The Kansas Corporation Commission told Evergy this week that a proposed 133-mile transmission line can move ahead through Sedgwick and Sumner County — but not along a proposed path that would have traveled through native grasslands in the Flint Hills.
“The Commission takes seriously any activity that has the potential to permanently and adversely affect the Flint Hills or other unique ecological regions of the state,” the commission said in an order filed Tuesday.
The order puts a pause on a major transmission project that is intended to bring high-voltage power lines through hundreds of miles of Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Commission officials said construction can begin on the sections of the line in Sedgwick and Sumner counties, but can’t move further east than U.S. Highway 77 into an area that it said contains the “sensitive ecosystem of the Flint Hills and the unique oil and gas operations in Cowley and Chautauqua counties.”
Evergy applied for a siting permit with the commission in November. The utility company planned to build a $493 million transmission line from the Buffalo Flats substation in Garden Plain to an interconnection point in Delaware, Oklahoma.
Evergy’s proposed line is a 345 kilovolt line, a high-voltage line that serves as a kind of energy highway through the electrical network.
The route Evergy proposed would have gone south from Garden Plain down to Wellington, east just north of Arkansas City and then south to the Kansas-Oklahoma border. From there, other utility providers would be part of an effort to build additional transmission lines connecting Delaware, Oklahoma, to Monett, Missouri, and then to Branson, Missouri.
In Kansas, the route was set to cut through 35 miles of tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills and through Cross Timbers landscapes in the Chautauqua Hills.
Evergy employees told the commission the line was a necessary project in order to improve the electrical grid’s regional reliability.
Energy providers testified to the commission over the course of several months that the line would help respond to voltage issues in Branson, Missouri. They said that they also expected it to reduce the likelihood of energy overload or voltage issues in southeastern Kansas and southern Missouri and reduce energy costs for Kansas customers.
A group of Kansas landowners and ranchers disagreed with Evergy’s description of the benefits. They told the commission in a series of public meetings that they felt the biggest beneficiaries were Missourians and that the utility company had underestimated the potential impact the project could have on the Kansas environment.
“The remaining four percent of the Tallgrass prairie — two-thirds of which is in Kansas — the Flint Hills ecosystem — is a national treasure that deserves a far more thorough and comprehensive analysis than has been presented by Evergy,” the landowners wrote in a brief to the commission.
The landowners urged the commission to require Evergy to abandon the Flint Hills route and instead consider circumnavigating the prairie land in a route that would need to travel much further south.
In its order this week, the commission said Evergy must conduct a new route study for the eastern portion of the proposed transmission line. That study has to consider “the unique ecology, topology, and cultural history of the Flint Hills” as well as potential damage to trees, wetlands, preservation areas and native soils and grasses.
The commission gave Evergy until June 12 to provide an updated schedule for that study as well as construction of the line. The project is expected to be online by 2029.
