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The Trump administration just dealt a blow to the biggest transmission line project currently underway in the United States.
The U.S. Department of Energy has canceled a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a massive transmission line project seeking to carry wind and solar energy from the Great Plains to states farther east. It’s the latest in a series of Trump administration actions aimed at undermining the U.S. clean energy sector in the name of protecting taxpayer dollars.
In its Wednesday cancellation announcement, the DOE claimed that “the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright is also scrutinizing several other loans made under the Biden administration by the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, which issued its conditional guarantee to the Grain Belt Express in November. He has pledged to closely review and potentially cancel tens of billions of dollars more in financing from the office, citing a need to more responsibly steward federal dollars. However, in its 20-year history, the office has turned a profit for taxpayers by collecting interest and principal payments from the companies that receive loans.
The Grain Belt Express has been in the works for more than a decade. It’s one of only a handful of major transmission projects underway in the U.S., and once built it will be able to support the development of gigawatts of new wind and solar projects and deliver $52 billion in energy cost savings over 15 years, according to Invenergy, the Chicago-based developer that’s building it. Around the country, more projects like the Grain Belt Express are needed to expand the grid fast enough to meet surging demand and to bolster electricity reliability.
The cancellation comes a week after Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told The New York Times that he had made a personal appeal to President Donald Trump to take action to halt the project, and that Trump had promised to instruct the DOE to do so.
“He said, ‘Well, let’s just resolve this now,’” Hawley told The New York Times. “So he got Chris Wright on the line right there.”
Invenergy did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday morning. The developer had sought the loan guarantee to reduce the expense of borrowing for the project, which will cost $11 billion in total and has already secured agreements with utilities in Missouri as part of its efforts to find buyers for the power it will make available across the regions it will connect.
It’s unclear to what extent the loss of federal loan guarantees will derail or slow down the project’s timeline. In May, Invenergy signed a nearly $1.7 billion contract with contractors Kiewit Energy Group and Quanta Services, and construction is slated to begin next year.
In a statement earlier this month responding to a social media post from Hawley criticizing the project, Invenergy accused the senator of “trying to deprive Americans billions of dollars in energy cost savings, thousands of jobs, grid reliability and national security, all in an era of exponentially growing demand.”
The U.S. faces a looming crisis as new data centers, factories, and broader economic growth cause electricity demand to rise faster than supply is forecast to grow.
Solar, wind, and batteries have made up more than 90% of new energy built in recent years, and are the only resources that can be constructed rapidly enough to meet surging demand in the near term. Other energy resources have far slower development times, including fossil-gas power plants, which currently face manufacturing bottlenecks that will take years to resolve.
In addition to headwinds from Trump and the GOP-led Congress, which just eliminated federal tax credits for solar and wind, the main factor that threatens to hold back clean-energy development is a lack of space on the grid.
The U.S. lags in building the new high-voltage transmission lines that grid experts say are necessary to bring even more new solar, wind, and batteries online. These lines carry clean power from where it’s cheap to produce to where the most energy is consumed, like cities, and building more of them can reduce grid congestion, improve power system reliability, and lower electricity rates.
The Grain Belt Express has won approval from utility regulators in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, and has received support from lawmakers and organizations representing farmers and large electricity consumers. But the project has also faced multiple challenges from landowners and farmers. Invenergy is currently contesting an Illinois court’s 2024 decision to overturn state regulatory approval for the project, made in response to a challenge from the Illinois Farm Bureau and landowner groups.
Missouri’s attorney general, a Republican, launched an investigation into the project earlier this month, accusing Invenergy of inflating economic benefits and overstating cost savings it would deliver. Invenergy contested the validity of that challenge in a letter to Energy Secretary Wright, saying that all relevant issues have already been decided by state courts and regulators.
It’s common for large-scale transmission projects, which traverse hundreds of miles across many different municipalities, counties, and states, to get bogged down in court battles. It’s a big reason why it takes so long to build new power lines in the U.S. But the Trump administration’s decision to cancel financing for the project is uncharted territory, and the impact is still unclear.
Should the project be delayed, it’d be a major setback for the U.S.’s already-sluggish transmission buildout.
The U.S. needs far more transmission to be built to lower energy costs and reduce the increasing threat of blackouts caused by extreme weather, according to reports from groups ranging from the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
Over the past decade, the number of miles of long-range, high-voltage transmission built across the country has fallen, even as utility transmission spending has risen. A report released this week by advocacy group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid and consultancy Grid Strategies found that only 322 miles of high-voltage transmission lines were completed last year, the third-lowest buildout of the past 15 years, and well below the nearly 4,000 miles built in 2013.
“The Grain Belt Express represents a critical opportunity to modernize the grid, lower electricity costs, and deliver reliable energy across multiple states,” Christina Hayes, executive director of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, told Canary Media in a Wednesday email. “We encourage the administration to take a fresh look at the value this project brings to achieving its own goals for economic growth and energy dominance.”
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