Wind turbines generate electricity at the Block Island Wind Farm on July 7, 2022, near Block Island, Rhode Island. The first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States is located in the Atlantic Ocean 3.8 miles from Block Island, Rhode Island. The five-turbine, 30 MW project was developed by Deepwater Wind and began operations in December, 2016. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday it’s halting leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast due to national security risks.

The Interior Department paused the projects — off the coasts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and New York — due to analysis from reports that have “long found that the movement of massive turbine blades and the highly reflective towers create radar interference,” which poses a national security risk, according to a department release.

“Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement alongside the announcement. 

The Interior Department said “the clutter caused by offshore wind projects obscures legitimate moving targets and generates false targets in the vicinity of the wind projects.” 

The department said leases for Vineyard Wind 1, off Massachusetts; Revolution Wind, off Rhode Island and Connecticut; Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind; along with Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1, off New York, have been paused “effective immediately.” 

The department noted that the pause would give it, the Defense Department and other agencies “time to work with leaseholders and state partners to assess the possibility of mitigating the national security risks posed by these projects.” 

The moves are part of the administration’s continued attacks against the renewable energy source, which have spilled into courts. A federal judge found this month that Trump’s January order halting permits for offshore wind projects was unlawful. 

‘Desperate rerun’ 

The action drew swift backlash from major environmental advocacy groups and Democratic officials. 

Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a Monday statement the administration is “again unlawfully blocking clean, affordable energy.”

The administration has “baselessly and unlawfully attacked wind energy with delays, freezes and cancellations, while propping up aging, expensive coal plants that barely work and pollute our air,” Kelly added.

Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, described the move as a “desperate rerun of the Trump administration’s failed attempt to kill offshore wind — an effort the courts have already rejected.” 

She added that many of the projects had already won approvals through “rigorous review” and court challenges.

“Trying again to halt these projects tramples on the rule of law, threatens jobs, and deliberately sabotages a critical industry that strengthens, not weakens, America’s energy security,” she said. 

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also weighed in, saying in a Monday social media post Trump was “trying AGAIN to kill thousands of good-paying union jobs and raise your electricity bill.”  

The New York Democrat said he’s “been fighting Trump’s war against offshore wind — a war that threatens American jobs and American energy” and vowed to continue fighting “to make sure these projects, the thousands of jobs they create, and the energy they provide can continue.” 

Rhode Island lawmakers slam pause 

Lawmakers in Rhode Island were also quick to blast the administration’s effort, which affects the Revolution Wind project off its own coast. 

Rep. Seth Magaziner said that “at a time when working people in Rhode Island are struggling with high costs on everything, Trump should not be canceling energy projects that are nearly ready to deliver reliable power to the grid at below-market rates and help lower costs.” 

The Rhode Island Democrat rebuked the administration’s claims that Revolution Wind and the other offshore wind projects present national security concerns as “unfounded,” noting that “the Department of Defense thoroughly reviewed and signed off on this project during the permitting and approval process.” 

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in a statement Monday that Revolution Wind “was long ago thoroughly vetted and fully permitted by the federal government, and that review included any potential national security questions.” 

Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the move “looks more like the kind of vindictive harassment we have come to expect from the Trump administration than anything legitimate.” 

“This is President Donald ‘Stop Work’ Trump trying to keep affordable, clean energy off the grid, without a care about how many working people have to lose their jobs to keep his fossil fuel billionaires happy,” he said. 

In a statement Monday, Sen. Jack Reed noted that amid an increase in energy prices, policymakers should be promoting new energy sources.

“Trump’s repeated attacks on offshore wind are holding our nation back, increasing energy bills, and hurting our economy,” the Rhode Island Democrat said. 

The former site of the We Energies Power Plant on Nov. 13, 2025, in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. (Photo by Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

By some measures, the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant, once regarded locally as an “iconic industrial landmark,” had a good run.

Opened in 1980 near Lake Michigan in Kenosha County, it became Wisconsin’s largest generating plant, burning enough Wyoming coal, some 13,000 tons a day, to provide electricity for up to 1 million homes.

But over time, the plant became too expensive to operate. The owner, We Energies, shut it down after 38 years, in 2018.

We Energies customers, however, are still on the hook.

A portion of their monthly bills will continue to pay for Pleasant Prairie until 2039 — 21 years after the plant stopped producing electricity.

In fact, residential and business utility customers throughout Wisconsin owe nearly $1 billion on “stranded assets” — power plants like Pleasant Prairie that have been or will soon be shut down, a Wisconsin Watch investigation found.

That total will likely grow over the next five years with additional coal plants scheduled to cease operations.

Customers must pay not only for the debt taken on to build and upgrade the plants themselves, but also an essentially guaranteed rate of return for their utility company owners, long after the plants stop generating revenue themselves.

“We really have a hard time with utilities profiting off of dead power plants for decades,” said Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group.

The $1 billion tab looms as Wisconsin utility companies aim to generate unprecedented amounts of electricity for at least seven major high-tech data centers that are proposed, approved or under construction. By one estimate, just two of the data centers, which are being built to support the growth of artificial intelligence, would use more electricity than all Wisconsin homes combined.

All of which raises an important question in Wisconsin, where electricity rates have exceeded the Midwest average for 20 years.

What happens to residents and other ratepayers if AI and data centers don’t pan out as planned, creating a new generation of stranded assets?

How much do Wisconsin ratepayers owe on stranded assets?

Of the five major investor-owned utilities operating in Wisconsin, two — We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. — have stranded assets on the books. Both companies are subsidiaries of Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group.

As of December 2024, when the company released its most recent annual report, We Energies estimated a remaining value of more than $700 million across three power plants with recently retired units: Pleasant Prairie, Oak Creek and Presque Isle, a plant on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Wisconsin Public Service Corp.’s December 2024 report listed roughly $30 million in remaining value on recently retired units at two power plants.

In total, utilities owned by WEC Energy Group will likely have over $1 billion in recently retired assets by the end of 2026.

The company also noted a remaining value of just under $250 million for its share of units at Columbia Generating Station slated to retire in 2029, alongside a remaining value of roughly $650 million for units at Oak Creek scheduled to retire next year.

Its customers will pay off that total, plus a rate of return, for years to come.

The company estimates that closing the Pleasant Prairie plant alone saved $2.5 billion, largely by avoiding future operating and maintenance costs and additional capital investments.

Both Wisconsin Power and Light and Madison Gas and Electric also own portions of the Columbia Energy Center, and Wisconsin Power and Light also operates a unit at the Edgewater Generating Station scheduled for retirement before the end of the decade. Neither company provided estimates of the values of those facilities at time of retirement. Andrew Stoddard, a spokesman for Alliant Energy, Wisconsin Power and Light’s parent company, argued against treating plants scheduled for retirement with value on the books as future stranded assets.

How stranded assets occurred: overcommitting to coal

In 1907, Wisconsin became one of the first states to regulate public utilities. The idea was that having competing companies installing separate gas or electric lines was inefficient, but giving companies regional monopolies would require regulation.

Utility companies get permission to build or expand power plants and to raise rates from the three-member state Public Service Commission. The commissioners, appointed by the governor, are charged with protecting ratepayers as well as utility company investors.

Stranded assets have occurred across the nation, partly because of the cost of complying with pollution control regulations. But another factor is that, while other utilities around the country moved to alternative sources of energy, Wisconsin utilities and, in turn, the PSC overbet on how long coal-fired plants would operate efficiently:

• In the years before We Energies pulled the plug on Pleasant Prairie, the plant had mostly gone dark in spring and fall. Not only had coal become more expensive than natural gas and renewables, but energy consumption stayed flat. By 2016, two years before Pleasant Prairie’s closure, natural gas eclipsed coal for electricity generation nationally.

• In 2011, We Energies invested nearly $1 billion into its coal-fired Oak Creek plant south of Milwaukee to keep it running for 30 more years. The plant, which began operating in 1965 and later became one of the largest in the country, is now scheduled to completely retire in 2026 — with $650 million on the books still owed. That will cost individual ratepayers nearly $30 per year for the next 17 years, according to RMI, a think tank specializing in clean energy policy. The majority of the debt tied to those units stems from “environmental controls we were required to install to meet federal and state rules,” WEC Energy Group spokesperson Brendan Conway said.

• In 2013, to settle pollution violations, Alliant Energy announced an investment of more than $800 million in the Columbia Energy Center plant in Portage, north of Madison. But by 2021, Alliant announced plans to begin closing the plant, though now it is expected to operate until at least 2029.

Various factors encourage construction and upgrades of power plants.

Building a plant can create upwards of 1,000 construction jobs, popular with politicians. Moreover, the Public Service Commission, being a quasi-judicial body, is governed by precedent. For example, if the PSC determined it was prudent to allow construction of a utility plant, that finding would argue in favor of approving a later expansion of that plant.

The PSC allowed utility companies “to overbuild the system,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit advocate for utility customers. “I think the mistake was that we allowed so much investment, and continuing to double down on coal when it was becoming less economic.”

Utilities “profit off of everything they build or acquire,” Stuart said, “and so there is a strong motivation to put steel in the ground and perhaps to even overbuild.”

Conway, the WEC Energy Group spokesperson, argued that the utilities’ plans to retire plants amount to a net positive for customers.

“We began our power generation reshaping plan about a decade ago,” he wrote in an email. “That includes closing older, less-efficient power plants and building new renewable energy facilities and clean, efficient natural gas plants. This plan reduces emissions and is expected to provide customers significant savings — hundreds of millions of dollars — over the life of the plan.”

Guaranteed profits add to ratepayer burden

The built-in profits that utility companies enjoy, typically 9.8%, add to the stranded assets tab.

When the Public Service Commission approves construction of a new power plant, it allows the utility company to levy electricity rates high enough to recover its investment plus the specified rate of return — even after a plant becomes a stranded asset.

“We give them this license to have a monopoly, but the challenge is there’s no incentive for them to do the least-cost option,” Content said. “So, in terms of building new plants, there’s an incentive to build more … and there’s incentive to build too much.”

When the Pleasant Prairie plant was shut down in 2018, the PSC ruled that ratepayers would continue to pay We Energies to cover the cost of the plant itself, plus the nearly 10% profit. The plant’s remaining value, initially pegged at nearly $1 billion, remained at roughly $500 million as of December 2024.

Eliminating profits on closed plants would save ratepayers $300 million on debt payments due to be made into the early 2040s, according to Content’s group.

New ‘stranded assets’ threat: data centers

As artificial intelligence pervades society, it’s hard to fathom how much more electricity will have to be generated to power all of the data centers under construction or being proposed in Wisconsin.

We Energies alone wants to add enough energy to power more than 2 million homes. That effort is largely to serve one Microsoft data center under construction in Mount Pleasant, between Milwaukee and Racine, and a data center approved north of Milwaukee in Port Washington to serve OpenAI and Oracle AI programs. Microsoft calls the Mount Pleasant facility “the world’s most powerful data center.”

Data centers are also proposed for Beaver Dam, Dane County, Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie.

The energy demand raises the risk of more stranded assets, should the data centers turn out to be a bubble rather than boom.

“The great fear is, you build all these power plants and transmission lines and then one of these data centers only is there for a couple years, or isn’t as big as promised, and then everybody’s left holding the bag,” Stuart said.

In an October Marquette Law School poll, 55% of those surveyed said the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. Environmental groups have called for a pause on all data center approvals. Democratic and Republican leaders are calling for data centers to pay their own way and not rely on utility ratepayers or taxpayers to pay for their electricity needs.

Opposition in one community led nearly 10,000 people to become members of the Stop the Menomonie Data Center group on Facebook. In Janesville, voters are trying to require referendums for data centers. In Port Washington, opposition to the data center there led to three arrests during a city council meeting.

Utilities are scheduled in early 2026 to request permission from the Public Service Commission to build new power plants or expand existing plants to accommodate data centers.

Some states, such as Minnesota, have adopted laws prohibiting the costs of stranded assets from data centers being passed onto ratepayers.

Wisconsin has no such laws.

Shifting cost burden to utility companies

Currently, ratepayers are on the hook for paying off the full debt of stranded assets — unless a financial tool called securitization reduces the burden on ratepayers.

Securitization is similar to refinancing a mortgage. With the state’s permission, utilities can convert a stranded asset — which isn’t typically a tradeable financial product — into a specialized bond.

Utility customers must still pay back the bond. But the interest rate on the bond is lower than the utility’s standard profit margin, meaning customers save money.

A 2024 National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners report noted that utilities’ shareholders may prefer a “status quo” scenario in which customers pay stranded asset debts and the standard rate of return. Persuading utilities to agree to securitization can require incentives from regulators or lawmakers, the report added.

In some states, utilities can securitize the remaining value of an entire power plant. Michigan utility Consumers Energy, for instance, securitized two coal generating units retired in 2023, saving its customers more than $120 million.

In Wisconsin, however, utilities can securitize only the cost of pollution control equipment on power plants — added to older coal plants during the Obama administration, when utilities opted to retrofit existing plants rather than switching to new power sources.

In 2023, two Republican state senators, Robert Cowles of Green Bay and Duey Stroebel of Saukville, introduced legislation to allow the Public Service Commission to order securitization and allow securitization to be used to refinance all debt on stranded assets. The bill attracted some Democratic cosponsors, but was opposed by the Wisconsin Utilities Association and did not get a hearing.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers proposed additional securitization in his 2025-27 budget, but the Legislature’s Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee later scrapped the provision.

Even Wisconsin’s narrow approach to securitization is optional, however, and most utilities have chosen not to use it.

We Energies was the first Wisconsin utility to do so, opting in 2020 to securitize the costs of pollution control equipment at the Pleasant Prairie plant. Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission approved the request, saving an estimated $40 million. “We will continue to explore that option in the future,” Conway said.

But the PSC expressed “disappointment” in 2024 when We Energies “was not willing to pursue securitization” to save customers $117.5 million on its soon-to-retire Oak Creek coal plant. The utility noted state law doesn’t require securitization.

Stuart said that if utilities won’t agree to more securitization, they should accept a lower profit rate once an asset becomes stranded.

“It would be nice to ease that burden,” he said. “Just to say, hey, consumers got to suck it up and deal with it, that doesn’t sound right. The issue of stranded assets, like cost overruns, is certainly ripe for investigation.”

Comprehensive planning required elsewhere — but not Wisconsin

Avoiding future stranded assets could require a level of planning impossible under Wisconsin’s current regulatory structure.

When the state’s utilities propose new power plants, PSC rules require the commission to consider each new plant alone, rather than in the context of other proposed new plants and the state’s future energy needs. Operating without what is known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP, opened the PSC to overbuilding and creating more stranded assets. IRPs are touted as an orderly way to plan for future energy needs.

“There’s no real comprehensive look in Wisconsin,” Stuart said. “We’re one of the few regulated states that really doesn’t have a comprehensive plan for our utilities.

”We’ve been doing some of these projects kind of piecemeal, without looking at the bigger picture.”

Structured planning tools like IRPs date back to the 1980s, when concerns about cost overruns, fuel price volatility and overbuilding prompted regulators to step in. Minnesota and Michigan require utilities to file IRPs, as do a majority of states nationwide.

Evers proposed IRPs in his 2025-27 state budget, but Republican lawmakers removed that provision because it was a nonfiscal policy issue.

Northern States Power Company, which operates in Wisconsin and four other Midwestern states, is required by both Michigan and Minnesota to develop IRPs. “Because of these rules, we create a multi-state IRP every few years,” said Chris Ouellette, a spokesperson for Xcel Energy, the utility’s parent company.

Madison Gas and Electric, which only operates in Wisconsin, argued that its current planning process is superior to the IRP requirements in neighboring states. “A formal IRP mandate would add process without improving outcomes,” spokesperson Steve Schultz said. “Wisconsin’s current framework allows us to move quickly, maintain industry-leading reliability and protect customer costs during a period of rapid change.”

How to influence decisions relating to stranded assets

The devil will be in the details on whether the Public Service Commission adopts strong policies to prevent the expected wave of new power plant capacity from becoming stranded assets, consumer advocates say.

The current members, all appointed by Evers, are: chairperson Summer Strand, Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins.

The public can comment on pending cases before the PSC via its website, by mail or at a public hearing. The commission posts notices of its public hearings, which can be streamed via YouTube.

Among the upcoming hearings on requests by utilities to generate more electricity for data centers:

Feb. 12: We Energies’ request to service data centers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington. We Energies says the fees it proposes, known as tariffs, will prevent costs from being shifted from the data centers to other customers. The “party” hearing is not for public comment, but for interaction between PSC staff and parties in the case, such as We Energies and public interest groups.

Feb. 26: Another party hearing for a case in which Alliant Energy also said its proposed tariffs won’t benefit the data center in Beaver Dam at the expense of other customers.

To keep abreast of case developments, the PSC offers email notifications for document filings and meetings of the commission.

The PSC would not provide an official to be interviewed for this article. It issued a statement noting that utilities can opt to do securitization to ease the financial burden on ratepayers, adding:

“Beyond that, the commission has a limited set of tools provided under state law to protect customers from costs that arise from early power plant retirements. It would be up to the state Legislature to make changes to state law that would provide the commission with additional tools.”

On Nov. 6, state Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin, D-Whitefish Bay, and Rep. Angela Stroud, D-Ashland, announced wide-ranging data center legislation. One provision of their proposal aims to ensure that data centers don’t push electricity costs onto other ratepayers.

But there is no provision on stranded assets.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To republish, go to the original and consult the Wisconsin Watch republishing guidelines.

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• Wisconsin utility ratepayers owe nearly $1 billion on coal power plants that have been or soon will be shut down. That includes debt taken on to build and upgrade the plants, plus a guaranteed rate of return of nearly 10% for the utility companies that own the plants.

• Other states have found ways to limit the effect on ratepayers, such as allowing debt to be securitized at a lower rate than the guaranteed investment return and having comprehensive planning processes that reduce the likelihood of overbuilding.

• Wisconsin utility groups have pushed back on bipartisan proposals, and Republicans have blocked efforts by Gov. Tony Evers to reduce costs for ratepayers.

By some measures, the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant, once regarded locally as an “iconic industrial landmark,” had a good run.

Opened in 1980 near Lake Michigan in Kenosha County, it became Wisconsin’s largest generating plant, burning enough Wyoming coal, some 13,000 tons a day, to provide electricity for up to 1 million homes. 

But over time, the plant became too expensive to operate. The owner, We Energies, shut it down after 38 years, in 2018.

We Energies customers, however, are still on the hook.

A portion of their monthly bills will continue to pay for Pleasant Prairie until 2039 — 21 years after the plant stopped producing electricity. 

In fact, residential and business utility customers throughout Wisconsin owe nearly $1 billion on “stranded assets” — power plants like Pleasant Prairie that have been or will soon be shut down, a Wisconsin Watch investigation found.

That total will likely grow over the next five years with additional coal plants scheduled to cease operations. 

Customers must pay not only for the debt taken on to build and upgrade the plants themselves, but also an essentially guaranteed rate of return for their utility company owners, long after the plants stop generating revenue themselves.

“We really have a hard time with utilities profiting off of dead power plants for decades,” said Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group. 

The $1 billion tab looms as Wisconsin utility companies aim to generate unprecedented amounts of electricity for at least seven major high-tech data centers that are proposed, approved or under construction. By one estimate, just two of the data centers, which are being built to support the growth of artificial intelligence, would use more electricity than all Wisconsin homes combined.

All of which raises an important question in Wisconsin, where electricity rates have exceeded the Midwest average for 20 years. 

What happens to residents and other ratepayers if AI and data centers don’t pan out as planned, creating a new generation of stranded assets?

How much do Wisconsin ratepayers owe on stranded assets?

Of the five major investor-owned utilities operating in Wisconsin, two — We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. — have stranded assets on the books. Both companies are subsidiaries of Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group.

As of December 2024, when the company released its most recent annual report, We Energies estimated a remaining value of more than $700 million across three power plants with recently retired units: Pleasant Prairie, Oak Creek and Presque Isle, a plant on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Wisconsin Public Service Corp.’s December 2024 report listed roughly $30 million in remaining value on recently retired units at two power plants.

In total, utilities owned by WEC Energy Group will likely have over $1 billion in recently retired assets by the end of 2026. 

The company also noted a remaining value of just under $250 million for its share of units at Columbia Generating Station slated to retire in 2029, alongside a remaining value of roughly $650 million for units at Oak Creek scheduled to retire next year.

Its customers will pay off that total, plus a rate of return, for years to come.

The company estimates that closing the Pleasant Prairie plant alone saved $2.5 billion, largely by avoiding future operating and maintenance costs and additional capital investments.

Both Wisconsin Power and Light and Madison Gas and Electric also own portions of the Columbia Energy Center, and Wisconsin Power and Light also operates a unit at the Edgewater Generating Station scheduled for retirement before the end of the decade. Neither company provided estimates of the values of those facilities at time of retirement. Andrew Stoddard, a spokesman for Alliant Energy, Wisconsin Power and Light’s parent company, argued against treating plants scheduled for retirement with value on the books as future stranded assets.

How stranded assets occurred: overcommitting to coal

In 1907, Wisconsin became one of the first states to regulate public utilities. The idea was that having competing companies installing separate gas or electric lines was inefficient, but giving companies regional monopolies would require regulation.

Utility companies get permission to build or expand power plants and to raise rates from the three-member state Public Service Commission. The commissioners, appointed by the governor, are charged with protecting ratepayers as well as utility company investors.

Stranded assets have occurred across the nation, partly because of the cost of complying with pollution control regulations. But another factor is that, while other utilities around the country moved to alternative sources of energy, Wisconsin utilities and, in turn, the PSC overbet on how long coal-fired plants would operate efficiently:

• In the years before We Energies pulled the plug on Pleasant Prairie, the plant had mostly gone dark in spring and fall. Not only had coal become more expensive than natural gas and renewables, but energy consumption stayed flat. By 2016, two years before Pleasant Prairie’s closure, natural gas eclipsed coal for electricity generation nationally.

• In 2011, We Energies invested nearly $1 billion into its coal-fired Oak Creek plant south of Milwaukee to keep it running for 30 more years. The plant, which began operating in 1965 and later became one of the largest in the country, is now scheduled to completely retire in 2026 — with $650 million on the books still owed. That will cost individual ratepayers nearly $30 per year for the next 17 years, according to RMI, a think tank specializing in clean energy policy. The majority of the debt tied to those units stems from “environmental controls we were required to install to meet federal and state rules,” WEC Energy Group spokesperson Brendan Conway said.

• In 2013, to settle pollution violations, Alliant Energy announced an investment of more than $800 million in the Columbia Energy Center plant in Portage, north of Madison. But by 2021, Alliant announced plans to begin closing the plant, though now it is expected to operate until at least 2029. 

Various factors encourage construction and upgrades of power plants.

Building a plant can create upwards of 1,000 construction jobs, popular with politicians. Moreover, the Public Service Commission, being a quasi-judicial body, is governed by precedent. For example, if the PSC determined it was prudent to allow construction of a utility plant, that finding would argue in favor of approving a later expansion of that plant.

The PSC allowed utility companies “to overbuild the system,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit advocate for utility customers. “I think the mistake was that we allowed so much investment, and continuing to double down on coal when it was becoming less economic.”

Utilities “profit off of everything they build or acquire,” Stuart said, “and so there is a strong motivation to put steel in the ground and perhaps to even overbuild.”

Conway, the WEC Energy Group spokesperson, argued that the utilities’ plans to retire plants amount to a net positive for customers. 

“We began our power generation reshaping plan about a decade ago,” he wrote in an email. “That includes closing older, less-efficient power plants and building new renewable energy facilities and clean, efficient natural gas plants. This plan reduces emissions and is expected to provide customers significant savings — hundreds of millions of dollars — over the life of the plan.”

Guaranteed profits add to ratepayer burden

The built-in profits that utility companies enjoy, typically 9.8%, add to the stranded assets tab. 

When the Public Service Commission approves construction of a new power plant, it allows the utility company to levy electricity rates high enough to recover its investment plus the specified rate of return — even after a plant becomes a stranded asset.

“We give them this license to have a monopoly, but the challenge is there’s no incentive for them to do the least-cost option,” Content said. “So, in terms of building new plants, there’s an incentive to build more … and there’s incentive to build too much.”

When the Pleasant Prairie plant was shut down in 2018, the PSC ruled that ratepayers would continue to pay We Energies to cover the cost of the plant itself, plus the nearly 10% profit. The plant’s remaining value, initially pegged at nearly $1 billion, remained at roughly $500 million as of December 2024.

Eliminating profits on closed plants would save ratepayers $300 million on debt payments due to be made into the early 2040s, according to Content’s group.

New ‘stranded assets’ threat: data centers

As artificial intelligence pervades society, it’s hard to fathom how much more electricity will have to be generated to power all of the data centers under construction or being proposed in Wisconsin. 

We Energies alone wants to add enough energy to power more than 2 million homes. That effort is largely to serve one Microsoft data center under construction in Mount Pleasant, between Milwaukee and Racine, and a data center approved north of Milwaukee in Port Washington to serve OpenAI and Oracle AI programs. Microsoft calls the Mount Pleasant facility “the world’s most powerful data center.” 

Data centers are also proposed for Beaver Dam, Dane County, Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie. 

The energy demand raises the risk of more stranded assets, should the data centers turn out to be a bubble rather than boom.

“The great fear is, you build all these power plants and transmission lines and then one of these data centers only is there for a couple years, or isn’t as big as promised, and then everybody’s left holding the bag,” Stuart said. 

In an October Marquette Law School poll, 55% of those surveyed said the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. Environmental groups have called for a pause on all data center approvals. Democratic and Republican leaders are calling for data centers to pay their own way and not rely on utility ratepayers or taxpayers to pay for their electricity needs.

Opposition in one community led nearly 10,000 people to become members of the Stop the Menomonie Data Center group on Facebook. In Janesville, voters are trying to require referendums for data centers. In Port Washington, opposition to the data center there led to three arrests during a city council meeting.

Utilities are scheduled in early 2026 to request permission from the Public Service Commission to build new power plants or expand existing plants to accommodate data centers.

Some states, such as Minnesota, have adopted laws prohibiting the costs of stranded assets from data centers being passed onto ratepayers.

Wisconsin has no such laws.

Shifting cost burden to utility companies

Currently, ratepayers are on the hook for paying off the full debt of stranded assets — unless a financial tool called securitization reduces the burden on ratepayers.

Securitization is similar to refinancing a mortgage. With the state’s permission, utilities can convert a stranded asset — which isn’t typically a tradeable financial product — into a specialized bond. 

Utility customers must still pay back the bond. But the interest rate on the bond is lower than the utility’s standard profit margin, meaning customers save money. 

A 2024 National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners report noted that utilities’ shareholders may prefer a “status quo” scenario in which customers pay stranded asset debts and the standard rate of return. Persuading utilities to agree to securitization can require incentives from regulators or lawmakers, the report added.

In some states, utilities can securitize the remaining value of an entire power plant. Michigan utility Consumers Energy, for instance, securitized two coal generating units retired in 2023, saving its customers more than $120 million. 

In Wisconsin, however, utilities can securitize only the cost of pollution control equipment on power plants — added to older coal plants during the Obama administration, when utilities opted to retrofit existing plants rather than switching to new power sources.

In 2023, two Republican state senators, Robert Cowles of Green Bay and Duey Stroebel of Saukville, introduced legislation to allow the Public Service Commission to order securitization and allow securitization to be used to refinance all debt on stranded assets. The bill attracted some Democratic cosponsors, but was opposed by the Wisconsin Utilities Association and did not get a hearing.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers proposed additional securitization in his 2025-27 budget, but the Legislature’s Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee later scrapped the provision.

Even Wisconsin’s narrow approach to securitization is optional, however, and most utilities have chosen not to use it. 

We Energies was the first Wisconsin utility to do so, opting in 2020 to securitize the costs of pollution control equipment at the Pleasant Prairie plant. Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission approved the request, saving an estimated $40 million. “We will continue to explore that option in the future,” Conway said.

But the PSC expressed “disappointment” in 2024 when We Energies “was not willing to pursue securitization” to save customers $117.5 million on its soon-to-retire Oak Creek coal plant. The utility noted state law doesn’t require securitization.

Stuart said that if utilities won’t agree to more securitization, they should accept a lower profit rate once an asset becomes stranded. 

“It would be nice to ease that burden,” he said. “Just to say, hey, consumers got to suck it up and deal with it, that doesn’t sound right. The issue of stranded assets, like cost overruns, is certainly ripe for investigation.”

Comprehensive planning required elsewhere — but not Wisconsin 

Avoiding future stranded assets could require a level of planning impossible under Wisconsin’s current regulatory structure.

When the state’s utilities propose new power plants, PSC rules require the commission to consider each new plant alone, rather than in the context of other proposed new plants and the state’s future energy needs. Operating without what is known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP, opened the PSC to overbuilding and creating more stranded assets. IRPs are touted as an orderly way to plan for future energy needs. 

“There’s no real comprehensive look in Wisconsin,” Stuart said. “We’re one of the few regulated states that really doesn’t have a comprehensive plan for our utilities. 

”We’ve been doing some of these projects kind of piecemeal, without looking at the bigger picture.”

Structured planning tools like IRPs date back to the 1980s, when concerns about cost overruns, fuel price volatility and overbuilding prompted regulators to step in. Minnesota and Michigan require utilities to file IRPs, as do a majority of states nationwide.

Evers proposed IRPs in his 2025-27 state budget, but Republican lawmakers removed that provision because it was a nonfiscal policy issue.

Northern States Power Company, which operates in Wisconsin and four other Midwestern states, is required by both Michigan and Minnesota to develop IRPs. “Because of these rules, we create a multi-state IRP every few years,” said Chris Ouellette, a spokesperson for Xcel Energy, the utility’s parent company.

Madison Gas and Electric, which only operates in Wisconsin, argued that its current planning process is superior to the IRP requirements in neighboring states. “A formal IRP mandate would add process without improving outcomes,” spokesperson Steve Schultz said. “Wisconsin’s current framework allows us to move quickly, maintain industry-leading reliability and protect customer costs during a period of rapid change.”

How to influence decisions relating to stranded assets

The devil will be in the details on whether the Public Service Commission adopts strong policies to prevent the expected wave of new power plant capacity from becoming stranded assets, consumer advocates say.

The current members, all appointed by Evers, are: chairperson Summer Strand, Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins.

The public can comment on pending cases before the PSC via its website, by mail or at a public hearing. The commission posts notices of its public hearings, which can be streamed via YouTube. 

Among the upcoming hearings on requests by utilities to generate more electricity for data centers:

Feb. 12: We Energies’ request to service data centers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington. We Energies says the fees it proposes, known as tariffs, will prevent costs from being shifted from the data centers to other customers. The “party” hearing is not for public comment, but for interaction between PSC staff and parties in the case, such as We Energies and public interest groups.

Feb. 26: Another party hearing for a case in which Alliant Energy also said its proposed tariffs won’t benefit the data center in Beaver Dam at the expense of other customers.

To keep abreast of case developments, the PSC offers email notifications for document filings and meetings of the commission.

The PSC would not provide an official to be interviewed for this article. It issued a statement noting that utilities can opt to do securitization to ease the financial burden on ratepayers, adding: 

“Beyond that, the commission has a limited set of tools provided under state law to protect customers from costs that arise from early power plant retirements. It would be up to the state Legislature to make changes to state law that would provide the commission with additional tools.”

On Nov. 6, state Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin, D-Whitefish Bay, and Rep. Angela Stroud, D-Ashland, announced wide-ranging data center legislation. One provision of their proposal aims to ensure that data centers don’t push electricity costs onto other ratepayers. 

But there is no provision on stranded assets.

As energy-hungry data centers loom, Wisconsin ratepayers owe $1 billion on shuttered power plants is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The toxic plant that killed Socrates thousands of years ago is becoming more prevalent in the Midwest. 

Poison hemlock is an invasive biennial plant that has tall, smooth stems with fern-like leaves and clustered small white flowers. It can grow up to eight feet tall. 

Meaghan Anderson, an Iowa State University Extension and Outreach field agronomist, said the plant is becoming more widespread due to several factors.

Those factors include unintentional movement of seeds from one place to another by floods, mowing equipment and animals. Hikers inadvertently transport seeds on their shoes or clothing.

Changing ecology could also be contributing to spread. For example, Anderson said tree loss in parts of eastern Iowa from the 2020 derecho made room for the plant. Cedar Rapids estimates it lost about 65% of the overall tree canopy that existed before the derecho flattened trees with hurricane-force winds.

“The loss of so many trees and opening of canopies has likely allowed for many weedy species to gain a foothold in areas they were not in the past,” Anderson said.

Since the plant was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1800s, hemlock has made its way into every state, except Hawaii. 

Scott Marsh, an agricultural weeds and seed specialist with the Kansas Department of Agriculture, said though the plant is widespread across the country, it’s generally more common in central parts of the United States. He said it is slightly less abundant in the southeast and northeast parts of the country.

Mark Leoschke, a botanist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Bureau, said poison hemlock likes moist soils and benefits from “disturbed areas,” like roadside ditches, flood plains, and creeks or rivers, where running water can carry seeds downstream.

“It just benefits from periodic disturbance, and it is the way it can grow and maintain itself,” Leoschke said.

Anderson said the plant also favors areas along fences and margins between fields and woodlands.

Generally, the plant isn’t a threat to lawns and residential yards, Leoschke said, because lawns are typically mowed regularly, which keeps the plant from maturing.

A ‘highly toxic’ plant

Poison hemlock — which is known by its scientific name conium maculatum and is native to Europe and Western Asia — starts growing in the springtime and is a dangerous plant. 

“The most serious risk with poison hemlock is ingesting it,” Anderson said. “The plant is highly toxic and could be fatal to humans and livestock if consumed.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, every part of the plant — from its stem to its leaves, as well as the fruit and root — is poisonous.

The leaves are especially potent in the spring, up to the time the plant flowers.

The toxic compounds found in the plant can cause respiratory failure and disrupt the body’s nervous and cardiovascular systems.

Anderson said it is possible for the toxins in poison hemlock to be absorbed through the skin, too.

“Some of the population could also experience dermatitis from coming in contact with the plant, so covering your skin and wearing eye protection when removing the plant is important,” she said.

Poison hemlock can also be fatal if consumed by livestock. 

According to USDA, cattle that eat between 300 and 500 grams or sheep that ingest between 100 and 500 grams of hemlock – less than a can of beans – can be poisoned. Though animals tend to stay away from poison hemlock, they may eat it if other forage is scarce or if it gets into hay. Animals that ingest it can die from respiratory paralysis in two to three hours. 

Jean Wiedenheft, director of land stewardship for the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said no one should eat anything from the wild unless they know exactly what they are ingesting.

The carrot family of plants, including poison hemlock, can be particularly treacherous. Water hemlock, a relative of the poison hemlock native to the U.S., is also toxic. Giant hogweed, another member of the carrot family, can grow up to 15 feet tall with leaves that span two to three feet. Marsh said that if humans get sap from the plant on their skin and then go into the sun, it can cause third-degree burns. Wild carrot, another invasive also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, is generally considered safe or mildly toxic.  

Managing the plant

Poison hemlock is a biennial plant, which means it takes two years to complete its life cycle. 

Removal strategies vary depending on where in the life cycle the plants are, where the plants are located, how abundant they are, what time of year it is and the ability of the person trying to manage the plant.

For example, Anderson said flowering plants generally need to be cut out and disposed of as trash. However, Anderson said that using herbicides on the hemlock when the plant is growing close to the ground in its first year is often more efficient and more effective in eradicating the plant.

In some situations, mowing can be an effective option to manage isolated infestations of poison hemlock as well, she said.

“Since (they’re) a biennial species, if we remove plants prior to producing seed, we can eliminate the possibility of new plants or increasing populations of these plants,” Anderson said. “Any location with poison hemlock will need to be monitored for several years.” 

Successful hemlock management comes back to prevention.

“We often talk about the species this time of year because the white flowers atop the tall stems are very obvious on the landscape, but the species exists for the rest of the year as a relatively unassuming rosette of leaves on the ground that people don’t think of until they see the flowers, when it is too late for most effective management strategies,” Anderson  said. “Every time a plant is allowed to produce seed, it adds to the soil seed bank and creates more future management challenges.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

‘Highly toxic’ hemlock widespread in Midwest — and spreading is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A few years ago, Holly Jones started studying the micro-climate and the topography on her family farm in Crawfordsville, Iowa, about 40 miles south of Iowa City. Jones said learning more about the landscape of her fifth generation flower farm helped her recognize some of the ways weather and climate change could affect her operation.   

“There are some areas of our land that are a little higher than others,” Jones said. “That’s going to impact, for example, when we’re looking out for frost advisories or frost concerns really early in the season or the end.”   

Around this time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its plant hardiness zones map, which divides the United States into 13 zones based on average annual minimum temperatures in a given time period. 

Todd Einhorn, an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture at Michigan State University, said simply put plant hardiness zones help gardeners and farmers determine which plants are most likely to survive winters in a specific location. 

Jones’ farm, called Evergreen Hill, is currently in zone 5b. The USDA found that for her area the temperature had increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit between 2012 and 2023 – a trend experts say will continue in the Upper Midwest.

In response to the changing climate and her deeper understanding of her land, Jones created “crossover plans” for the farm, planting flower varieties with overlapping bloom times. If one species is late to flower or runs its course early, she has other plants that can fill in as the farm’s “focal flower” at any given time. 

Jones works to be transparent with customers about whether they can have certain flowers by a specific date when she takes orders.

She said she and her team have learned that they must be flexible when it comes to farming in a changing climate since she does not have control over growing conditions.  

“We can prepare as much as we want, but there’s so much variability now in growing, especially in the ways that we grow that you just have to be prepared to pivot and adapt,” Jones said.

Jones won’t be the only one adapting. 

Plant hardiness zones are shifting northward nationwide as the country continues to warm, affecting farmers, gardeners and producers across the country. The biggest changes in the coming decades are predicted to be in the Upper Midwest. The Midwest produces 27% of the nation’s agricultural goods.

What are plant hardiness zones?  

The USDA Plant Hardiness Zone map has 13 zones, which serve as guidelines for growers on what kind of plants will grow well in their area. 

“Hardiness zones are meant to at least delineate which species or cultivars of species could be planted based on their survival,” said Einhorn, who specializes in plant hardiness science, particularly with fruit tree species.  

Each zone covers about 10 degrees — for example, Iowa lies primarily in zone 5, which means its coldest temperatures range from -20 degrees to -10 degrees Fahrenheit on average. Each zone is further divided into 5 degree half zones — the northern half of Iowa is in 5a, the southern half in 5b. 

Madelynn Wuestenberg, an agricultural climatology extension specialist with Iowa State University, said that plant hardiness zones are defined by their average coldest temperatures. The averages are calculated over 30 years.   

In 2023, using new averages, the USDA updated the map, moving about half of the country up by half a plant zone, meaning average minimum temperatures rose by zero to 5 degrees in the affected places.

Why are the zones shifting north?  

Climate Central, a nonprofit researching climate change and how it affects people, analyzed 243 locations around the United States and found that about 67% of the locations studied based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data have already shifted to warmer planting zones from the mid-1900s to present.

The researchers found that the Northwest and the Southwest, along with Alaska, have been the most affected to date. 

With unabated climate change about 90% of locations examined will likely shift to warmer planting zones by the middle of this century. The Upper Midwest is predicted to be affected most.  

Wuestenberg said winter temperatures in the Midwest are becoming warmer on average, compared to decades past.  

“What we saw from the 1981 to 2010 climatology versus the 1991 to 2020 climatology is we’re really starting to see warming across the U.S.,” Wuestenberg said. “And this has been observed for a long time, and really it’s a pretty consistent overall warming, but the specific amount of warming varies region to region across the U.S.”   

Of the cities with the highest predicted temperature change between now and mid-century, a majority of the top 25 are in the Mississippi River Basin. 

Madison, Wisconsin, for example, is projected to switch from zone 5b to 6a as the average coldest temperature is expected to increase by 8.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Jefferson City, Missouri, will likely change from zone 6b to zone 7b as the area’s average cold temperatures are projected to increase by 8.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

In Dubuque, Iowa, the average coldest temperatures are expected to rise by 8.3 degrees Fahrenheit, and producers will go from zone 5a to 6a.

Average cold temperatures in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, are on course to warm by 8.2 degrees Fahrenheit, and the region is expected to jump an entire planting zone to 6a. 

The shift in plant hardiness zones could force some growers across the country to select plants that are adapted to a wider and warmer range of temperatures to survive warmer winters and earlier frosts and thaws.  

In some cases, that could mean new opportunities. 

Dean Colony runs Colony Acres Family Farm in North Liberty, Iowa. On his 200-acre farm, he grows pumpkins, corn, soybeans and zinnias. 

His farm is currently in plant hardiness zone five, but Colony said it could be a matter of time before Iowa is able to produce peaches like Missouri and Kentucky can. 

“How many more years is it going to be? I mean, we could grow peaches in Iowa, but it seems like they grow them way better down there,” Colony said. “So is it a matter of time before that comes here?” 

Wuestenberg said one challenge with the shifting zones is that they are based on climatological averages and do not take atypical and significant frost or freeze events into account, which can be challenging for producers. 

Who will be most affected?  

Wuestenberg said gardeners and fruit tree producers will likely be more concerned about the shifting zones, rather than row crop producers. 

Fruit trees and vines need a certain number of chilling hours, which is the minimum period of cold weather a fruit tree needs to blossom. 

For example, Einhorn said most apple trees require about a thousand chilling hours in the winter to break their dormancy period and bloom in the spring.  

But with winters warming, even by a few degrees, apple trees will want to break dormancy earlier.

“Instead of being at 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, maybe now the days are at 34 (degrees Fahrenheit) and that little bit of warming actually has a humongous effect on a tree,” Einhorn said.  

The apple trees could start flowering in late February or early March.

“Unfortunately, what can happen is overall, winter may have been warmer, but we still might get a March, April frost. And once that happens, those buds, those flowers, are exposed to that cold temperature, and then it kills them,” Wuestenberg said.   

This could lead to reduced fruit yields later in the season.  

But Einhorn said there are ways that producers can work within the unpredictable conditions.  

For example, there are various methods for raising temperatures for trees during a freeze, including using fans to pull warm air out of the atmosphere and running water over plants. There are also research efforts underway breeding new plants that have either delayed blooms or can withstand the new conditions.   

Meanwhile, farmers will continue to adapt. Jones, the flower farmer, has noticed strong winds and storms coming through the eastern Iowa region. She’s planted sunflowers in windier areas of the farm because they can withstand stronger gusts. More delicate flowers go near trees for natural protection. She also uses netting to help stabilize flowers from winds, rains and storms. 

 “At the end of the season, we’re at the mercy of our climate and the weather,” Jones said. “And that can greatly impact what we have in any given season.”  

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

A warming climate is changing growing conditions, shifting planting zones northward is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.