LAMAR — The land runs deep in southeastern Colorado.
For Bob Bamber, the connection goes back to his great-great-grandfather, who homesteaded north of Pritchett, a tiny Baca County town of barely 100 people not far from the Oklahoma state line.
So the 44-year-old rancher took notice when he found out that a portion of the 10,000 acres of ranchland he and his father own and lease in neighboring Prowers County had been placed in a zone designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a potential high-voltage electric transmission corridor.
And he got agitated.
“It’s an emotional reaction because of that family connection,” said Bamber, bouncing in his truck along dirt roads that slice through prairie dotted with cedar trees, yucca and prickly pear cactus. “It sounds cliche, but you are part of the land out here.”
His worry echoes that of his over-the-fence neighbor. Val Emick fears that a transmission corridor, with towering pylons marching from New Mexico into three rural Colorado counties — Baca, Prowers and Kiowa — could disturb a fragile short-grass prairie landscape in the state’s far-southeast corner, lowering land values and disrupting ranching and farming operations that span generations.
“You go out seven days a week, and you build it and want to pass it down to your kids and your grandkids — it seems unfair,” said Emick, who has lived in the same house south of Lamar for 35 years and runs a cow-calf operation on some 5,000 acres. “And they come in with that threat.”
That threat is eminent domain — the power the government has to condemn and take land for public uses, like the construction of highways and other infrastructure. It must pay fair market value to the property owner for the land.
No determination has been made about the use of eminent domain to accommodate electric transmission lines as part of the Energy Department’s National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors initiative, or NIETC. But people in this part of the state have fresh and raw memories of the specter of condemnation that hung over the U.S. Army’s plan to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, northeast of Trinidad, nearly 20 years ago.
After both of Colorado’s U.S. senators expressed opposition to involuntary land sales for the expansion, the idea was scuttled in 2013.
“The biggest concern we have is eminent domain,” Prowers County Commissioner Ron Cook recently told The Denver Post inside the county courthouse in Lamar. “We’ve got third- and fourth-generation farmers and ranchers running these properties, and we sure don’t want them run off their land.”
The concern over the NIETC proposal brought a crowd out to the same courthouse last month. Some in the room, including Cook, said they had only recently learned of the project. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from the federal government.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert joined the meeting via video link and told the attendees she would push back hard on the corridor designation.
In an email to the Post this month, the Republican congresswoman said she reached out to newly confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fellow Coloradan, and got the public input period for the project extended from mid-February to April 15. In a Feb. 10 letter to Wright, Boebert said what was started under the Biden administration should be looked at again, with an option for the agency under President Donald Trump’s new administration to “shut this project down.”
“We can all agree that access to reliable energy is important for the health and prosperity of rural Coloradans, but that doesn’t mean we need to be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach dictated by D.C. bureaucrats who have failed to include community leaders in this process,” she said.
“Very important corridor” for grid
The NIETC program, which Congress authorized in 2005, tasks the Department of Energy with identifying areas of the country where transmission is lacking. It’s charged with determining where infrastructure is “urgently needed to advance important national interests, such as increased electric reliability and reduced consumer costs,” according to the program’s website.
Impacts from a compromised electric grid include more frequent and longer power outages and higher prices for energy due to a lack of capacity to move lower-cost electricity from where it is produced to where it is needed, the website says.
So far, no NIETC corridors have been established in the United States.
The Post asked the Department of Energy for comment via multiple phone and email requests but received no response. The department’s latest designation effort began last May with the release of a list of 10 possible transmission corridors, based on a National Transmission Needs Study that was completed in 2023.
That list was winnowed in December to three corridors, including what is known as the Southwestern Grid Connector — which would run up the eastern edge of New Mexico, scrape the western edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and pierce the southeast corner of Colorado.
The other two NIETC corridors being considered are in the Lake Erie portion of Pennsylvania and across parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska.
The Department of Energy says the Southwest Grid Connector could be anywhere from three miles to 15 miles wide, though the ultimate transmission line built would cover far less land. The corridor, the government says, is designed to follow existing transmission line rights-of-way for parts of its path.
“It’s a very important corridor,” said Adam Kurland, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in federal energy policy. “It’s probably the one that adds the most value to the grid.”
The Southwestern Grid Connector would help link the nation’s eastern and western interconnections, Kurland said, and would provide the ability “to exchange more power and serve a national grid.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the eastern interconnection operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains while the western interconnection covers states west of the Rockies.
“There’s very limited transfer between these two interconnects,” Kurland said. “There’s a lot of value for doing that, for reliability of the grid and for resilience against weather systems. You could more easily move power and supply power where it’s needed.”
More data centers, fewer coal plants
Grid Strategies, a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the company, are power-hungry data centers and manufacturing facilities.
A study that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden participated in last fall concluded that the U.S. transmission system — consisting of a half-million miles of power lines — will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers.
And a 2024 report by the nonprofit North American Electric Corp. determined that about half the continent was at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years. That risk comes as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity increases.
In Colorado, coal plants across the state have been shut down in recent years as worries about their climate-warming emissions escalate. All are expected to close by the end of 2030.
“The more transmission we build, the more flexibility and resilience we create,” said Mark Gabriel, the president and CEO of the Brighton-based electric cooperative United Power.
For eight years, Gabriel headed the Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells and conveys electricity across 17,000 miles of transmission lines to 15 western and central states.
“As coal goes away, we still need to move electrons,” he said. “How do we meet a growing demand at the same time we’re closing down generator resources?”
The state’s future demands on electric power are ambitious. While campaigning for his first term in office, Gov. Jared Polis said he wanted all of the power on Colorado’s electric grid to come from renewable energy sources by 2040. Rules adopted by Denver and the state aim to eventually make buildings all-electric.
And Colorado, with its goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030, recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold.
“You want to have a diverse portfolio of generation resources, and that portfolio is helped by more transmission,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t (achieve that) unless we have projects like this, and others, constructed.”
Farmers lament lack of “bargaining power”
But it’s how projects are constructed that matters to Steve Shelton, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher who lives about 10 miles south of Lamar. He grows wheat, corn and sorghum on 20,000 acres.
Shelton, 69, was on the other side of the transmission debate about 15 years ago, when he joined neighboring ranchers in exploring deals with a wind farm near Kit Carson to string electric wires across land in the state’s southeast corner.
“We had some farmers who said ‘No,’ and we’d have to find another path or sweeten the pot,” he said of the effort, which eventually fizzled out.
With the shadow of eminent domain in the mix this time, Shelton said, “you have no bargaining power.”
“They would get the development rights or the easement, and the farmer and rancher would have no income off of that,” he said.
The county’s fiscal health would also be impacted by a condemnation action by the government, said Prowers County Commissioner Roger Stagner, who served as mayor of Lamar for a decade. Taking land off the tax rolls would not only hit the county’s $41 million annual budget but would also have a ripple effect on the local economy, he said.
Boebert, in her Feb. 10 letter to the energy secretary, said the contemplated Southwestern Grid Connector would “affect approximately 325,000 acres of private land in Baca, Prowers and Kiowa counties in Colorado.” There are fewer than 20,000 residents combined in the three counties.
“Everything revolves around agriculture. If you’re going to take out that much land, it can affect the entire county,” Stagner said. “If there’s no alfalfa grown on that ground, that farmer doesn’t spend as much in town. That’s a big concern for us.”
Bamber, the Prowers County rancher, says he has no issue with the deployment of energy infrastructure across his property, so long as it’s done with full disclosure and landowner input. In fact, he and Emick, his neighbor, host dozens of wind turbines on their acreage that power the Twin Buttes wind farm.
“We’ve been able to live with the wind farm because they’ve compensated us,” Bamber said. “We’ve made the tradeoff for the money.”
Lease agreements they hammered out with the wind energy company to use their land made the deal palatable, Emick said.
“There was no hiding anything,” she said.
Broken trust, uncertain future
With the NIETC process already in the third of four phases, Cook is frustrated and befuddled that he and his fellow commissioners didn’t catch wind of the project before late January. That uncertainty has been a driving force behind much of the resistance to it among his constituents.
“That is what we’re struggling with — we have no idea how this is going to end up and what they’re going to do with it,” he said.
The Department of Energy describes the third phase of the designation process as the “public and governmental engagement phase.” During this period, the agency will decide the level of environmental review that applies to each NIETC project. It will conduct any required reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The agency conducted a webinar on the latest developments with the Southwestern Grid Connector in mid-January. And it issued a news release about the latest phase in December. But many in southeast Colorado think the federal government could have done a better job of outreach to local officials and property owners.
Some take hope in the success of opponents in Kansas last year who eliminated the Midwest-Plains and Plains-Southwest NIETC corridors that were part of the original 10 first proposed in the spring. U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, who represents that state’s 1st Congressional District, issued a statement in December after the Kansas transmission corridors were dropped.
“Kansans made it clear from the very beginning that we were not interested in the federal government seizing our private land,” Mann said, adding: “I’m glad our voices were heard in stopping this federal overreach.”
Boebert, in her letter to the energy secretary last month, cited Kansas’ resistance and urged the agency to “reconsider and halt further actions on current NIETC designations in Colorado initiated by the previous administration.”
That’s the right call, Bamber said.
“I’d like to see it just stopped — the trust is broken,” he said. “We’re an afterthought and we should have been partners in this.”
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.
