STERLING – A company that is planning electricity transmission lines across northern Illinois has reached an agreement with the state to lessen impacts on agriculture.
Rock Island Clean Line, a subsidiary of Houston-based Clean Line Energy Partners, has proposed preferred and alternate routes for the east-west lines.
Both would go 8 miles through the corner of Whiteside County, south of Erie. In Whiteside County, they merge. East of the Whiteside County portion, they would go through northern Henry and Bureau counties.
Farmers expressed concern about how the towers would impact their operations.
For its part, the Department of Agriculture wanted to make sure the company took care of problems it caused with farms’ drainage tiles and soil, said Terry Savko of the department’s Office of Farmland Protection.
“One of our biggest concerns was the number of poles per structure,” she said. “That was the stumbling block.”
The department believed that one-pole structures would have the least impact; the company ultimately decided to go with such towers, rather than those with four poles, with some exceptions, including turns, Savko said.
The agreement is the result of extensive consultation with landowners, agricultural organizations and the state, officials said.
“I’m pleased that we have reached agreement with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and that this is the first such agreement in Illinois to include special provisions for organic producers while also maintaining historic commitments to traditional producers,” Clean Line CEO Michael Skelly said in a statement.
Farmers contended the towers would impact the range of their pivot irrigation systems, reducing their productive acreage.
The state agricultural agreement doesn’t cover that issue, but Hans Detweiler, Clean Line’s director of development, said his company changed the routes so that they would only affect a couple of farms’ systems.
Clean Line, he said, would seek to compensate those farmers.
With the lines, the company plans to send power from wind farms in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota to population centers in Chicago and to the east. The lines would end near Morris, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago.
The company still needs to get approval for its project from the state Commerce Commission. A decision is expected early next year.
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