Dear Editor,
I am writing in response the article “Let’s Get Along.” My personal experience with Grain Belt Express and Clean Line Energy Partners is that “getting along” is NOT going to happen. The dishonesty that I have observed with this private investment firm assures me of this.
Should Clean Line Energy Partners (a private investment company that seeks eminent domain for private gain) be allowed to needlessly tear up precious farmland in order to place environmentally destructive wind farms and huge HVDC cancer causing power lines covering 700+ miles of land, decreasing home and land values, restricting agricultural usability and quality of life? Common sense tells me no.
I am a Missouri resident on one of the proposed Grain Belt routes. I sent my testimony to the KCC opposing this line in August because this 3500 megawatt power line would be only 300 feet from my front door! This testimony shares my personal dealings with Clean Line and how my husband and I were disrespectfully treated at our “Open” House meeting in Cameron, Mo. in July of this year. I was assaulted by Grain Belt’s hired armed, local, plain clothes cop and forcefully escorted out of the meeting for attempting to share documents that sited health and safety concerns of living too near HVDC lines. I was told that I had “NO FREE SPEECH RIGHTS!” at that meeting. What kind of business treats their associates in this manner?! Not any reputable one that I know. Is this a company that anyone, including Kansas, should want to do business with?
The demand for power is lessening as people are applying energy conservation methods that actually work, and are not intrusive like the miles of industrial HVDC power lines that Clean Line Energy projects propose. Read this: “Shocker: Power Demand from U.S. Homes is Falling”
My family built an energy efficient home. The products available to conserve energy are marvelous. With just a few simple lifestyle changes energy needs can be lessened, and money saved by energy conservation rather than promoting energy consumption, as Grain Belt Express and all her sister projects are set to do. Because of our “truly green” energy conservation efforts we have reduced our burden on the current grid. Our total household energy bill for August 2013 was $74, and we haven’t even put up our solar panels yet. This is far more effective environmentally and economically. Industrial wind energy is NOT economical as the costs far outweigh the return. The true reason industrial wind investors want to develop these intrusive large scale transmission lines is for money. It has nothing to do with saving the environment or the economy. It is wasteful and encroaches on personal property rights; the farmer’s and landowner’s livelihood. This is something that we can not afford in our continued depressed economy. Web-sites like “Stopillwind.org” debunks myths that wind developers are interested in only providing a public service. And where is that “service” going to go since 11 east coast governors have explicitly advised Congress that they do not want to buy Mid-west wind. Does Grain Belt not know that wind also blows on the east coast, too?
Our energy bills are sure to skyrocket should the KCC be foolish enough to allow these lines and Kansas will have a lot to answer for when it is revealed that Grain Belt services are only a bunch of lies and empty promises. So, do I think that we will all just be able to “get along?” Not without serious ethics classes taken by Grain Belt reps and everybody who works for them or promotes them.
Amy Harvey
Polo, Mo.