Trump administration canceled a $4.9B loan guarantee for a line to deliver green power

FILE - A solar farm sits in Mona, Utah, on Aug. 9, 2022. Photo by Rick Bowmer /AP

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday canceled a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee for a new high-voltage transmission line for delivering solar and wind-generated electricity from the Midwest to the eastern U.S.

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The U.S. Department of Energy declared that it is “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the first phase of Chicago-based Invenergy’s planned Grain Belt Express. The department also questioned whether the $11 billion project could meet the financial conditions required for a loan guarantee.

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President Donald Trump has repeatedly derided wind and solar energy as “unreliable” and opposed efforts to combat climate change by moving away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy also said Wednesday that the conditional commitment to Invenergy in November was among billions of dollars’ worth of commitments “rushed out the doors” by former President Joe Biden’s administration after Biden lost the election.

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“To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the agency said in a statement.

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It wasn’t immediately clear how much the department’s action would delay or stop the start of construction, which was set to begin next year. The company’s representatives didn’t immediately respond to emails Wednesday seeking comment

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The company has said its project would create 4,000 jobs and new efficiencies in delivering power, and that it would save consumers $52 billion over 15 years. The line would deliver electricity from Kansas across Missouri and Illinois and into Indiana, connecting there to the power grid for the eastern U.S. It could deliver up to 5,000 megawatts of electricity.

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“When electricity demand and consumer power bills are soaring, it’s hard to imagine a more backward move,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan, Washington-based group supporting renewable energy.

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Keefe called the Grain Belt Express “one of the country’s most important energy projects” and suggested Trump canceled the loan guarantee “just because it will bring cleaner energy to more people.”

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But two prominent Missouri Republicans, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, are vocal critics of the project, describing it as a threat to farmland and land owners’ property rights. Bailey called the project a “scam” and a “boondoggle.”

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Hawley said on July 10 that he had secured a pledge from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright to cancel the loan guarantee in a conversation with him and Trump.

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Critics like Hawley object to the company’s ability to use lawsuits against individual land owners along the line’s route to compel them to sell their property, which Hawley called “an elitist land grab.”

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Online court records show that the company filed dozens of such lawsuits in Missouri circuit courts in recent years, and the Missouri Farm Bureau’s president posted on the social platform X Wednesday that the project threatened to “sacrifice rural America in the name of progress.”

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Democrats on the U.S. Senate’s energy committee suggested on X that Trump, Wright and Hawley “just killed” the project, but Invenergy announced in May that it had awarded $1.7 billion in contracts for work on the project.

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And Bailey suggested in a statement that the project could still go forward with private funding without the loan guarantee, saying, “If Invenergy still intends to force this project on unwilling landowners, we will continue to fight every step of the way.”

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