Invenergy Project Gets Green Light

Missouri-based attorney Douglas Healy serves at Healy Law Offices in Springfield, where he monitors a team of four attorneys responsible for handling state and federal actions relating to utility law, energy law, and environmental torts. Over the years, attorney Douglas Healy and his team have represented several large entities, including Invenergy and the Missouri Joint Municipal Electric Utility Commission (MJMEUC).

Some 40 other municipal utilities represented by the MJMEUC will benefit from Invenergy’s new Grain Belt Express transmission line. This project, which will stretch over 200 miles through northern Missouri, will deliver wind energy from Kansas to Indiana and Illinois as well as Missouri, saving utilities nearly $13 million a year for a period of 20 years.

The project will cross the property of 570 landowners in Missouri, who pursued a lawsuit against the project in the Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District. This appeal was joined by the Missouri Farm Bureau as a challenge to the Public Service Commission’s (PSC’s) unanimous decision to grant the project a certificate of convenience and necessity. This action recognized the project as being in the public interest and allowed for the use of eminent domain to construct the line.

In a ruling issued at the end of 2019, the appeals court found that the PSC did not make an error in granting the certificate to the Grain Belt Express project, as argued by landowners and the Farm Bureau. With this ruling, Invenergy, the company building the transmission line, received a green light to move forward with its project.