The Energy Department on Wednesday said it had terminated a conditional commitment to provide a $4.9 billion loan to a company building a contentious transmission line across the Midwest.
The cancellation may imperil the $11 billion project, known as Grain Belt Express, which would cross 800 miles of farmland and is designed to carry electricity generated by wind farms in Kansas to population centers in Illinois and Indiana.
It is the kind of infrastructure that experts say is necessary to update America’s aging electrical grid at a time of rising energy demand. If built, it would be the largest privately funded transmission line in the country’s history.
But the project, which is being developed by the Chicago-based company, Invenergy, has drawn intense backlash from some landowners and Republican lawmakers.
This month, in a conversation with President Trump in the Oval Office, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, pressed Mr. Trump to cancel the loan commitment. At Mr. Trump’s urging, Senator Hawley said, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he would do so.
In a statement, the Energy Department said that it determined “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.”
It added that “to ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources,” the department “has terminated its conditional commitment.”
“The Grain Belt Express boondoggle loan has been CANCELLED,” Senator Hawley posted on X.
Invenergy did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in a statement earlier this month, the company said the project fits with Mr. Trump’s “energy dominance agenda” and that Senator Hawley “is trying to deprive Americans of billions of dollars in energy cost savings, thousands of jobs, and grid reliability and national security, all in an era of exponentially growing electricity demand.”
The Grain Belt Express project has been in the works for more than a decade. For the past several years, Invenergy worked to secure agreements from regulators in all four states the line would traverse, as well as landowners.
Last year, during the final months of the Biden administration, the Energy Department offered the $4.9 billion loan commitment, a crucial piece of financing that made the long-awaited project appear primed to begin construction.
Then this month, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey, a Republican, said he was investigating the project and asked state regulators to rescind their approval for the project.
Garrett Hawkins, president of Missouri Farm Bureau, a group that had opposed the project, applauded the Energy Department’s decision.
“This move demonstrates a long-overdue recognition of the voices of rural communities who have consistently and clearly expressed their deep concerns about the project’s impact on their land, livelihoods and private property rights,” he said.
Mr. Bailey also applauded the news.
“If Invenergy wants to continue to pursue this project,” he said, “we’ll be there every step of the way to defend Missouri landowners and taxpayers from corporate abuse.”
David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
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