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It’s only been a few months since the Trump administration and lawmakers like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley succeeded in derailing the Grain Belt Express, a high-voltage transmission line that would have brought clean energy to much of the upper Midwest. It’s not clear whether the project will go forward, but it’s already clear that people will pay more for electricity as a result—and nowhere is that more clear than in Missouri.
The Grain Belt Express would have carried 5,000 megawatts of wind power from Kansas across Missouri and Illinois into Indiana. The 1,280-kilometre project, slated to cost $11 billion and scheduled to begin construction next year, has drawn fire from critics—whose opposition includes its use of eminent domain to cross private property—and has been the target of Republican opponents like Hawley for well over a decade.
After years of lawsuits, regulatory review, and political battles in the Show-Me State, Invenergy, the nation’s largest privately-held clean energy supplier, received state approval from Kansas and Missouri in 2019. It began acquiring access to land as similar work proceeded elsewhere along the route. In March, Andrew Bailey, who was until recently Missouri’s attorney general, urged Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to cancel the loan. He called the Grain Belt Express a project by “far-left deep staters” dedicated to undermining farmers.
Bailey opened an investigation into the project in July, alleging that Invenergy had overstated its economic benefits, and called on the state Public Service Commission to reconsider its approval. President Trump, with Hawley’s encouragement, reportedly called Energy Secretary Chris Wright and told him to cancel a US$5 billion conditional loan the Department of Energy approved in November to underwrite construction. The agency did just that on July 23, a move Hawley called “a huge win” for Missouri.
However, it’s likely that Missourians will suffer if the line is not built: It was predicted to save state ratepayers almost $18 billion in utility bills in the coming years—though Bailey has called that figure an overstatement. Jesse Jenkins, of Princeton’s REPEAT Project, which analyzes how federal climate and energy policies impact emissions and energy systems, said it’s useful to think of Grain Belt Express as “roughly five nuclear reactors’ worth of low-cost energy.” Thirty-nine municipal utilities across Missouri—including several in the same rural communities Hawley claims would be harmed by the transmission line—have already signed up to tap that supply. If the line is not built, “all the customers in all these cities are going to see higher prices than they normally would have,” said Andy Knott of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
Hawley’s offices in Washington, D.C. and Columbia, Missouri did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.
This, on top of the local impacts of the recently-passed One Big Beautiful Bill spending package—which one study suggested will cause Missouri electricity bills to skyrocket more than any other state—could create a dire situation for those already struggling to make ends meet. Kera Mashek, of the United Way of Greater Kansas City, said more than 14,000 people have called the Kansas City area 211 line seeking utility assistance so far this year.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is expected to increase Missourians’ electricity bills $240 a year by 2030 and $800 a year by 2035, according to a study from Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy policy think tank. It also could hinder climate progress. Clean energy tax credits granted by the Biden administration and rescinded by the Trump administration likely would have incentivized power companies to bring cheaper energy sources online. Without the incentives, they’ll probably continue repairing aging coal-fired plant infrastructure indefinitely, said Megan Mahajan, a co-author of the study.
The idea that people’s bills are going to go up is “certainly concerning for us,” Mashek said. Given the looming cuts to Medicaid and federal assistance programs, particularly those that help low-income people pay energy bills, under Trump’s spending package, “We could be looking at a very dire situation for a lot of households that are suddenly just simply not going to be able to afford to keep their lights on,” Mashek said.
Invenergy accused Hawley of “trying to deprive Americans of billions of dollars in energy cost savings, thousands of jobs, and grid reliability.” It plans to proceed with construction of what it calls “the largest transmission infrastructure project in U.S. history” using private financing. It’s got plenty of backers, including Blackstone, the world’s biggest private equity firm.
“A privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs,” the company said in a statement. It might also connect a natural gas plant to what was initially a green energy line, the company announced in July.
Invenergy took Bailey’s office to court, demanding that the attorney general withdraw the investigation. But last week, Bailey announced he’d be leaving his post to join the FBI. Governor Mike Kehoe appointed former state House speaker and federal prosecutor Catherine Hanaway, who most recently worked as lead counsel for Grain Belt Express. Hanaway says the case will proceed, and that she has recused herself.
For Knott, of Beyond Coal, the decade-plus battle over Grain Belt Express is less about what would benefit Missourians and more about a culture war over what “energy dominance” means. “They have politicized clean energy,” he said, “which is honestly just a very weird and illogical thing to do, because clean energy is much, much cheaper than fossil fuels, and we need as much energy on the grid as possible right now.”
