Developers of the Grain Belt Express transmission line have asked the federal government to narrow a 780-mile route energy officials proposed as a transmission corridor of “national interest.” The Department of Energy is working to designate “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors” in parts of the country where officials have found consumers are harmed by a lack of electric transmission and where additional lines would boost reliability and cut costs. One of those corridors runs through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois before ending at the Indiana border, encompassing the route of the Grain Belt Express high-voltage transmission line being built by Invenergy, a Chicago-based clean energy developer.
The corridor proposed by the Department of Energy is five miles wide, but Invenergy has called on federal officials to reduce it to 0.5 miles, arguing in a blog post on the Grain Belt Express website that the narrower route “will balance the needs of states to access additional power while also addressing the concerns and uncertainty stakeholders along the path of the project are expressing.” Over the years, as Invenergy has worked to develop the Grain Belt Express, it has battled rural neighbors and lawmakers over its ability — granted by state energy regulators — to use eminent domain, a legal tool that can be used in infrastructure projects to acquire property or easements from unwilling landowners and compensate them.
According to the Department of Energ.
