St Louis Post Dispatch: Missouri faces hard choice: Renewable energy highways, or property rights?
An uncomfortable decision looms for Missouri regulators, one that pits state property rights against the renewable energy that would help in the fight against climate change.
For five years, Houston-based Clean Line Energy Partners has worked to win approval for the Grain Belt Express transmission line in the states it would cross: Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.
The independent transmission developer says it needs the right to use eminent domain, just like utilities, in order to keep a 780-mile infrastructure project from being scuttled by one landowner unwilling to sell it an easement.
Instead, one state — Missouri — could end up blocking it.
The issue has divided the Missouri Public Service Commission. Members laid out their positions on the cross-state transmission line earlier this month, indicating a 3-2 vote may derail a project whose developers say would bring Kansas wind energy east to the grid.
Indiana and Kansas have both said yes to the line that eastern population centers would need to tap the wind energy of the Great Plains. While Illinois regulators are still considering it, the state has already given preliminary approval to one of Clean Line’s other projects from Iowa.
