The Sprouse family farm covers thousands of acres of fertile glacial till, remnants of the last ice age, in northwestern Missouri. Each day, billions of cubic feet of natural gas and hundreds of thousands of barrels’ worth of crude oil pass underneath its fields and cow pastures. The only visible signs of this subterranean activity are three posts—one metal and two plastic—spaced about thirty feet apart along a barbed-wire fence at the edge of a field. Each corresponds to a pipeline, and each has a warning label with a number to call in an emergency. “At least the pipelines are out of sight, even if they aren’t out of mind,” Loren Sprouse, the youngest of three Sprouse brothers, said one morning in May as we were driving around in a utility terrain vehicle. “We’d rather have them than the transmission line.”
The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028.
One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines and winning over landowners—or, if they can’t be won over, then deciding whether and when the need for a given project outweighs their concerns. “The scale of the undertaking and the speed at which it needs to occur are incredibly daunting,” Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at Columbia Law School, told me. “We’re talking about a massive build-out of new, large-scale infrastructure across the country, and we need to do it, like, yesterday.”
Sprouse and I headed south on a gravel road, past a tumbledown chicken coop and a white farmhouse that his grandparents had moved into in 1911. Across the way, his brother Weldon was servicing a tractor. The brothers had finished planting their corn crop a couple of weeks earlier; soybeans were next. We got out at the top of a hill above the farmhouse. To the east was a machine shed and several rows of hay bales, to the west a green pasture. “I was going to build my retirement home right here,” Sprouse said, leaning against a fence post. “Could you ask for a better view?” He told me that he abandoned his plans for the house after he learned that the Grain Belt Express would be built directly in front of it. As we spoke, a surveying team subcontracted by Invenergy pulled up in two white pickup trucks. They had come to search for archeological remains along the planned route, a step required by the National Historic Preservation Act. Sprouse asked them to come back another day.
Sprouse said that he wasn’t against renewable energy, but he couldn’t support something that would interfere with his family’s farming operations and, in his words, “be the dominant scar on the landscape.” The transmission towers that Invenergy plans to build are around a hundred and fifty feet tall. One of Sprouse’s main concerns is whether G.P.S.-guided equipment, like tractors and combines, would work near them. (A 2012 study from the University of Calgary suggests that they will.) He’s also worried about how the line could affect aerial spraying and his ability to maintain a pond…
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