Back
The Trump administration recently terminated a $4.9 billion loan for the Grain Belt Express, the country’s biggest transmission grid project. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Democrat from New Mexico, says the decision is illegal.
In an exclusive new interview with Canary Media, Heinrich discusses why he’s demanding that the Department of Energy account for the decision — and what response he’s received.
Last month, Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, sent a letter to the DOE challenging its vague excuse for cutting off the legally binding contract between the federal government and Invenergy, the Chicago-based energy project developer planning to build the power-line project from Kansas to Illinois.
“Not only am I concerned that this move is illegal,” Heinrich wrote — a belief shared by Jigar Shah, the former head of the DOE Loan Programs Office, which issued the conditional loan guarantee in the waning days of the Biden administration. “I am concerned that the federal government is eroding what little trust the private sector has in our ability to be reliable partners.”
That trust is eroding rapidly, Heinrich said. The project has been in the works for more than a decade and is one of only a handful of major transmission developments underway in the United States.
The Grain Belt Express would support gigawatts’ worth of new wind and solar projects — energy sources that are under attack by the Trump administration.
The new GOP megalaw is expected to cut new solar, wind, and battery deployments by more than half just as power demand is rising. Last year, clean energy made up 96% of the new energy capacity being added to the U.S. grid.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has unleashed a flurry of anti-wind and anti-solar actions in the past month that threaten to subject wind and solar projects to burdensome and potentially insurmountable Interior Department reviews, block development on federal lands under “capacity density” restrictions, and potentially put a halt to already permitted wind farms on land and at sea.
The move to block the Grain Belt Express is part of this broader attempt to slow renewable energy — just when the country can least afford it, Heinrich said.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why did you decide to write the letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright?
Secretary Wright, before he was secretary, said numerous times to our committee [the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources] that he was going to follow the law, and a conditional loan guarantee is a legally binding commitment.
It’s as if you go to your bank and you get preapproved for a mortgage, then when you show up for the closing, you expect the bank to make good on that. And that’s what we had here.
The reality is, we need this administration to follow the law and make good on commitments that have been made so that there is predictability in the market. We also need every cheap electron we can get right now, and so if you put these big infrastructure projects in jeopardy, what you’re really doing is passing along more costs to consumers.
Have you received any response from DOE?
Not yet.
Do you expect you’ll eventually get a response?
I certainly expect to. And if the secretary wants to be taken seriously by the Senate, then he needs to provide that information.
One of the things that really bothers me about a lot of the actions that the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior are taking right now is the sum total is creating a lot of uncertainty in the finance markets, and that flows through to create additional costs for consumers.
When you have a big transmission project like this one, there are $52 billion in energy savings over the course of the next decade, and that should be accruing to consumers. And if you put all of this in jeopardy, the real impact is that costs are going up, and then when you put all of these permits that are usually very predictable and are now uncertain, all of this is going to raise costs for consumers — for retail consumers and for commercial consumers. We’re already seeing electric rates start to rise, and I am deeply concerned that that is going to get a lot worse in the coming years because of their actions and their inactions.
You asked the department if it had analyzed the impact of canceling the loan guarantee. What do you see as the administration’s responsibility in analyzing its actions on energy policy in terms of affordability? And are they fulfilling those responsibilities?
They are not. And it doesn’t take a detailed analysis to understand that, in an environment of surging demand, if you artificially constrain supply, you’re going to be raising costs for people. And I want the American people to know that this is not an accident. They are choosing to take actions which are raising people’s electric bills.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican representing Iowa, has said he won’t be moving Treasury Department nominations forward until there’s some response from the administration regarding its actions on wind and solar tax credits. Can you tell us more about where members of Congress have power to challenge how the administration is managing energy policy?
Well, I think the confirmation process is one obvious place. This is an administration that has been very public about saying that they need more people in place to be able to execute their agenda. But unless they’re responsive to the Congress, that process is not going to speed up.
You asked the DOE for a list of all the closed loans and conditional commitments that the department is reviewing. Have you received any response?
I’ll be honest, they have not been particularly transparent or responsive on many of these issues, and that is a trend that I think does not bode well for the next several years.
Having been through a 17-year process to get one transmission line built [the SunZia line in New Mexico and Arizona], I’m also acutely aware of the jobs that hang in the balance. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of good, high-quality American jobs that are simply not going to come to fruition because this administration has a political agenda. I’ve never seen an administration so insensitive to the job implications of their actions.
.svg)
