SPP’s $8.6 billion 765-kilovolt buildout will reshape Midwest land and tax base

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — On November 5, 2025, the Southwest Power Pool Board of Directors approved $8.6 billion in 2025 Integrated Transmission Plan (ITP) projects, a larger annual Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) package than the $7.7 billion plan SPP’s board approved the year before. Central to the portfolio, in SPP’s own words, is “the development of a regional 765 kilovolt (kV) backbone: an efficient, scalable solution for long-distance power delivery.” That $8.6 billion sits on top of the $7.7 billion 2024 ITP, which the SPP board approved in October 2024 and which alone added more than 2,000 miles of new and upgraded transmission lines.

SPP describes a single 765 kV line as able to “carry four times the power of a 345 kV line while using less land and losing less energy over long distances.” The organization frames the buildout as a response to demand. Electricity use across SPP’s 14-state region, it says, is expected to double over the next decade, and “even under conservative assumptions, SPP forecasts a 35% increase in demand.” SPP projects $12 to $18 in benefits for every $1 invested through the 2025 ITP.

The forcing function behind plans this big is federal. On May 13, 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 1920, the first major overhaul of regional transmission planning since Order No. 1000 in 2011. Order 1920 requires RTOs like SPP to develop at least three long-term scenarios “using best available data inputs and no less than a 20-year transmission planning horizon,” reassessed every five years. Order 1920-A, issued November 21, 2024, expanded the role of state regulators, and Order 1920-B followed on April 11, 2025.

Crucially, Order 1920 tells transmission planners what to put into those 20-year scenarios. Seven mandatory factors include federal, state, local, and tribal “laws on decarbonization and electrification,” state-approved utility integrated resource plans, and policy goals that affect long-term transmission needs. The rule also permits a cost allocation method, agreed to by the relevant state entities, that “may allocate incremental costs to states with applicable laws, policies, and regulations that encourage or require the development or use of such resources.” In plain language, states whose policies drive the buildout can be assigned more of the bill for the lines built to move their generation.

That is the national framework. On the ground in Kansas, Virginia Macha, founder of Stand 4 the Land Kansas, told Kim Monson what it looks like at the fence line on the April 16 episode of The Kim Monson Show. Monson, introducing the segment, called it “one of the biggest land grabs that I have ever seen with these industrial transmission lines.” Macha agreed: “And this isn’t just Kansas. This is the entire Midwest.” She said the lines SPP wants to build are 765 kilovolt lines. On air she characterized the current as “DC,” though SPP’s own description of the 765 kV backbone places it in the extra-high-voltage alternating-current class (the press release benchmarks the 765 kV line against 345 kV AC transmission and does not use the HVDC label). She also said the SPP footprint runs “north to south of our country’s borders, east to west,” a broader characterization than SPP’s 14-state Midwest-to-plains territory.

Her central ground-level claim is harder to dispute. “Those solar fields will be thousands and thousands of farm ground acres,” Macha said, “taking out of food production.”

That impact is amplified by how Kansas taxes renewable generation. Under K.S.A. 79-201 Eleventh, all property “actually and regularly used predominantly to produce and generate electricity utilizing renewable energy resources or technologies” is exempt from all property and ad valorem taxes. For applications filed after December 31, 2016, the exemption runs for the 10 taxable years immediately following the project’s construction. Renewable resources are defined in the statute to include “wind, solar, photovoltaic, biomass, hydropower, geothermal and landfill gas.”

The mechanism is straightforward: counties set levies on a smaller taxable base, so the same cost of schools, roads, and sheriffs spreads across fewer taxpayers. Macha put it bluntly on the show. “That property tax they’re missing is being pushed to the regular guy.” She cited state Department of Revenue paperwork that she said shows Kansas generated $5 billion in new property-tax reassessment revenue in 2022 and roughly $7 billion the following year, figures that could not be independently verified from accessible state sources as of publication.

The transmission lines themselves, separate from the generation, ride on a different statute. K.S.A. 17-618 authorizes electric corporations to appropriate land for transmission of power “by electrical current,” with right-of-way for “wires or cables” that “may be laid, carried or stretched on, through or over any land or lot.” Any company “holding a certificate of convenience as a public utility issued by the state corporation commission” qualifies. That is the legal hook that makes eminent domain available to utilities building the SPP-approved lines once the Kansas Corporation Commission signs off on a route.

SPP’s own framing of what rides on those wires is more mixed than its critics allow. The November 2025 press release states that the 2025 ITP “supports the interconnection of new generation resources” and “includes many dispatchable resources such as natural gas units queued in SPP’s generator interconnection study process.” SPP’s 2025 accredited generating capacity is 48.4% natural gas, 32.7% coal, 8.4% wind, 4.5% hydro, 3.0% nuclear, and 0.8% solar. Wind produced a larger share of actual 2025 energy, 36.7%, because wind runs when it runs and its capacity factor is high; but the nameplate mix is still majority thermal. The 765 kV backbone, per SPP, is a general reliability investment, not a renewables-only export conduit.

The scope claims about Kansas specifically come from Stand 4 the Land Kansas, not from SPP. The organization’s homepage says 63 Kansas counties are targeted for 56 industrial solar, 46 industrial wind, and 27 battery storage projects, together producing 150,000 megawatts “in conjunction with the Regional Partner the Southwest Power Pool.” The minimum land required to produce that quantity of power, according to the group, is 1.3 million acres for wind and 136,000 acres for solar. SPP has not publicly confirmed those totals; the group derives them from county-by-county aggregations of SPP generator interconnection queue entries.

What happens next is procedural but consequential. SPP itself “does not own or build transmission.” Its board approves the plan, staff issue Notification to Construct letters to member transmission owners within a four-year financial commitment horizon, and state siting authorities like the Kansas Corporation Commission approve individual line routes. FERC Order 1920 compliance filings, cost allocation negotiations, and state consultation requirements are ongoing. Landowners and homeowners who want to track it can follow SPP’s ITP notices and Stand 4 the Land Kansas’s county-by-county spreadsheets.