pushed the first-of-its-kind “Grain Belt Express” as a major step in the fight for renewable energy, but also touted its benefits in creating jobs and supplying low-cost electricity.

With a capacity to carry 3,500 megawatts of electricity, it would have allowed for a doubling of the amount of wind power generated in Kansas, bringing billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of jobs.

Starting near Dodge City, it would have run northeast and then east across Kansas. It then would have run across Missouri and Illinois to Indiana where it would have connected into the regular power grid.

But many Missouri farmers didn’t want it coming across their land. They dug in their boots, planted signs, organized and packed hearings around the state.

The commission voted 3-2 Wednesday to deny Houston-based Clean Line Energy’s application, saying the project was not needed. The accompanying order noted farmers’ concerns about crops, pastures and maneuvering large equipment around towers.

Evidence showed, the order said, that “actual benefits to the general public from the Project are outweighed by the burdens on affected landowners.”

Clean Line Energy said its fight for the power route is not over. It could go to court or even seek federal intervention with the U.S. Department of Energy.

But the vote clearly disappointed, and frustrated, Clean Line officials, who only last week announced that a Kansas City company would build Grain Belt.

“The commissioners were confused about the benefits to the state of Missouri,” Mark Lawlor, the project’s development director, said after the vote.

Company officials had pushed the 1,300 construction jobs. They said Grain Belt would have brought low-cost renewable energy to the state and generated an additional $6.4 million in property taxes for the eight Missouri counties it intended to cross.

Clean Line uses the latest energy technology and was backed by chambers of commerce, labor unions and national environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club. They pushed the future of renewable energy, cleaner air, better health, jobs and tax dollars.

The Grain Belt fight shaped up to be an urban-rural conflict.

Farmers talked about what 150-foot towers strung with high-voltage cable would look like coming across their fields and pastures. Some said it would ruin the land for the next generation.

“They (Clean Line) act like they can do whatever they want, and that don’t sit well with a lot of us up here,” Logan Kelly, who, with his brother, recently bought a piece of the old family place near Braymer, said recently about the project.

For more than two years, Clean Line employees had driven blacktops and gravel roads trying to reach easement agreements with farmers. But of 500 or so tracts of land between Buchanan County on the west and Ralls County on the east, the company came to terms with fewer than 50 owners.

The transmission line would have required an easement 150 to 200 feet wide. Clean Line offered to pay 100 percent market value per acre, even though farmers could continue to use the land for crops and cattle.

This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 6:15 PM with the headline "Missouri rejects $2.2 billion wind power line."