"The Grain Belt Express is over a decade in the making and would bring huge amounts of cheap wind and solar from the plains to the East. Its future is now murky."
"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."
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