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Bailey is also asking state utility regulators at the Missouri Public Service Commission to “reevaluate the purported benefit” of the project and potentially revoke its approval.

The 800-mile Grain Belt Express project would ease transmission bottlenecks by bridging seams in the nation’s power grid, and would bring cheap wind energy from the Plains to areas of high electricity demand, farther east. The project would stretch from wind-rich parts of western Kansas across Missouri and Illinois before reaching its eastern terminus in Indiana.

Although the project has faced years of hurdles and delays, it has secured approval in all four states it would traverse, with construction targeted to start next year. Invenergy, the transmission line’s Chicago-based developer, already has deals with municipal utilities seeking cheaper power through the project, guaranteed by contracts.

Invenergy says that the project would produce $52 billion in energy cost savings for U.S. consumers over 15 years.

In his Tuesday letter to the PSC, Bailey claimed that “Grain Belt presented, at best speculative and faulty, or at worst intentionally fraudulent information in their application, including in their impact analysis.”

A PSC spokesman said the agency is “reviewing the request.”

Bailey’s demand letter to Invenergy, sent last week, seeks a range of documents and communications focused largely on its calculations of cost savings and economic benefits tied to the multi-state power line.

Invenergy said it is reviewing the demand from Bailey, while continuing with project development. The company called Bailey’s move “a last-ditch and obviously politically-driven attempt” to delay the project, in a statement.

“We should be building energy infrastructure in America, but the Missouri Attorney General is instead playing politics with U.S. power,” Martin Grego, a spokesman for Grain Belt Express, said in the emailed statement. “Electricity demand is rising across the country, and we urgently need transmission infrastructure to deliver power. Projects like Grain Belt Express are the answer to providing all forms of affordable and reliable electricity to U.S. consumers.”

Indeed, energy experts widely acknowledge the need for new transmission capacity in the U.S. — a constraint that Grain Belt would help address.

Invenergy has reached access agreements with landowners along much of the project’s path, including 1,500 voluntarily signed easements in Kansas and Missouri, the company said.

Meanwhile, the project is tied to nearly 50 eminent domain lawsuits against landowners along its route in Missouri, Bailey said Wednesday.

Bailey’s recent actions are merely the latest in a yearslong list of attempts to derail the project, from lawmakers and others.

In March, Bailey wrote to Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, asking for an investigation into the $4.9 billion conditional loan guaranteed to the project last year by the U.S. Department of Energy.

But Grain Belt has plenty of bipartisan support — plus economic appeal to the utilities and consumers who have lined up for the cheaper power promised by the project.

As recently as May, for instance, the White House touted the project’s announced $1.7 billion in contractor awards among a weekly “list of wins,” with supportive comments also from the Congressional Energy and Commerce Committee, and Missouri Speaker of the House Jon Patterson.

And in Missouri alone, 39 municipal utilities — predominantly in small towns in rural areas, in addition to Kirkwood — have deals with Grain Belt.