Editor’s Note: This story continues the Watchman’s series on energy development in Hale County and the Black Belt, including the $221 million EG Saturn solar farm near Newbern. This week: Alabama Power goes to court to survey a 722-acre farm in the path of its planned Lock Five to S. Bessemer transmission line, and, elsewhere in this edition, a second solar developer quietly assembles a 250-megawatt project in Hale County.
Alabama Power paid $14 million in January for 1,372 acres of Hale County farmland and riverfront between the Black Warrior River and County Road 16 south of Owl Road, ground set to anchor a major new piece of the state’s electrical grid. Now the company has asked a circuit judge to order a landowner to open her gates to its surveyors, the first courtroom collision between the planned 500-kilovolt transmission line that would begin at that ground and the people who own the land in its path.
The purchase was recorded Jan. 15 in the Hale County probate office. A statutory warranty deed conveys two parcels totaling 1,372.49 acres from Lock Five, LLC, an Alabama company formed in March 2021, to Alabama Power Company for $14,000,000, a price confirmed by the $14,000 deed tax recited on the instrument. The price works out to more than $10,000 an acre for land carried on the county’s books at current-use agricultural values of a few hundred dollars an acre. The deed was signed by Christopher Lee Skinner as authorized member of Lock Five, LLC.
What Alabama Power intends for at least part of the ground appears in a federal file. In an April 30 letter to the Alabama Historical Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing described the Lock 5 Transmission Substation Project, a new substation on a pad measuring 1,055 by 1,740 feet on the west side of County Road 16 just south of Owl Road, with a quarter-mile gravel access road, a permanent detention pond and about 110 acres of ground disturbance. The letter says the site will be developed with room for six additional 500-kilovolt terminals and two additional 230-kilovolt terminals in the future, the scale of a backbone transmission hub rather than a local substation.
The site the letter describes appears to fall within the boundaries of the land Alabama Power bought in January, based on a comparison of the letter’s description with the deed’s legal descriptions.
The substation is being financed under a federal loan guarantee. On Feb. 25 the Energy Department closed a $26.5 billion loan package for Southern Company subsidiaries, about $4.1 billion of it to Alabama Power, to fund gas generation, nuclear upgrades, battery storage and more than 1,300 miles of transmission projects across Alabama and Georgia. The Lock 5 substation is part of that federally guaranteed program, according to the department’s April letter.
The line the substation would launch is named in a courthouse filing. On June 22, Alabama Power filed an application in Hale County Circuit Court asking for an order permitting entry onto about 667 acres owned by Donna Jackson in Sections 1 and 12 of Township 19 North, Range 4 East, land bounded by County Road 9 and reaching Alabama 69 and County Road 54, east of the substation site and across Alabama 69 from it, on the side facing Bessemer.
The filing states that the company sought access to plan its Lock Five to South Bessemer transmission line and that entry was refused through Jackson’s representative with the statement that entry was denied unless specifically ordered by a court of law.
The application is not a condemnation. It is a request under Alabama’s eminent domain code for an order allowing entry to survey, and no taking of the Jackson land has been filed.
The company asks for seven days of daylight access for five activities:
- A timber cruise
- Marking the project centerline and an access road survey
- Wetland delineation and species and cultural resource studies
- An inspection by an independent licensed appraiser, whom the owner or her representative may accompany
- An assessment of construction access
The application also asks the court for a preliminary assessment of damages and the possible posting of a bond against any injury the entry causes.
Alabama Power recites in the filing that it holds the power of eminent domain; if the company ever seeks to take any of the land rather than merely study it, that would be a separate case filed later, with compensation determined through a process that begins with appraisals like the one the requested entry would allow.
The court file shows the company arrived prepared. The application was filed electronically at 10:27 on the morning of June 22, a motion to set a hearing followed at 10:42, and Circuit Judge Donald L. McMillan Jr. signed the first order at 11:18 the same morning.
Jackson was served June 30 at a Tuscaloosa address. She is represented by Woodford W. Dinning Jr. of the Demopolis firm Lloyd and Dinning, who entered an appearance July 8. The case is set for a show cause hearing Aug. 7, according to the court’s docket.
The land Alabama Power bought is the historic Robert K. Greene Farm, assembled by deeds dating to 1942 and earlier. A companion quitclaim recorded the same morning as the sale describes the property by that name and carves out the Judge Greene Place subdivision, whose boundary runs more than four miles along the 73-foot elevation contour of the river.
Alabama Power did not buy the subdivision; it bought the farmland and riverfront around it. Part of the riverfront lies within longstanding federal flood-control rights on the Black Warrior recorded in the 1950s.
The recorded chain also shows the sale closed out a lawsuit. Charis Farm General Partnership, operated by Michael B. and Peggy T. Lawrence, farmed the land as tenant under a 2019 lease from a prior owner, Chambless Farms, LLC, a lease that carried a right of first refusal.
In 2021, the year Lock Five, LLC was formed and acquired the property, the Lawrences sued Steve Chambless, Chambless Farms and Lock Five in Hale County Circuit Court over title to the land, and a lis pendens was later recorded.
On Jan. 10, the Lawrences signed a quitclaim surrendering the lease and the right of first refusal. Four days later, Lock Five signed the $14 million deed to Alabama Power.
On the morning of Jan. 15, four instruments were recorded at the probate office within 17 minutes:
- The deed
- A release of the lis pendens
- The Lawrences’ quitclaim
- A second quitclaim perfecting title
The release states that as a result of certain agreements between the parties in the civil action, title to the property is no longer at issue.
What Lock Five, LLC paid for the land in 2021, and what it earned on the January sale, is not stated in the instruments reviewed.
Alabama Power has made no public announcement of the substation or the line, and no public utility filing reviewed by this newspaper names a Lock Five project.
The company’s current ten-year regional transmission plan, published in November through the Southeastern Regional Transmission Planning process, does list a new 500-kilovolt project matching the line’s voltage and destination: approximately 63 miles of new transmission line from the company’s Greene County steam plant to South Bessemer, with an expanded 500-kilovolt yard at the South Bessemer substation to receive it, in service in 2030.
The plan’s stated justification is reliability: that the existing Greene County to Moundville 230-kilovolt line overloads under contingency and that the new line would relieve multiple other overloaded lines.
A path from the Greene County plant to South Bessemer crosses northern Hale County, where the substation site and the Jackson property lie, though the plan places the line’s western switchyard at or near the plant itself rather than the County Road 16 site, a difference the records reviewed do not explain.
The same planning documents show years of work on the strained grid around Bessemer, where a separately announced data center campus of roughly $14.5 billion, with an end user whose identity has not been disclosed, awaits the outcome of a rezoning lawsuit:
- Reconductoring the Bessemer to South Bessemer 115-kilovolt line in two phases by 2030
- Rebuilding 15 miles of the parallel 230-kilovolt line by 2030
- A new 75-mile 230-kilovolt line from Autaugaville to East Pelham by 2027, on which the company’s annual report to federal regulators shows roughly $70 million already spent
That annual report, covering the year that ended two weeks before the land purchase closed, contains no Lock Five project among the 165 construction projects it names.
Nothing in the records reviewed states what the new line will serve or connects it to any specific customer, and no siting authority, federal or state, approves the route of a transmission line in Alabama.
The company purchased roughly ten times the acreage its federal environmental file describes as disturbed ground, including river frontage the substation itself does not require.
One dispute has already surfaced in the federal file. The University of Alabama archaeologists who surveyed the substation site for the project concluded that it would have an adverse visual effect on the Sykes Martin House, a circa 1925 farmhouse near the site considered eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
The Energy Department disagreed with its own contractor and issued a finding of no adverse effect, writing that the project would not alter the house’s architecture and that trees and newer buildings would screen the view.
The department gave the Alabama Historical Commission 30 days to respond; the department has not published the commission’s answer.
If Judge McMillan grants the application Aug. 7, the company’s surveyors, foresters and appraiser gain seven days on the Jackson land, and the line’s path across it moves from a court filing toward stakes in the ground.
