Developer Vows to Build Grain Belt Express Transmission Project Without Billions in Federal Loan Guarantees

August 6, 2025--Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The developer of the proposed Grain Belt Express merchant high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line spent more than a decade negotiating with Midwestern landowners and state utility regulators. Eventually, it was successful. Then the developer began negotiating with the Biden administration for a loan guarantee. In that, too, it was successful, last November winning a conditional $4.9 billion loan guarantee to build a transmission project to move up to 5,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity on an 800-mile journey, from Kansas through Missouri and Illinois to Indiana. But the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Energy terminated that loan guarantee July 23, asserting 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 the loan guarantee was "one of many conditional commitments that were rushed out the door in the final days of the Biden administration."