For seven years, Michael Polsky has been trying to build a high-voltage power line from the windswept prairies of Kansas to the ravenous
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electrical grids of the Midwest and East Coast.He brings plenty of firepower to the task.
His Chicago-based company Invenergy is the country’s largest privately held generator of renewable power. And his investors include Blackstone, the world’s biggest private equity firm.
But it’s been a seesaw battle, and the outcome is still in doubt.
One of the main problems for Polsky’s power line is that it needs to cross lots of farmland in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. And lots of farmers hate the idea of eminent domain, especially when it’s a private developer such as Polsky who wants their land.
The Grain Belt Express has filed nearly 50 eminent domain lawsuits to obtain the right-of-way it needs in Missouri alone, according to Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general. Most of these cases have been settled, but emotions still run high. In Illinois, the state Supreme Court is also preparing to weigh in.
On July 2, Bailey opened an investigation into the Grain Belt Express for making false claims. Invenergy was grabbing land, he said in an earlier statement, “to satisfy the greed of private investors.’’
President Donald Trump followed up by canceling a loan guarantee for the transmission line. The president also accelerated the phase out of hefty tax credits for wind and solar farms, including those whose power the line was intended to carry.
Still, experts say that among all the energy developers in the United States, Polsky may be best equipped to navigate today’s treacherous political waters.
He’s got deep-pocketed Wall Street backers and an enormous tailwind in the prospect of soaring electricity prices for the foreseeable future. He can revert faster than most to any of the power plant technologies he’s already mastered, and to some still on the drawing board.
These include natural gas, which he may hook up to his Grain Belt Express after facing a backlash from Republican lawmakers over his ties to wind power, according to Bloomberg News. He may ship power from coal plants too, Bloomberg said.
“Polsky has always been ahead of the curve. He was one of the early entrants in utility-scale renewables and one of the first in utility-scale batteries,” said Mark Pruitt, an energy consultant.
Pruitt is the former head of the Illinois Power Agency. This state agency procures affordable power for low-income residents. “Nobody is always right all the time,” he said. “But Polsky has been right enough to continuously build his company.”
With the Grain Belt Express, Polsky is not just trying to build an 804-mile power line that starts in Kansas and ends just east of the Illinois line in Indiana. He’s planting the flag of private equity in a transmission business that up till now has mostly been the exclusive preserve of regulated utilities.
The power line would carry 5 gigawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of four nuclear reactors.
Polsky declined the baiduhai’s interview requests. In an Inc. magazine profile last month, he presented himself as an engineer above all, a pragmatist more than an environmentalist, and someone planning to stay as governments come and go.
“Policies that make it more difficult,” he told the magazine, “are like facing a headwind for the first few miles of a marathon.”
Polsky will face another test of his political skill in October when the Illinois legislature, tormented by rising electricity rates, could vote on renewable-energy type credits for transmission lines, including the Grain Belt Express.
Farmers fight eminent domain
In Rosamond, Illinois, 35 miles southwest of Decatur, Joe Gleespen has been fighting the Grain Belt Express ever since he first heard of an initial version in 2014.
He’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit that successfully blocked the certificate of public necessity that the Illinois Commerce Commission had issued for the transmission line. Invenergy has appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court to restore the certificate, and a ruling could be a year away, according to Paul Neilan, a Bannockburn attorney representing Gleespen.
An adverse ruling could end Invenergy’s ability to build the transmission line in Illinois.
From the bay window in his gray, three-bedroom farmhouse, Gleespen looks south toward his neighbor’s cornfield, which is about the length of a football field away.
The Grain Belt Express aims to acquire about a third of this space, potentially through eminent domain, and construct transmission towers that could be as tall as 10-story buildings all along the south and west borders of his property.
The Grain Belt Express project calls for work crews to have access to any part of the 160-acre farm at any time. But the price the company is offering is “far below” the going rate for land in Christian County, according to Gleespen. And it’s only for the 16 acres that would make up the transmission right-of-way, not the whole farm.
Gleespen, 71, and his wife Lucy, 66, moved to the farm when they got married in 1980, seven years after his father had purchased it, and they raised their two daughters there. Their soybean plants now have leaves of deep green, a color indicating robust health. The plants stand about 42 inches tall, as if preening for the harvest just weeks away.
Gleespen has spent the last decade fighting not just the Grain Belt Express but also a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline on a separate piece of property he owns nearby. He still wakes up at night, he said, to jot down notes on how to preserve his farms.
It’s not just that Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois legislature, in his view, should never have allowed a private company such as Invenergy to wield eminent domain. It’s also that he’s not convinced that power from the Grain Belt Express would be green, affordable or even necessary.
All Illinoisans should be reducing their environmental footprint, Gleespen said, just as he and Lucy did by installing geothermal heating and air conditioning 20 years ago. Small nuclear reactors located near data centers, he said, could reduce the need for interstate transmission.
Gleespen is part of overlapping networks of like-minded farmers in Christian County and across the state. Christian County voted for Trump 3-1 last year and has recently begun requiring high-voltage operators, such as Invenergy, to bear the added expense of burying their future transmission lines.
“It’ll be a long and drawn-out affair for Grain Belt,” Gleespen said. “Even if they beat us in the Supreme Court, they’ll have to drag people into court on every one of those eminent domain cases.”
According to Neilan, the Illinois Supreme Court case will turn on a simple question — how much proof should Invenergy be required to present to state regulators to demonstrate it has the funds to complete a project that, if approved, would allow the company to go to court to seize property from farmers.
“The Illinois Commerce Commission dismissed out of hand the landowners’ concerns about having their property involuntarily taken from them for what amounts to a venture capital project,” Neilan said. “You don’t know whether they can even do this project.”
Brad Klein, a managing attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago, predicted that the court will side with the ICC. The legislature established the commission in the first place, Klein said, as an independent panel with the necessary skills for making this kind of complex policy decision.
In Illinois and Missouri, opponents claim Invenergy has grossly overstated the potential benefits of the Grain Belt Express by counting how much it could save on a federal carbon tax that never had much chance of being enacted, even before Trump took office.
Experts say companies routinely include a carbon tax in their future cost projections, if only as a proxy for the many ways climate change will affect how they operate. An Invenergy spokeswoman declined to respond to written questions about the carbon tax and other issues.
In his announcement in Missouri last month, Bailey specifically included carbon tax savings as one of what he called the false Invenergy claims that he needs to investigate.
On Monday, Trump named Bailey co-deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But as Bailey’s replacement, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe chose Catherine Hanaway
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, the lead counsel for the Grain Belt Express and a former Republican speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, according to a report in the Missouri Independent.In a Grain Belt Express statement last month, Hanaway called Bailey’s investigation of the transmission line “unlawful and politically motivated.’’
On Tuesday, she told reporters she’ll recuse herself from Grain Belt Express deliberations when she becomes attorney general early next month.
The shakeup may help Polsky. But even the setback with Bailey’s inquiry came two years after the Missouri Public Service Commission gave its final approval to the Grain Belt Express, and seven years after the state’s Supreme Court declined to block the transmission line.
“If projects can’t count on certainty even after being approved and reviewed upon appeal, America can’t count on ever getting steel in the ground,” Invenergy said in a blog post. “America will lose the test of its will to build.”
The art of making electricity
For Polsky, to generate electricity is literally to live the American Dream.
He fled Soviet-controlled Ukraine in 1976 and arrived in Detroit with $500 in his pocket. A decade later, while a night student at the University of Chicago business school, he started a company that designed power plants. That is what he’d been trained to do in Kiev.
He quickly mastered the art of making electricity using everything from natural gas-driven turbines to wind and solar farms to storage batteries.
Today at age 76, he’s so rich that research institutes bearing his name are fighting cancer, teaching entrepreneurship and documenting how Jews died during the Holocaust.
From a glass skyscraper overlooking the South Branch of the Chicago River, Polsky manages 2,800 employees worldwide. He operates 212 generating and battery storage projects with a total capacity of 34 gigawatts. That’s enough to power 12 million homes.
On top of that, Polsky’s pipeline of future projects was worth $150 billion last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
To gain a sense of the technical challenges Polsky has overcome, a good starting point is Rock Falls, a village 115 miles west of Chicago.
Polsky bought a half-built natural gas plant out of bankruptcy there in 2004, opened it a decade later and has since expanded its capacity to produce 980 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to that of a typical nuclear reactor.
Then, in 2022, Polsky began building a solar farm nearby to generate electricity for making hydrogen. The renewable energy credits he earned help finance the project.
Since then, he’s used green hydrogen to cool his natural gas turbines in Rock Falls. He plans to produce hydrogen for other markets such as chemicals and liquid fuels, according to an Invenergy statement.
Polsky’s excursion into the world of transmission lines became possible in 2009 when federal regulators first allowed private companies — so-called merchant operators — to build them.
Congress had fueled Polsky’s early career in 1992 by allowing private ownership of power plants.
Transmission lines are tougher because they cross more land with more people, said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based energy consultancy.
Most transmission lines today are built by federally supervised regional grid operators such as Midwest Independent System Operator and PJM Interconnection. Each of these covers several states. In Illinois, PJM encompasses the northern fifth of the state, including the Chicago area. MISO covers the remainder of the state.
PJM and MISO routinely do forecasts on their long-term transmission needs, and they can order local utilities to help foot the bill.
Regulated utilities don’t face the same complaints from disgruntled farmers that they’re protecting greedy investors more than the public interest. But they’re still government-sanctioned monopolies. They rarely move as fast as private operators such as Polsky, or with the same tolerance for risk.
To keep up with accelerating demand from data centers and advanced manufacturers, the United States should be adding transmission lines four times faster than it is, Gramlich said.
Even today, transmission line developers are hopeful for some assistance from the administration, he said.
Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright has declared transmission to be a priority. Various administration officials are focused on expanding the grid to enable the U.S. to win the artificial intelligence race with China, Gramlich said.
The Grain Belt Express would be a so-called high-voltage, direct current line, or HVDC. Among other things, this would allow power not just to flow to the east when the wind blows in Kansas, but also back to the west when a winter storm knocks out the state’s electrical grid, something that happened in 2021.
“There’s good nuclear in Illinois, very good wind energy to the west, and solar in different parts of the state and the region,” Gramlich said. “So if you just look at the optimum power system configuration, it calls for a lot of transmission in that region.”
The wind and solar tax credits Trump is phasing out can be worth up to 50% of the capitalized cost of such projects, energy industry officials say.
“Any energy project that thought they had a tax credit or a grant or a loan, I think the developer has to go back and reevaluate their project economics,’’ Gramlich said.
Before Trump even took office, Invenergy and its partners canceled an $11 billion underground transmission line intended to transport wind, solar, and hydro power from upstate New York to the borough of Queens in New York City.
The company is still planning overhead lines in Oklahoma and New Mexico. And it’s ready to break ground on the Grain Belt Express next year, assuming that all the financing and federal permits can be secured, according to its website.
In Missouri and Kansas, Invenergy has acquired 95% of the land it needs mostly through voluntary agreements, the company said in a statement. And it’s still seeking private financing for the Grain Belt Express.
“With the loan guarantee, the federal government was saying, `we’ll act as a backstop. We’ll guarantee that we’ll pay a certain price,’” said Chaz Teplin, head of power-grid analysis at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental research group in Basalt, Colorado.
Invenergy is talking with anyone who’s willing to make the same guarantee to buy power, Teplin said.
“For some companies like hyper-scalers and data center builders, power is a small portion of their costs,’’ he said. “We’ve seen this type of company willing to pay a premium for reliable and clean energy, as their facilities remain profitable.’’
Invenergy and Facebook parent Meta, to cite one example, already have close ties. In June, Invenergy agreed to supply an additional 791 megawatts of solar and wind energy for Meta’s data centers in Ohio, Arkansas and Texas. And both companies have a growing interest in nuclear power.
Meta is considering whether to help Constellation Energy expand its nuclear power station in Clinton, Illinois, according to a baiduhai report in June. And Polsky recently told Inc. magazine he can already build everything for a nuclear plant except the reactor itself and may try to compete in this area.
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The glass may be half full for Polsky in other ways, said Chris Seiple, vice chairman of Wood Mackenzie, a Boston-based research and data company.
“The renewables industry is very lucky that two things are happening as they are losing these tax credits,” Seiple said.
“The first is all the demand growth from artificial intelligence. And the second is that the cost of building a gas-fired, combined-cycle power plant has nearly doubled in the past three or four years,” he said.
“That means the cost of what renewables are competing with has become so much higher that they are largely competitive to meet the new demand growth without having to get the tax credit,” Seiple said.
Solar, wind and battery storage in the United States are now so affordable they accounted for 93% of all new capacity added to the country’s electricity grids last year, according to CleanView, a Miami-based research group.
A looming shortfall
Illinois remains a net energy exporter thanks to its 11 nuclear reactors, the most of any state.
However, a shortfall is looming as data center demand skyrockets and the state begins closing 28 gigawatts of coal- and natural-gas-generating plants by 2045 to improve air quality. The Trump administration may try to delay these closings. But in a recent study, the Illinois Power Agency projected steep increases in monthly bills over the next quarter-century to reserve future generating capacity for regional power grids.
The 5 gigawatts of power that Polsky wants to pump through his Grain Belt Express won’t solve the Illinois shortfall, as half of the power is being dropped off in Missouri, according to media reports in that state, and the rest will be shared among three regional grids and an electricity co-op that serve dozens of states.
Still, the comprehensive energy bill that the legislature is scheduled to take up in October could pave the way for renewable energy-type credits for the Grain Belt Express and Soo Green line, said Jen Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council. Soo Green is a transmission line that would run underground alongside a railroad track from Mason City, Iowa, to Yorkville, Illinois.
The comprehensive energy bill would also upgrade the state’s battery storage and energy efficiency programs.
“Labor hasn’t actively supported the bill yet, so one thing that could be helpful would be something labor is excited about, and some of that could be building more transmission,” Walling said.
Marc Poulos, a labor quarterback in Springfield, described the Grain Belt Express and Soo Green lines as “great projects.”
Poulos is the executive director of labor-management operations for International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150.
Walling’s environmental coalition has already endorsed the Grain Belt Express. But she said she won’t know if the coalition can support future transmission line credits until it learns more from state regulators about how much the program will cost.
Legislators are especially sensitive about costs after double-digit rate increases in June at ComEd and Ameren, and with pending votes on, among other things, the Chicago transit system’s budget shortfall.
“We want more transmission, but we need to spend our dollars wisely,” Walling said.
So, besides finding private financing for the Grain Belt Express in the next few months, Polsky will have to convince worried legislators in his home state that the project can deliver affordable electricity even in the face of Trump’s relentless attacks.
Polsky has been preparing for this test for a long time.
According to Inc. magazine, he chose to specialize in renewable energy and storage not just because they’re carbon-free, but also because — unlike fossil fuels — they’re at the dawn of vast efficiencies that come with mass production.
And Polsky has $2.5 billion in the bank, according to Forbes magazine. He can afford to be patient.
“An energy project takes years to develop and build, and operates for decades,” he told Inc. magazine. “So we take that long view.
“At the end of the day, technology listens to the market, not politicians.”
John Lippert is a freelancer.