The Grain Belt Express and the Fifteen-Year Fight to Build One Power Line

The wind in Ford County, Kansas, does not stop much. It blows across the wheat fields and cattle pastures around Dodge City with a steadiness that made western Kansas, along with the rest of the Great Plains, one of the best places in the world to generate wind power. The trouble has always been distance. The people who need the most electricity live far to the east, in cities like St. Louis, Chicago and Indianapolis, and between the Kansas wind and those cities lie hundreds of miles of farmland, three state borders and the property of a great many families who never asked for a power line. Around 2010 a small Houston company proposed to close that gap with a single line, a high-voltage direct current cable running roughly 800 miles from western Kansas across Missouri and Illinois to the Indiana border. They called it the Grain Belt Express. More than fifteen years later, after rejections, reversals, a change of ownership, a state supreme court decision, a federal loan guarantee granted and then canceled, it has still not carried a single watt. Its story is the clearest illustration in America of why the clean energy transition is less a technology problem than a building problem.

In short: The Grain Belt Express was proposed around 2010 to carry Kansas wind power east. It won approval in Kansas, lost and then won in Missouri, was approved and then undone in Illinois, changed owners, and in 2025 lost a federal loan guarantee. Its history shows how hard it is to build long power lines in the United States, and why both clean energy advocates and landowners have legitimate stakes in how it is done.

A small company with a big idea

The project began with Clean Line Energy Partners, a startup founded by Michael Skelly, a Texas wind developer who had concluded that the biggest obstacle to wind power was not turbines but wires. His company proposed a set of long-distance direct current lines to carry power from the windiest parts of the Plains to population centers.

Direct current lines are the right tool for that job. Most of the American grid runs on alternating current, which loses more energy over very long distances. High-voltage direct current lines can carry large amounts of power hundreds of miles with relatively small losses, which is why countries like China have built many of them. The catch is that a direct current line is a highway with few exits; it connects distant places but does little for the communities it passes through along the way. That would turn out to matter enormously.

Clean Line was not a utility. It did not own power plants or serve customers. It was what the industry calls a merchant transmission developer, planning to make money by selling capacity on its line to wind farms and to buyers at the other end. That status, too, would come back to haunt it.

Kansas says yes, Missouri says no

Kansas regulators approved the project early. The state had wind to sell and every reason to want a way to sell it.

Missouri was another matter. The line would cross the northern part of the state through farm country, and landowners organized against it. Their arguments were not mainly about climate or energy. They objected to a private company using eminent domain, the power to force the sale of land for public use, to put a power line across farms that would get little direct benefit from it. Many farmers resented the idea that their land would be taken so that people in Indiana or Chicago could buy cheaper power.

The Missouri Public Service Commission rejected the project in 2015. Clean Line applied again, and in 2017 the commission rejected it once more, this time saying it felt bound by a state appeals court decision in a different case that seemed to require the developer to get approval from each county the line crossed before the state could grant its own approval. The commission indicated that the project might otherwise have merit.

In 2018 the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the commission had been wrong about that requirement and sent the case back. The same year, Clean Line, worn down by delays and costs, agreed to sell the project to Invenergy, a much larger Chicago-based developer of wind, solar and gas power. In 2019 the Missouri commission approved the line.

Illinois: approved, then undone

In Illinois the project followed a different path to a similar delay. State regulators approved it in 2015. Landowner groups challenged the decision, and a state appeals court later threw the approval out, concluding that Clean Line could not be treated as a public utility in Illinois because it did not yet own or operate any utility property in the state. That reasoning created a riddle familiar to merchant developers: to get permission to build, you had to already be the kind of company that had built something.

Invenergy went back to Illinois regulators and started the process over. The Illinois piece of the route has remained a separate and lengthy fight, which matters because a power line that reaches only part of the way to its customers is not much use.

The landowners have a point

It would be easy to tell this story as a heroic clean energy project blocked by stubborn locals. That would be unfair, and it would miss the most important lesson.

The farmers who opposed the Grain Belt Express raised real issues. A large transmission tower on your land is permanent. It can complicate farming with large equipment, and it changes the land your family may have worked for generations. Eminent domain is a serious power, and its use for private projects has long been controversial on both the left and the right. Opponents also pointed out that the line, as originally designed, would pass through Missouri delivering little power to Missourians.

Those concerns deserved an answer, and to some extent the project's developers eventually gave one. A group of Missouri municipal utilities signed up to buy power delivered by the line, arguing that it would lower costs for their customers. Invenergy later redesigned the project to deliver more of its power into Missouri itself. Invenergy also offered landowners payments above the appraised value of the easements it needed.

This is where I think the progressive argument has to be honest with itself. The country needs many more lines like this one if it is going to move clean power from where it is made to where it is used. That means using the power of the state to build infrastructure over local objections, sometimes. But the way to do that is not to dismiss rural landowners as obstacles. It is to treat them as partners with a stake: pay them fairly and repeatedly, not just once; route lines along existing corridors like highways and railroads where possible; make sure the communities the line crosses get something real, whether cheaper power, local tax revenue or jobs. A clean energy movement that cannot persuade the farmer whose land it needs will not get much built.

Washington steps in, then steps out

By the mid-2020s the project had cleared enough approvals to seek federal financing. In November 2024, the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office announced a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of about $4.9 billion to help build the first phase of the line. Supporters called it a turning point.

The commitment was conditional, meaning the final deal had not closed. After the change in administration, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, pressed publicly for the guarantee to be canceled, echoing the landowner objections and criticizing the use of eminent domain for the project. In July 2025, after reviewing the project, the Energy Department announced that it was canceling the loan guarantee.

Invenergy said it would keep pursuing the line without the federal guarantee. Without it, the financing is harder and more expensive, and the timeline less certain. You can follow the broader pattern of canceled grants and loans on the government gutted page.

What a fair deal for the land could look like

Suppose you accept both halves of the argument: the country needs long lines, and the people whose land they cross deserve better than a one-time check and a court date. What would a better arrangement look like? There is no settled model, but the pieces are not mysterious.

Payments could run for the life of the line rather than once, so that a farm family shares in the value of the power flowing over its fields every year, the way a landowner with a wind turbine collects lease payments. Counties could receive a dependable share of the line's value through property taxes, money that pays for schools and roads in places that often struggle to fund them. Routes could follow existing highways, railroads and older power lines wherever the engineering allows, reducing the number of new properties affected. And the line could be designed with more exits, so that some of the power it carries is delivered to the communities it crosses rather than simply passing overhead.

None of this is free. Every added payment raises the cost of the line, and some of that cost lands on the customers who buy the power. But the alternative has costs too, measured in years of litigation, projects abandoned after millions in spending, and clean power that never reaches anyone. A system that makes landowners partners rather than adversaries may well be the cheaper path once the delays are counted.

There is a political payoff as well. Rural voters have been told for years that the clean energy transition is something done to them by people far away. A line that sends a check to a Missouri farm family every year for decades tells a different story.

What one line teaches about building anything

The Grain Belt Express is not unusual because it was delayed. It is unusual mainly because people noticed. Long-distance transmission lines across the country face similar fights, and many have died quietly. Clean Line's other flagship project, a line meant to carry Oklahoma wind east through Arkansas, ran into opposition from that state's congressional delegation and was eventually abandoned.

Several lessons come out of this history.

The first is that the American system gives many parties a veto and few parties the power to say yes. Each state along the route regulates the line separately. Counties, courts and federal agencies all have roles. A project that needs approval from every one of them and can be stopped by any one of them faces terrible odds.

The second is that the rules were written for a different grid. Most transmission in the United States was built by utilities within their own territories, for their own customers. Long lines that cross many states to carry power from one region to another fit poorly into that structure, and nobody has clear authority to approve them. Congress gave the federal government limited backstop authority to site lines in certain corridors in 2005, courts narrowed it, and although Congress tried to strengthen it again in 2021, it has done little in practice so far.

The third is about time. When the Grain Belt Express was first proposed, wind power was still relatively expensive and battery storage was a niche technology. Since then the cost of wind and solar has fallen sharply, electricity demand has begun rising again, and the need for long lines has only grown. A project that takes fifteen years to approve will be planned for one world and built in another.

The fourth is about politics. The opposition to the line came mostly from rural conservatives, and the cancellation of its federal support came from a Republican administration. But the problem of being unable to build long power lines is not a partisan one. Blue-state projects have died in similar ways, through local opposition and lengthy reviews. Fixing it will need people from both sides, including farm-state legislators who want their constituents to profit from wind leases and transmission payments.

What you can do

Power lines get built or blocked through public processes most people never see, which means a few informed participants can change the outcome.

• Find out who decides in your state. Utility commissions and legislatures approve transmission routes and set the rules for eminent domain. Look up your state legislators and members of Congress and ask where they stand on new transmission and on fair payment to landowners.
• Comment on federal energy rules. Federal agencies, including FERC and the Energy Department, take public comment on transmission planning and permitting. The federal comment page lists rules open for comment now, with guidance on how to write one.
• See how much clean power your state is making. The climate page shows the US power mix and clean power by state, a reminder of where the wind and sun are and where the power is needed.
• Support groups working on both sides of the fence. Farm, rural and environmental organizations sometimes work together on fair transmission deals, and you can find ones near you, sorted by cause and state, in the organizations directory.

Somewhere in Ford County, the wind is blowing right now, as it was when Michael Skelly first looked at a map and drew a line east. The power it carries could light homes in Missouri and Indiana. Whether it ever does depends less on engineering than on whether the country can learn to build again, and to bring the farmers along when it does.