Attendees at a Feb. 12 protest called for a pause on data center construction in Wisconsin. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A group of Democratic state lawmakers on Thursday announced a proposal to put a moratorium on data center construction in Wisconsin as communities across the state grapple with local resistance to the development of hyperscale AI data centers. 

Debates around data centers have become increasingly tense in recent months as residents of communities including Mount Pleasant, Mount Horeb, Beaver Dam, Port Washington and Janesville have rallied opposition to  the approval of data centers by local officials. 

While officials in these communities are often tempted by the promise of increased property tax revenue from the facilities, residents have raised objections to their local representatives ceding local land to multibillion-dollar tech companies, the massive amounts of energy and water needed to operate the large data centers and the related effects on local utility rates and the environment to produce all the power.

Several pieces of legislation to regulate data center construction have already been proposed in the Legislature. In January, Assembly Republicans passed a bill that would establish some regulations, but Democrats said it didn’t do enough to prevent electricity costs from being passed on to regular consumers and included a provision that would stymie renewable energy development in the state. 

With just days left before the Legislature ends its work for the session next week, a group of Democratic lawmakers rolled out a proposal that would pause data center construction until “all of the questions that you have, that you have been asking your local mayors, you have been asking your local legislators, you have been asking these data centers, that all of those are actually answered,” Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said at a press conference Thursday afternoon with local data center activists. 

The bill defines a data center as “a facility having a primary purpose of storing, managing, and processing digital data and that has at least 5,000 servers, occupies at least 10,000 square feet, or has an electricity demand of at least 100 megawatts.”

The bill wouldn’t allow the construction of any data centers in the state until the state establishes a data center planning authority; prohibits energy and water costs from being shifted to residential utility customers; creates a “land and community funding mechanism”; eliminates state and local financial subsidies for data centers; mandates public reporting of data center energy and water use; creates data center-specific pollution regulations; requires that 100% of the energy produced for data centers be renewable; requires that data center construction projects pay prevailing or collectively bargained wages; restores planning authority to the Public Service Commission; prohibits non-disclosure agreements between data centers and government entities and creates an enforcement and penalty structure for data centers that violate regulations. 

“The intent is not to permanently prohibit data centers, but to ensure that any future development is responsible, transparent, and does not impose additional financial burdens on Wisconsin households,” a co-sponsorship memo on the proposal states. “Wisconsinites should not be asked to shoulder higher utility costs while large new energy users operate without clear rules, accountability, or public oversight. This bill provides the Legislature with the time and authority necessary to establish a fair and comprehensive framework that protects ratepayers, workers, and local communities before large-scale data centers are allowed to move forward.”

On Thursday, a few dozen people gathered outside the state Capitol to protest against data center construction before meeting in a hearing room for a news conference and panel discussion. Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), one of the several Democrats running in the primary for governor, said at the press conference that the data center proposals have galvanized anti-corporate views in communities of all political stripes. 

“This is about community power and returning community control to folks all across the state,” Hong said. “I am so incredibly grateful because I have not seen this type of bipartisan opposition to corporate control. I have not seen this type of bipartisan support for ensuring that we protect our natural resources. Our natural resources are not for sale. Our health is not for sale. Our shared future depends on all of us fighting right now to ensure that we are holding AI data centers accountable.”

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As power-hungry data centers proliferate, states are searching for ways to protect utility customers from the steep costs of upgrading the electrical grid, trying instead to shift the cost to AI-driven tech companies. (Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)

At a public hearing held by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission Tuesday, dozens of Wisconsin residents decried the effects massive data centers could have on the state’s electricity rates and ability to adopt renewable energy sources. 

The three-member PSC is considering a proposal from the Wisconsin Electric Power Company to establish a tariff system for providing electricity to massive data centers. Under the proposal, “very large” customers that would be subject to the tariff would have a combined energy load of 500 megawatts — the equivalent of powering about 400,000 homes. 

The first phase of Microsoft’s $13.3 billion data center project in Mount Pleasant is projected to require 450 megawatts. 

Critics of the proposal say that under this system, regular consumers will still be on the hook for 25% of the infrastructure costs associated with increasing the state’s energy load. 

Over the past year, the growth of data center development in Wisconsin has spurred an increasingly tense debate. Local governments have been tempted to allow their construction as a source of property tax revenue while local residents raise concerns over energy and water use, the conversion of historical farmland, the ethics of artificial intelligence and long-term environmental impacts.

The massive energy needs of data centers have become the central issue in the debate, with people in Wisconsin and around the country questioning how to manage the demands of giant corporations seeking to use orders of magnitude more energy than is currently being produced.

“I speak to you not only as a We Energies customer, a member of the Wisconsin State Senate, but on behalf of people across Wisconsin who have communicated to me their worry and fear about the development of hyperscale data centers,” Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said at the hearing. “This worry and fear transcends political divides and income brackets, residents and small businesses alike fear that these data centers will fundamentally alter and potentially destroy our Wisconsin way of life, and with good reason; the scale of the proposed development is unprecedented.” 

Larson added that often “this debate is framed as a false choice that our state must prioritize economic growth or meet our clean energy and climate goals. This is simply not true. In reality, Wisconsin can and must be a leader in pursuing both advancing economic development while accelerating a just transition to affordable, reliable, clean energy in a way that does not harm residents, health, economic security or the environment.”

The vast majority of those testifying during the more than three-hour hearing Tuesday afternoon were opposed to the structure of the proposed system — largely due to the 500 megawatt threshold proposed by the utility company. 

Several people said they were concerned that the threshold being set at this level would encourage the growth of still large data centers that use less than 500 megawatts of energy — and the costs of those centers’ electricity use will be passed on to regular consumers. 

“I submit that 500 megawatts is at least an order of magnitude too high,” Pleasant Prairie resident Charles Hasenohrl said. “The threshold should be lower than 50 megawatts, where at that point, companies are required to cover all costs, which again include generation, transmission and distribution.” 

Opponents also said they were concerned that data centers increasing the energy demand in Wisconsin will encourage the PSC and the state’s utility companies to construct new natural gas power plants, instead of encouraging the growth of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

“Renewable energy is the cheapest way to generate electricity, and it’s only getting cheaper,” Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of health and the environment at UW-Madison, said. 

Patz added that burning fossil fuels to provide energy for currently proposed data centers in southeastern Wisconsin will increase air pollution not only in the immediate region but spread to Chicago and western Michigan. 

“Because the right choice happens to be both the safest and the most affordable. That’s solar and wind power,” Patz said. “Let’s stop killing people unnecessarily with pollution from burning fossil fuels, especially knowing the multi-decadal life span of a power plant. The rest of the world is turning to renewable energy. Why should the PSC prevent us from transitioning to clean energy and improving our health at the same time?”

The handful of people who testified in favor of the proposal were union representatives. Several of the state’s unions have been vocal in supporting the construction of data centers, arguing that their members will benefit from the jobs created while the centers are being built. The union representatives said that the state should work to protect costs from being passed on to ratepayers, but that the state shouldn’t discourage data centers from coming to Wisconsin. 

“These projects require significant amounts of power, far beyond what’s available today to be operational and successfully run,” Jim Meyer, business manager for IBEW Local 2150, said. “Faced with this problem, the traditional method of having a utility company add power generation capacity through building more power plants, then spreading those costs over its customer base, would simply be unfair to its everyday customer, like my membership, who live and work in the areas and are also customers themselves. The VLC tariff will put the tab for those plants exactly where it belongs, with those very large customers who need that new electric load.”

PSC Administrative Judge Michael Newmark said that the job of the commission isn’t to decide if the state should go all in on encouraging data center construction but only the “reasonableness of the rates, terms, and conditions of electric service” in the We Energies proposal. Several people testifying expressed frustration that often the commission holds public hearings only to ultimately vote against the majority sentiment of the public and side with corporate utility interests. 

“I am wondering whether this is an exercise in futility,” Milwaukee resident Ted Kraig said. “Technologically, it makes no sense to be building up old fossil fuel infrastructure, and still, the Public Service Commission just goes and basically rubber stamps it. My concern is that we can have 1,000 people testifying with the best evidence and arguments imaginable, but the Public Service Commission sitting there with little check boxes … We Energies gets whatever it wants.” 

The Public Service Commission is expected to make its decision on the tariff by May 1.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Judge Michael Newmark. We regret the error

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• An eighth billion-dollar data center project is in the early stages of development, this one in southwestern Wisconsin, the Grant County Economic Development Corp. confirmed in an interview Monday.

• An undisclosed company is seeking 400 to 500 acres in the town of Cassville, the town of Cassville chair told Wisconsin Watch. Not much else is known at this point.

• The project comes as public scrutiny of data center projects intensifies and the Public Service Commission considers how to structure rates for large utility consumers like data centers.

A site in the Driftless Area in southwest Wisconsin is being eyed for a possible $1 billion data center, just as the state considers who should pay to provide the unprecedented amount of electricity such projects need.

It would be the eighth major data center known to have been proposed in Wisconsin, though one of those, near Madison, has been dropped.

Ron Brisbois, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Corp., said Feb. 9 he expects to learn by spring whether Grant County remains in consideration by a company scouting sites for what it said would be a $1 billion data center. 

“They’re casting a pretty wide net, Grant County just happens to be part of that net,” Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch. “It’s very, very preliminary.” 

The revelation contrasts with how other Wisconsin officials have handled data center proposals. 

A Wisconsin Watch investigation found that local officials in some of the seven communities where hyperscale data centers have been proposed worked on the proposals for months before making any announcement to the public. In four of the communities, officials signed confidential nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), pledging to keep details of the plans private.

Brisbois said he has not been asked to sign a data center NDA. He said he met with a company, whom he would not identify, in November before announcing at an open meeting in December that a $1 billion data center was being floated in Grant County. That mention was reported by local news media.

Brisbois told Wisconsin Watch he felt that his board of directors deserved to know about the initial inquiries, but that he wouldn’t release details that might jeopardize the project.

“I don’t know who the end user would be, all I’m being told is it’s one of the big five or six businesses,” Brisbois said. “I’ve asked not to be told that information. I don’t need that information to do my job.”

Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Major companies building data centers in Wisconsin include Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, in Beaver Dam, which used an NDA; and Microsoft in Mount Pleasant and Vantage Data Centers in Port Washington, to serve OpenAI and Oracle, which did not.

“I like to be transparent with my board of directors,” Brisbois said. “But did I give a lot of details? No. I thought it was an appropriate time that we were being evaluated, at least initially. Did I need to do that? No. But it’s how I do my job.”

Doug Schauff, the town chair in Cassville, in southwest Grant County, told Wisconsin Watch he attended a meeting about the data center about a week ago. He wouldn’t reveal other details, other than the company involved is seeking 400 or 500 acres in the town.

“Everything is so vague right now,” Schauff said. “They had not contacted land owners. … They wouldn’t give us any definite figures (on power usage), which would be Greek to us anyway.”

The seven major data center projects detailed in the Jan. 26 Wisconsin Watch report were valued at more than $57 billion, including one in the Madison suburb of DeForest. DeForest city officials did not sign an NDA, but kept details of a $12 billion data center proposal quiet for months before announcing it to the public. Amid opposition from residents, the city dropped the project Jan. 27. 

Data center proposals are pending in Kenosha, Menomonie and Janesville, all of which signed NDAs. 

The Janesville City Council has scheduled five informational sessions on an $8 billion data center proposed there. The first is Feb. 9, when the council is also scheduled to consider a proposal from data center opponents that would require a referendum on such large-scale projects.

Republican state lawmakers on Feb. 6 introduced a bill that would prohibit local governments from signing data center NDAs.

Meanwhile, attention is turning to how the state will determine who will pay to provide the massive amounts of electricity that data centers need to operate.

On Feb. 10, the Public Service Commission is scheduled to hold a hearing, which will be livestreamed, on establishing a payment structure for the generation and distribution of electricity needed by “very large customers,” such as data centers.  

A key question is whether data centers will be required to pay entirely, or whether some of those costs will be spread among other residential and other general ratepayers.

Bert Garvin, an executive vice president of We Energies, has said the rate structure proposed by the utility to the PSC will protect general ratepayers. “While your bills may go up for other cost-of-service reasons, we can assure all our customers your bills aren’t going up because of” data centers, he said at a public forum last week.

At the same forum, Tom Content, executive director of the consumer advocate Citizens Utility Board, said “the devil’s in the details” on how the PSC protects ratepayers. 

“I think it’s really important that these wealthy tech companies have to put up the money and not have to achieve compliance with that some other way,” he said.

Content also alluded to stranded assets — power plants that are shut down while ratepayers are still paying off their debt. He said the PSC must impose “exit fees” stringent enough so that data centers remain financially responsible for new multibillion-dollar power plants, should the AI phenomenon become a “bubble” and data centers shut down early.

Wisconsin Watch reported in December that residential and business utility customers in Wisconsin owe $1 billion for stranded assets — the debt taken on to build and upgrade power plants that have been shut down or are scheduled to be shut down soon.

One challenge in trying to protect ratepayers for the costs of electricity needed for data centers is that the PSC has never faced a surge in electricity demand of this scale. We Energies alone plans to spend $19 billion over five years to meet what is expected to be a doubling of its demand for electricity, largely from the two Milwaukee-area data centers, in Port Washington and Mount Pleasant. 

Nationally, the procedures that regulators use are “not designed for the current level and pace of load growth,” one energy consultant wrote in a December report. 

“As a result, the estimated cost to serve new customers can quickly become outdated and inaccurate,” potentially leading to costs being shifted to other customers, the report said.

The Republican-controlled Assembly on Jan. 20 passed a bill to require that the PSC ensure “that no costs associated with the construction or extension of electric infrastructure that primarily serves a data center are allocated to or recovered from any other customer.” 

No action has been scheduled in the GOP-controlled state Senate. 

Opponents have criticized a “poison pill” provision in the bill they say would severely limit the ability to use renewable energy to power data centers.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has said he likely would not sign the bill.

As Wisconsin weighs who should pay, another possible billion-dollar data center emerges 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.

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Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission typically operates far from the spotlight, quietly regulating the utilities most residents only notice when the lights go out. But a wave of proposed energy-intensive data centers in Wisconsin is fueling wider public interest in the agency’s work.

“These are the three most important people in state government that nobody has ever heard of,” said Tom Content, executive director of the state Citizens Utility Board. “They are setting the state’s policy for its energy future.”

With six new data centers planned or under construction in Wisconsin, the commission must now decide how — or whether — Wisconsinites should pay to keep them running. 

Balancing utility and ratepayer interests

The agency — more than a century old and among the first of its kind in the country — oversees Wisconsin’s utilities, both public and investor-owned. It balances two sometimes conflicting goals: the financial stability of utilities, without which the state’s grid could fall into disrepair, and fair treatment of utility customers. The commission’s roughly $39 million budget for the 2027 fiscal year primarily comes from fees paid by utilities, which pass those costs on to their customers.

The PSC isn’t always the decision maker on energy policy. State lawmakers can write rules for utilities for the PSC to enforce. But when state law leaves room for interpretation, the PSC is left to decide.

Most utilities under the PSC’s authority are municipal water and sewer services — the Milwaukee Water Works, for instance.

But many of the PSC’s highest-stakes decisions center on investor-owned utilities. Private gas and electrical utilities don’t compete for customers. As “regulated monopolies,” each is the sole provider in its portion of the state. The PSC acts as the regulator, approving rate hikes, bond issues and major construction projects.

The PSC also approves utilities’ “return on equity” — a profit margin factored into ratepayers’ bills. In Wisconsin, that rate typically runs around 10%.

Powering the data center boom

The PSC lacks a direct say in data center construction. But because data centers demand vast amounts of electricity, it decides how to distribute the costs of new infrastructure needed to power data centers.

The commission approved the construction of We Energies natural gas plants in Oak Creek in Milwaukee County and the town of Paris in Kenosha County in May 2025.

Both plants are part of We Energies’ more than $2 billion plan to expand its natural gas generation capacity to meet surging electricity demand largely driven by data centers. Planned data centers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington alone are projected to expand service area electricity demand by 40% between 2026 and 2030.

Wisconsin has no precedent for handling such a surge in demand for electricity.

Now the commission is considering a We Energies proposal for a new payment structure for “very large customers” that could set the standard for allocating the costs of building and operating power plants needed to meet data center demands. 

“Our proposed data center rate is considered by many people to be the gold standard, and one that could be a model for what others across the country use,” We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.

The Sierra Club is among several advocacy groups involved in the We Energies case as an “intervenor,” meaning it can question the utility and provide expert witnesses. 

“What the PSC requires them to do will likely influence future decisions on large customer rates, which is why it’s so important that we get this right this time around,” said Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator with the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter. 

The PSC is also weighing an Alliant Energy proposal to establish a payment structure for Meta’s planned data center in Beaver Dam. Some critics argue Alliant Energy should propose a framework covering all data center customers rather than a one-off agreement.

At the heart of the debate: Should Wisconsin’s residential and industrial customers cover any of the costs of powering new data centers?

To answer that question, the PSC holds proceedings in which utilities and intervenors trade questions and answers about the risks and rewards of a utility’s proposal. The commission collects up to $542,000 from utilities to help intervenors pay attorneys and expert witnesses; utilities cover their own expenses. Utility customers ultimately pay for both sides through their electricity bills.

Not all intervenors are critics. Microsoft and data center developer Vantage have intervened in the We Energies case. The proposed payment structure reflects negotiations between the three companies that took place before We Energies filed its case before the PSC. 

Utilities generally work closely with data center developers. Four of Wisconsin’s investor-owned utilities, including We Energies’ parent company, are founding members of the state’s Data Center Coalition, which says it aims “to ensure our state’s significant growth in data center development translates into sustainable economic benefits.” A data center boom is good business for utilities because they earn a return on any new infrastructure they build.

High-demand customers like Microsoft can also intervene and provide key data to inform PSC decisions.

In the We Energies case, details about Microsoft’s projected energy use for its southeast Wisconsin facilities are protected by an order that limits access to the PSC and other parties in the case. 

The PSC needs the data to judge whether proposed arrangements — like granting data centers 100 megawatts of free electricity if they exceed the supply agreed to in their contracts — properly balance the interests of utilities and the public. Microsoft successfully moved to shield that information from public disclosure on the grounds that it could give competitors a window into their operations.

“Load forecasts are sensitive because they give competitors information about our business outlook and investment decisions,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch.

Alliant’s one-off payment structure case is subject to even greater access restrictions: Entire pages of the proposed contract between Alliant subsidiary Wisconsin Power and Light and Meta are redacted. 

As the PSC considers the two cases, customers are still being billed in the same manner as  large industrial customers — a payment structure not built for such high electricity demands. Critics of the We Energies proposal agree some alternative is needed.

“They would be better off recognizing that there are some potential harms to other customers even with the proposal they have out there,” said Brett Korte, a staff attorney with the advocacy group Clean Wisconsin.

In written testimony, We Energies Vice President and Treasurer Tony Reese wrote that the new payment structure must leave non-data center customers “no worse off” than under the status quo.

Parties that disagree with a PSC outcome can appeal in court. One such challenge reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2005, when the justices upheld the commission’s approval of a coal plant expansion in Oak Creek. 

The commissioners

Unlike state Supreme Court justices, PSC commissioners are not elected. Governors appoint them to staggered six-year terms, subject to Senate confirmation. Gov. Tony Evers appointed all three current commissioners. Chairwoman Summer Strand has served on the commission since 2023; commissioners Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins took their seats in 2024.

The commissioners are supported by a full-time staff of researchers, auditors, attorneys, accountants and a range of other specialists to inform their decisions. Nieto and Hawkins previously worked on the PSC’s staff.

Former commissioners occasionally land jobs with the utilities they once regulated. Six months after stepping down from the PSC in February 2024, commissioner Rebecca Valcq took a job with Alliant Energy — the parent company of Wisconsin Power and Light, which provides electricity for much of central and southern Wisconsin. She became the company’s president in 2025.

Moves like Valcq’s have drawn concerns from watchdogs about utilities’ influence over the agency built to regulate them. Wisconsin law bars ex-commissioners from testifying before the PSC for a year after leaving. State Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, wants to extend that window, proposing a three-year “cooling off period” before ex-commissioners can take executive roles with utilities, enforced by the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. 

“Historically, good-government reforms that rein in the influence of special interests tend to draw bipartisan support,” Nedweski wrote in an email — though she said she hasn’t yet secured any Democratic co-sponsors.

What’s next? 

The PSC is set to hold its next hearing in the We Energies case on Tuesday, with room for residents and interest groups to weigh in.

Hanging over the finer details of the proposal is a larger question: What risks will ratepayers bear if the data center boom later goes bust?

“Of course no company is too big to fail,” Reese wrote last month. “But in the very unlikely event that a customer as massive and financially stable as Microsoft becomes unable to meet its financial obligations,” his company’s proposal promises “adequate protection” to the utility and  customers.

“Making sure our customers aren’t stuck paying data centers’ costs is at the foundation of our customer protection plan,” We Energies spokesman Conway told Wisconsin Watch.

Considering that Wisconsin ratepayers still owe nearly $1 billion on “stranded assets” — power plants that have been shut down due to obsolescence — critics of the data center proposals are skeptical. 

Will the utility’s proposed guardrails hold up in a worst case scenario? That’s now up to the PSC.

Data center boom spotlights Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission. Here’s what the agency does. 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.

An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va., in 2024. As Americans grow increasingly frustrated over their electricity bills, states are trying to keep the nation’s growing number of data centers from causing higher energy costs for consumers. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

As Americans grow increasingly frustrated over their electricity bills, states are trying to keep the nation’s growing number of data centers from causing higher energy costs for consumers.

For years, many states competed aggressively to land data centers, sprawling campuses full of the computer servers that store and transmit the data behind apps and websites. But many officials are now scrutinizing how those power-hungry projects might affect the electric bills of households, small businesses and other industries.

Oregon last year became one of the first states to enact a law requiring utilities to charge data centers different electric prices than other industries because of how they drive up the cost of energy production and transmission.

“We are now making data centers pay a higher rate commensurate with the amount of energy they’re sucking out of the system,” said Oregon state Rep. Tom Andersen, a Democrat.

Republican and Democratic leaders in at least a dozen states have targeted data centers with separate, higher electric rates to protect other customers. States also are requiring long-term commitments and financial guarantees through collateral before greenlighting infrastructure investments for new data center projects. But lawmakers acknowledge that numerous factors affect energy prices, so targeting data center-specific costs can be complicated.

An increasingly digital world and the rise of energy-intensive artificial intelligence has led to major expansion of data centers: Consultant McKinsey & Company expects companies to spend nearly $7 trillion worldwide on data centers by 2030. But the industry is facing growing scrutiny, from neighbors who don’t want to live near the massive server farms and from residents worried about how data centers will affect their own swelling utility bills.

Delaware legislation that would charge data centers higher rates advanced out of committee last week. On Tuesday, a Florida state Senate committee approved a bill that would create new rate structures for data centers.

In Oklahoma, a Republican state senator has proposed a moratorium on new data centers until late 2029, allowing the state to study how data centers affect utility rates, the environment and property values.

Separate legislation from state Rep. Brad Boles will seek to protect other ratepayers from the costs of data centers. Boles, the Republican chair of the state Energy and Natural Resources Oversight Committee, said his in-the-works measure would ensure data centers pay their fair share.

Boles told Stateline that his constituents are increasingly worried about data centers, with a dozen potential major ones proposed across the state.

“We’re trying to ensure that those data centers pay for their own infrastructure and we don’t shift that cost or burden to everyday Oklahomans,” he said.

In Oregon, Andersen’s legislation created a new rate structure for data centers with long-term contracts and required regulators to separate the costs of those facilities from other ratepayers.

But consumer advocates have already accused the state’s largest utility of trying to skirt the new law by making residential customers pay part of the long-term cost of supplying large data centers in a pending rate case.

Andersen, a member of the state House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment, said the new rate structure is unlikely to immediately lower consumer bills. Rather, it aims to curb future increases as data centers require more power generation and transmission.

“We’re not going to change the rates that are being currently paid by the ratepayers and the users of the electricity,” he said. “It’s just going to stop future raises.”

The data center boom

Rising utility bills continue to outpace inflation, sparking anger from consumers and more scrutiny from state regulators, governors and lawmakers.

The boom of data centers is frequently cited as a prime reason for rising electricity prices, as their operation requires more power generation, transmission and distribution upgrades. A Bloomberg News analysis in September found wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas with significant data center activity.

Data center companies say they aren’t the only reason prices are rising.

“It’s inaccurate to draw a clear line between large load customers like data centers coming online and increases in prices. It’s just not that simple,” said Lucas Fykes, senior director of energy policy and regulatory counsel at the Data Center Coalition, a trade group representing data center owners and users, including Amazon, Meta and Visa.

He said many factors have contributed to higher electricity prices, including extreme weather events and the nation’s aging electric grid.

Fykes said his organization opposes rate structures that treat data centers differently from other large electric users such as industrial sites. The organization is working with regulators as states increasingly implement practices to ensure residents and small businesses aren’t on the hook for big energy investments if major projects including data centers don’t come to fruition.

Fykes said the country is likely just in the “beginning innings” of a longer ramp-up in technology and power needs.

“We are also in a global race to build out data centers, to support AI, to support cloud infrastructure,” he said. “It’s important to make sure that we maintain those assets here in the United States.”

That can pose competing interests for political leaders, including mayors, who have pushed hard to land investments from tech companies.

“We want to be leaders in AI, but we don’t want the infrastructure needed to support it,” said Rusty Paul, the mayor of Sandy Springs, Georgia, in the Atlanta metro area.

He was among several mayors addressing the issue of data centers at last month’s winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. On a data center panel, Paul acknowledged the effect of Georgia’s tax incentives for data centers: “They’re just popping up everywhere,” he said.

But utilities and regulators are also making long overdue grid upgrades that aren’t tied to data centers, he said.

“The cost of electricity is going up for everybody — and it’s not all related to data centers,” he said.

A bipartisan push

The Georgia Public Service Commission last year created new rules that officials said would protect ratepayers from data center costs. In addition to covering costs of power consumed at their facilities, data centers would have to fund the costs incurred by upstream generation, transmission and distribution, the regulator said.

But lawmakers aren’t convinced those steps went far enough.

State Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican, is again pushing legislation that would solidify the regulator’s rules into law. His bill would prohibit utilities from passing along the fuel, generation or transmission costs of data centers to other customers.

He told Stateline that the regulator’s rules need to be codified into law so they can’t be weakened later.

Hufstetler said rising utility bills are among the biggest issues facing his constituents. High prices played a key role in November’s election, when Democrats flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission board — the first time Democrats won statewide constitutional office in nearly two decades.

“I saw people with MAGA hats going into the election polling places that were saying, ‘I’m not voting for those guys that raised my rates,’” Hufstetler said, referring to the Republican incumbents who lost.

Hufstetler said the bill, which passed out of committee last year, has already gained major bipartisan support in the Senate, where it is sponsored by multiple Republicans and Democrats.

“This is very bipartisan,” he said. “We have all heard from our people around the state of Georgia.”

The Georgia Public Service Commission agrees in principle with the legislation, said agency spokesperson Tom Krause. But he said the regulator worries about losing flexibility if its rules are written into law.

“Not just this bill, but whenever the legislature codifies a rule that we put in place, we get a little nervous because it can tie our hands in special circumstances,” he said.

A complex challenge

As part of implementing a law enacted last year, Maryland’s utility regulator is weighing a new rate structure for data centers and other large load users.

Proposed regulations would require certain preapproval analysis for heavy power users, a separate rate tariff for data centers and collateral to ensure other ratepayers don’t end up paying for major investments if projects do not come to fruition.

Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel, an independent agency representing residential utility users, said the proposed changes meet statutory requirements but could do more to protect consumers.

In a news release last month, Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp said residents are already facing higher costs from data centers from outside the state.

“While we push for better federal rules to address those costs, Maryland has the power—and customers a clear need—to make sure data centers within Maryland take on every cost that they impose on residential customers,” Lapp said.

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore recently joined 12 other governors and the Trump administration in urging the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to shield residents and businesses from the infrastructure costs from data centers.

Maryland state Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat, said the grid operator has for years failed residents in the 13 states plus the District of Columbia that it serves. By delaying renewable energy projects, she said, PJM has kept older, more expensive power plants online, driving up prices as data centers increase demand.

PJM’s board last month rolled out a new data center plan that it said would improve demand forecasting, accelerate the addition of new generation projects and give states a larger role.

Charkoudian said states and utilities struggle to determine just how much power is needed. Data center users shop around for sites, which can cause wildly inaccurate forecasts of just how much power a utility will need.

“It actually has a very concrete financial impact on ratepayers,” she told Stateline. “And so that’s why one of the things that really could make a difference for ratepayers is if we actually had an accurate count of how much we’re getting online.”

While some of those challenges lie outside the realm of state control, Charkoudian said there are things the state can do, including the new rate structure for larger users. She’s crafting a bill encouraging data centers to curtail their power usage during peak periods, such as hot days, when the electrical system is taxed by heavy usage of air conditioners, Maryland Matters reported.

Charkoudian said adding solar generation and storage are low-cost ways to respond quickly to demand. And states can avoid the need for more generation by doubling down on energy efficiency programs that lower demand and also consumer costs.

“The best time to fix this was five years ago,” she said. “The next best time is right this minute, because it’s only going to get worse.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira contributed to this story. Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

In Port Washington, Wisconsin, many residents oppose a $15 billion data center campus that’s currently under construction for end-users Oracle and OpenAI. (No Data Centers in Ozaukee County Facebook group)

Big Tech is here in Wisconsin, looking to make Wisconsin families and small businesses pay for data centers. The Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) is about to make a decision that will affect all of us: We Energies has proposed a new rate structure on data centers that, as drafted, favors profits and protections for Big Tech companies and We Energies executives themselves, but putting Wisconsinites at risk to subsidize the costs. Here’s what’s going on and how you can do something about it. 

What’s at stake?

We Energies, the largest and most profitable utility in the state, is preparing to spend $19.3 billion on electric generation due to data center proposals from Microsoft, Oracle, Vantage, and OpenAI.4. This is largely to build new gas plants in order to power the massive energy needs of Big Tech’s data centers. Here’s the problem: If sufficient protections aren’t in place now, the costs of these expensive gas plants may be forced onto families and small businesses, driving up people’s bills to keep the lights on and heat their homes in the winter.

We Energies’ proposals put us at risk for higher utility bills without fully ensuring that Big Tech is paying their fair share. As it currently stands, more expensive data centers likely means higher costs for all of us. Tech companies should be responsible for covering the cost of service needed to power their data centers, including the cost of building out power to service these high energy demands.

In addition to their problematic proposal, We Energies is proposing to add huge volumes of natural gas plants to feed these power-hungry data centers, which are expensive to build and take decades to pay off. These so-called “stranded assets” end up costing us more money for many years down the line, at times even when they are no longer in service. With rapidly changing AI technology, there is a very real risk that Big Tech does not move forward with planned data centers because they’re no longer profitable or needed. In short, data centers create short-term gains for Big Tech and We Energies with long-term consequences for Wisconsinites. 

What’s going on behind Big Tech’s closed doors?

We Energies’ proposal encourages Big Tech to make decisions behind closed doors, without considering Wisconsinites or how their decisions will impact Wisconsin lands, waters and natural resources. We should all be suspicious of this. What’s happening in these meetings that We Energies and Big Tech don’t want us to know about? If Big Tech builds data centers in Wisconsin communities, Wisconsin communities deserve to know what deals are being made with the utilities. 

Transparency and accountability are crucial. Big Tech and utilities like We Energies must make their data center reporting, planning and financials publicly available, so that regulators like the PSC can implement protections and ensure Wisconsinites aren’t being taken advantage of. We deserve to always know how and why our electric and gas bills are being affected.

The time to take action is now.

If We Energies builds new gas plants to power Big Tech’s data centers, all of us will live with greater risks of rising gas and electricity prices as well as environmental impacts to our communities. If Big Tech wants to come into our state and use our state resources, they shouldn’t be putting us in jeopardy, they should be the ones taking on the risks. 

As we prepare for the PSC to make a decision on data centers, we need to make our voices heard to decision makers: Big Tech and We Energies don’t get to decide what’s best for Wisconsin. You have a role to play in shaping the policies that affect you. Attend the virtual public hearing on Feb. 10 or by submitting a comment by Feb. 17.

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How much should data centers pay for the massive amounts of new power infrastructure they require? Wisconsin’s largest utility, We Energies, has offered its answer to that question in what is the first major proposal before state regulators on the issue.

Under the proposal, currently open for public comment, data centers would pay most or all of the price to construct new power plants or renewables needed to serve them, and the utility says the benefits that other customers receive would outweigh any costs they shoulder for building and running this new generation.

But environmental and consumer advocates fear the utility’s plan will actually saddle customers with payments for generation, including polluting natural gas plants, that wouldn’t otherwise be needed.

States nationwide face similar dilemmas around data centers’ energy use. But who pays for the new power plants and transmission is an especially controversial question in Wisconsin and other ​“vertically integrated” energy markets, where utilities charge their customers for the investments they make in such infrastructure — with a profit, called ​“rate of return,” baked in. In states with competitive energy markets, like Illinois, by contrast, utilities buy power on the open market and don’t make a rate of return on building generation.

Although six big data center projects are underway in Wisconsin, the state has no laws governing how the computing facilities get their power.

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled state Legislature are debating two bills this session. The Assembly passed the GOP-backed proposal on Jan. 20, which, even if it makes it through the Senate, is unlikely to get Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ signature. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a spokesperson for Evers said on Jan. 14 that ​“the one thing environmentalists, labor, utilities, and data center companies can all agree on right now is how bad Republican lawmakers’ data center bill is.” Until a measure is passed, individual decisions by the state Public Service Commission will determine how utilities supply energy to data centers.

The We Energies case is high stakes because two data centers proposed in the utility’s southeast Wisconsin territory promise to double its total demand. One of those facilities is a Microsoft complex that the tech giant says will be ​“the world’s most powerful AI datacenter.”

The utility’s proposal could also be precedent-setting as other Wisconsin utilities plan for data centers, said Bryan Rogers, environmental justice director for the Milwaukee community organization Walnut Way Conservation Corp.

“As goes We Energies,” Rogers said, ​“so goes the rest of the state.”

Building new power

We Energies’ proposal — first filed last spring — would let data centers choose between two options for paying for new generation infrastructure to ensure the utility has enough capacity to meet grid operator requirements that the added electricity demand doesn’t interfere with reliability.

In both cases, the utility will acquire that capacity through ​“bespoke resources” built specifically for the data center. The computing facilities technically would not get their energy directly from these power plants or renewables but rather from We Energies at market prices.

Under the first option, called ​“full benefits,” data centers would pay the full price of constructing, maintaining and operating the new generation and would cover the profit guaranteed to We Energies. The data centers would also get revenue from the sale of the electricity on the market as well as from renewable energy credits for solar and wind arrays; renewable energy credits are basically certificates that can be sold to other entities looking to meet sustainability goals.

The second option, called ​“capacity only,” would have data centers paying 75% of the cost of building the generation. Other customers would pick up the tab for the remaining 25% of the construction and pay for fuel and other costs. In this case, both data centers and other customers would pay for the profit guaranteed to We Energies as part of the project, though the data centers would pay a different — and possibly lower — rate than other customers.

Developers of both data centers being built in We Energies’ territory support the utility’s proposal, saying in testimony that it will help them get online faster and sufficiently protect other customers from unfair costs.

Consumer and environmental advocacy groups, however, are pushing back on the capacity-only option, arguing that it is unfair to make regular customers pay a quarter of the price for building new generation that might not have been necessary without data centers in the picture.

“Nobody asked for this,” said Rogers of Walnut Way. The Sierra Club told regulators to scrap the capacity-only option. The advocacy group Clean Wisconsin similarly opposes that option, as noted in testimony to regulators.

But We Energies says everyone will benefit from building more power sources.

“These capacity-only plants will serve all of our customers, especially on the hottest and coldest days of the year,” We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway wrote in an email. ​“We expect that customers will receive benefits from these plants that exceed the costs that are proposed to be allocated to them.”

We Energies has offered no proof of this promise, according to testimony filed by the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group, which represents factories and other large operations. The trade association’s energy adviser, Jeffry Pollock, told regulators that the utility’s own modeling of the capacity-only approach showed scenarios in which the costs borne by customers outweigh the benefits to them.

Clean energy is another sticking point. Clean Wisconsin and the Environmental Law and Policy Center want the utility’s plan to more explicitly encourage data centers to meet capacity requirements in part through their own on-site renewables and to participate in demand-response programs. Customers enrolled in such programs agree to dial down energy use during moments of peak demand, reducing the need for as many new power plants.

“It’s really important to make sure that this tariff contemplates as much clean energy and avoids using as much energy as possible, so we can avoid that incremental fossil fuel build-out that would otherwise potentially be needed to meet this demand,” said Clean Wisconsin staff attorney Brett Korte.

And advocates want the utility to include smaller data centers in its proposal, which in its current form would apply only to data centers requiring 500 megawatts of power or more.

We Energies’ response to stakeholder testimony was due on Jan. 28, and the utility and regulators will also consider public comments that are being submitted. After that, the regulatory commission may hold hearings, and advocates can file additional briefs. Eventually, the utility will reach an agreement with commissioners on how to charge data centers.

Risky business

Looming large over this debate is the mounting concern that the artificial intelligence boom is a bubble. If that bubble pops, it could mean far less power demand from data centers than utilities currently expect.

In November, We Energies announced plans to build almost 3 gigawatts of natural gas plants, renewables and battery storage. Conway said much of this new construction will be paid for by data centers as their bespoke resources.

But some worry that utility customers could be left paying too much for these investments if data centers don’t materialize or don’t use as much energy as predicted. Wisconsin consumers are already on the hook for almost $1 billion for ​“stranded assets,” mostly expensive coal plants that closed earlier than originally planned, as Wisconsin Watch recently tabulated.

“The reason we bring up the worst-case scenario is it’s not just theoretical,” said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin, the state’s primary consumer advocacy organization. ​“There’s been so many headlines about the AI bubble. Will business plans change? Will new AI chips require data centers to use a lot less energy?”

We Energies’ proposal has data centers paying promised costs even if they go out of business or otherwise prematurely curtail their demand. But developers do not have to put up collateral for this purpose if they have a positive credit rating. That means if such data center companies went bankrupt or otherwise couldn’t meet their financial obligations, utility customers may end up paying the bill.

Steven Kihm, the Citizens Utility Board’s regulatory strategist and chief economist, gave examples of companies that had stellar credit until they didn’t, in testimony to regulators. The company that made BlackBerry handheld devices saw its stock skyrocket in the mid-2000s, only to lose most of its value with the rise of smartphones, he noted. Energy company Enron, meanwhile, had a top credit rating until a month before its 2001 collapse, Kihm warned. He advised regulators that data center developers should have to put up adequate collateral regardless of their credit rating.

The Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group echoed concerns about risk if data centers struggle financially.

“The unprecedented growth in capital spending will subject (We Energies) to elevated financial and credit risks,” Pollock told regulators. ​“Customers will ultimately provide the financial backstop if (the utility) is unable to fully enforce the terms” of its tariff.

Jeremy Fisher, Sierra Club’s principal adviser on climate and energy, equated the risk to co-signing ​“a loan on a mansion next door, with just the vague assurance that the neighbors will almost certainly be able to cover their loan.”

A version of this article was first published by Canary Media.

Wisconsin debates how to pay for the power-hungry AI boom 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.

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The Madison suburb of DeForest, where a $12 billion data center proposal has been in development for months, abruptly announced Jan. 27 that the data center “is not feasible.”

The statement by the village government indicates the proposal will be dropped.

The announcement came a day after Wisconsin Watch reported on secrecy on the part of local governments regarding seven major data centers around Wisconsin. 

In DeForest, village staff worked for at least seven months with Virginia-based QTS Data Centers before the proposal was publicly announced in October. On Nov. 18, the village president said at a public board meeting that members had only known about the project for weeks.

A key issue was the village would have had to annex 1,600 acres in the neighboring town of Vienna.

QTS was expected to make a presentation Jan. 27 to a village board committee, ahead of consideration by the village board on Feb. 3 and a public hearing on Feb. 9. 

Instead, the village issued a statement Tuesday, saying: 

“After individual discussions with the Village Board trustees, village staff have determined that QTS’ data center proposal is not feasible in DeForest. Village staff have recommended to the village president to reject the annexation petition during the Feb. 3 Village Board meeting.”

Dan Jansen, a DeForest resident who opposes the data center, told Wisconsin Watch that the months of preparation appeared to give the proposal momentum, but that he believes it never had enough support on the seven-member village board.

Village President Jane Cahill Wolfgram, who had expressed frustration with residents’ opposition to the data center, told Wisconsin Watch on Jan. 28: “We have looked at the project as much as we can right now and decided it’s not the direction we should go.”

Our original story on data center secrecy was the result of a reader tip. If you have suggestions for future stories, please let us know.

DeForest announces it won’t move forward with controversial $12 billion data center 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.

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Wisconsin stands at a pivotal moment.

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing and hyperscale data centers are arriving quickly, bringing enormous demand for electricity and water. The real question is not whether these investments will come, but how we manage them and who pays the costs if we get it wrong.

As a purple state, Wisconsin has long shown that good energy policy is practical, not ideological. Families want affordable bills. Businesses want reliable power. Communities want clean water and economic opportunity. That same common-sense approach must guide how we respond to rapid data center growth.

An unprecedented load and a real affordability risk

The scale of proposed data centers is unlike anything Wisconsin has seen.

Just two projects, one in Port Washington and another in Mount Pleasant, have requested nearly four gigawatts of electricity combined. That is more power than all Wisconsin households use today.

Meeting this demand will require massive investments in power plants, transmission lines, substations, pipelines and water infrastructure. But under Wisconsin’s current utility model, these costs are not paid only by the companies driving demand. They are instead spread across all of us who pay electric bills, including families, farms and small businesses that won’t benefit from data center power.

For small businesses operating on thin margins, even modest increases in electric or water rates affect hiring, pricing and long-term viability. In rural communities with fewer customers sharing infrastructure costs, the impact can be even more severe.

This concern is already becoming real. Utilities are citing data center demand to justify new methane gas plants and delaying coal plant retirements. Utilities doubling down on fossil fuels should give every one of us pause.

Why costly gas is the wrong answer

Building new methane gas plants for data centers would lock customers into decades of fuel price volatility, even though cleaner options have become cheaper and faster to deploy.

Wind, solar and battery storage can come online far more quickly than fossil fuel plants and without exposing families and businesses to unpredictable fuel costs. Battery storage costs alone have fallen nearly 90% over the past decade. 

Across the country, these tools are replacing methane gas plants in states as different as Texas and California.

There is also a serious risk that we will pay higher bills for decades, even when data centers stop using those methane gas plants. In Nevada, a major utility has acknowledged that only about 15% of proposed data centers are likely to be built. When speculative projects fall through, all of us are left to pay for infrastructure we actually never needed.

This is not ideology. It is basic financial risk management, and basic fairness.

Clean energy is the lowest-cost path

Wisconsin policymakers and elected officials need to put guardrails into place to protect everyday residents from the AI bubble that’s threatening the state. The core principle? That data centers operate on 100% clean energy, not as a slogan, but because it is the lowest-cost and lowest-risk option over time.

A smart framework would require developers to:

• Supply at least 30% of their power from on-site and Wisconsin-based renewable energy.
• Offset additional demand through energy efficiency, demand response – at least 25% of peak capacity – and smart grid flexibility.
• Participate fully in utility efficiency and renewable energy programs rather than opting out.

Each data center project should require a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement that clearly defines community protections and benefits, negotiated among developers, local governments, neighborhood-based organizations, and underserved communities.

This approach reduces peak demand, lowers infrastructure costs and protects existing customers while allowing data centers to advance.

Major companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta have already publicly committed to operating on carbon-free energy. We need to hold them to that. Wisconsin risks losing our competitive advantage if we default to gas-heavy solutions instead of offering clean, flexible grids.

Water is a non-negotiable constraint

Energy is not the only concern. Water matters just as much.

A single hyperscale data center can use millions of gallons of water per day, either directly for cooling or indirectly through power generation. In communities with limited water systems, that can crowd out agricultural use and raise residents’ water bills.

Wisconsin should require closed-loop cooling systems, full accounting of direct and indirect water use and ongoing public reporting to ensure local water supplies are protected.

A practical path forward

Wisconsin does not have to choose between economic growth and affordability. We can do both if we insist on clear guardrails.

That means requiring data centers to pay the full cost of service, powering growth with clean energy first and protecting water resources and ratepayers from unnecessary risk.

Data centers are coming. The question is whether Wisconsin families and small businesses will be partners in that growth or be left paying higher bills for decades to come.

If we choose smart clean power over costly gas, Wisconsin can lead.

For more information

Check out the Clean Economy Coalition of Wisconsin (CECW) Data Center Accountability Framework, a statewide roadmap for policymakers to manage the rapid expansion of large-scale data centers in the state.

John Imes is co-founder and executive director of the Wisconsin Environmental Initiative and village president of Shorewood Hills. He has spent decades working with businesses, policymakers and local governments to advance pragmatic clean energy and infrastructure solutions that protect ratepayers, strengthen communities and support Wisconsin’s economy.

Opinion: How Wisconsin can protect consumers and the environment during the data center boom 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.

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Editor’s note: On Jan. 27, the village government in DeForest announced that a data center “is not feasible,” indicating that the previously proposed project will not move forward.

Click here to read highlights from the story

• At least four major data center projects in Wisconsin were developed after local community leaders signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with the companies. In Beaver Dam, Meta used two shell companies to develop its project in secret.

• In one community without a data center NDA, DeForest, the village president offered misleading comments to the public about how long officials knew about the proposal.

• Several states, including Wisconsin, have legislative proposals to ban data center NDAs. Data center advocates say NDAs are necessary to ensure private companies continue to invest in local communities.

How did a $1 billion, 520-acre data center proposed by one of the world’s richest companies go unnoticed in tiny Beaver Dam, Wisconsin?

A key reason: In a city that lists “communication matters” atop its core values, officials took steps to keep the project hidden for more than a year.

Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is building a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, enough to fill only a fifth of Lambeau Field.

It’s one of seven major data center projects pending in Wisconsin that combined are worth more than $57 billion. 

In four of them, including Beaver Dam, local government officials kept the massive projects under wraps through confidential nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), a Wisconsin Watch investigation has found.

Secrecy also occurred in the three communities without NDAs.

In one, the Madison suburb of DeForest, officials worked behind the scenes for months before publicly announcing a proposed $12 billion data center, which residents are fighting.

The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages, raises questions about how much time the public should have to digest projects that dramatically affect the economy, land use, energy, taxes, the environment and more. 

“As soon as community leadership is contemplating, even entertaining it, I think they need to make the public aware,” said retired tech executive Prescott Balch, who is advising residents around Wisconsin where data centers are proposed.

“Even if it makes it harder, that’s the right way to do it. And nobody is doing it that way.”

Blowback from residents who have been kept in the dark has spurred a new legislative proposal that would ban data center NDAs statewide.

How Beaver Dam did it

Wisconsin has some 40 data centers, stretching from Kenosha to Eau Claire. But most are tiny compared with the big seven: three under construction in Beaver Dam, Mount Pleasant and Port Washington; and four proposed in DeForest, Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie. 

Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

A case study in how projects each worth $1 billion or more are kept quiet is Beaver Dam, the Dodge County burg an hour northeast of Madison, where Meta’s data center is expected to open in 2027.

The Beaver Dam Area Development Corp., a quasi-government nonprofit that functions as the city’s economic development arm, signed an NDA on Dec. 1, 2023, not with Meta, but with a shell company no one had ever heard of, Balloonist LLC.

The agreement referred only to a “project,” making no mention of a data center or Meta.

The NDA was signed “very early, almost in the introductory period of that project,” the development corporation’s leader, Trent Campbell, told Wisconsin Watch. All major development projects have “different levels of confidentiality for different purposes. And this entity believed it to be necessary at the onset of the conversations.”

The NDA meant that the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. could not reveal its discussions with Balloonist, or even disclose “the existence of the project.”

The NDA also put the wheels in motion.

For more than a year, the city quietly took official actions to make the data center a reality, including:

• July 2024: The city council voted 12-0 to approve a predevelopment agreement with another shell company, Degas LLC, that only later was identified with the data center. The agenda and the minutes of the meeting don’t mention a data center.

• November 2024: The city council created a tax incremental finance (TIF) district for the data center to help fund development. The agenda and the minutes for that meeting do not mention a data center, though the agreement itself does.

Not until February 2025 — 14 months after the NDA was signed — did the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. announce that it and the city were working with a company — then still unidentified — on a “potential data center project.”

Campbell noted to Wisconsin Watch that Gov. Tony Evers and other officials had identified the site for a major development as far back as 2019. For months after the NDA was signed, it wasn’t known whether the data center would come to fruition, he added.

“I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.

Eventually, a news report in April 2025 identified Meta, which declined comment for this story, as the company likely behind the data center.

Meta confirmed its involvement eight months later, saying on Facebook: “We’re proud to call Beaver Dam home. We are honored to have joined such an incredible community in 2025.” 

The first reply to that post was from a Beaver Dam resident, who wrote: “We would have been honored to have the opportunity to decline this.”

Secrecy without an NDA

NDAs also helped keep the public in the dark about data centers under consideration in the three other cities that used them. 

• Menomonie signed its NDA with Balloonist LLC in February 2024 — more than a year before the city in northwest Wisconsin announced a $1.6 billion data center proposal in July 2025. Two months after the NDA, the city council unanimously helped pave the way for a data center by changing a land use ordinance. The change gave, for the first time, a definition of the ordinance’s reference to “warehousing,” saying warehousing includes data centers. The city’s mayor put the proposed data center on hold in September 2025. In January 2026, the city council adopted a zoning ordinance for data centers that reversed the warehousing definition. “Based upon feedback from the community and elected officials, it is clear that additional discussion should occur regarding the appropriate level of regulation of data centers,” the city’s public works director told the council and the mayor.

• Kenosha signed its NDA, with Microsoft, in May 2024, six months before news reports surfaced saying the NDA kept the proposed data center operator’s name confidential. It was later announced that Microsoft had purchased 240 acres in the neighboring town of Paris, which the city annexed in December 2024. No dollar amount for the proposal has been announced.

• Janesville announced in July 2025 it was approached by developers about a data center and put out a request for proposal. The city signed its NDA two months later and is now in negotiations with Viridian Acquisitions, a Colorado developer, for an $8 billion data center.

Port Washington in Ozaukee County and Mount Pleasant in Racine County responded to records requests from Wisconsin Watch saying they had not signed NDAs for their data centers. 

In Port Washington, where three people were arrested during a city council meeting on the data center in December, residents are trying to recall Mayor Ted Neitzke, saying he has been secretive about the $15 billion data center from OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers. 

In Mount Pleasant, Microsoft this month announced plans to add 15 data centers, worth $13 billion, to the $7 billion complex under construction there.

NDAs are described by economic development officials as necessary and criticized by data center opponents as against the public interest.

NDAs and other steps to protect confidentiality are crucial at the early stages of a development proposal, said Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition.

“If I’m a company considering making strategic investments, regardless of industry, I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at,” said Braun, a former executive at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. “You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.”

Questions have swirled around transparency even in communities where local government officials did not sign NDAs. 

That includes DeForest, which lists “communicate clearly” among its core values. 

The DeForest data center, proposed by Virginia-based QTS Data Centers, is controversial, in part, because the village board would have to annex 1,600 acres in the neighboring town of Vienna.

At one DeForest Village Board meeting about the project, Village President Jane Cahill Wolfgram said that based on emails she had been receiving from residents, there was “just one thing I think we need to clear up.” 

“And you can ask any one of these board members. They will tell you, they just learned about this project in the last couple of weeks.”

That was Nov. 18, 2025.

But Village Board trustees had been offered one-on-one meetings with the developer some 10 weeks earlier, trustee Jan Steffenhagen-Hahn said in an email to Vienna resident Shawn Haney. 

“Because of the scale of this project,” that’s when residents should have been notified, said Haney, a leader of a group that opposes the data center.

Other emails obtained by the group show that DeForest staff were strategizing with QTS representatives and Alliant Energy as early as March 2025 — seven months before announcing the proposal last October.

In one email, the village planner discussed with QTS representatives when to seek various village approvals, including annexation, while acknowledging that doing so without disclosing “any details of the project or operations will be difficult.”

Cahill Wolfgram told Wisconsin Watch she in fact had met with QTS on Oct. 1, three weeks before the public announcement. She expressed frustration that many residents are urging trustees to stop the data center.

“They’ve been brought in from the very early moments of this discussion and they have continued to be front and center of everything we’ve done,” Cahill Wolfgram said. “As village president, I know of nothing that has been done behind the scenes.”

A public hearing on the annexation is scheduled for Feb. 9. 

The state Department of Administration, which reviews annexation proposals and issues advisory opinions, concluded the DeForest annexation is not in the public interest because of concerns over how the village would provide water and sewer services for the annexed area.

The Clean Economy Coalition of Wisconsin has called for state leaders to pause consideration of any data centers until a comprehensive strategy on them is adopted. In part, the coalition said comprehensive planning is needed to avoid more “stranded assets.”

Wisconsin Watch reported in December that Wisconsin utility ratepayers owe nearly $1 billion for stranded assets — coal power plants that have been or soon will be shut down. A push to provide new energy capacity for data centers poses the risk of creating more stranded assets.

Some states targeting NDAs

Microsoft on Jan. 13 announced new standards aimed at being a “good neighbor in the communities where we build, own and operate our data centers.” It mentioned transparency five times.

But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers called Microsoft’s initial Mount Pleasant data center a “microcosm of a larger problem with secrecy and lack of transparency about water and electricity demands” of data centers throughout the country. That, they wrote, “harms the public’s ability to determine whether hosting a data center is in their best interest.” 

Mount Pleasant has wanted a major development where the data center is now under construction because a massive development signed with Foxconn in 2017 largely fell through.

Local government use of NDAs and other methods to keep data center development secret is widespread across the U.S.

In Minnesota, local elected officials were aware of data center proposals for months or even years before disclosing them. In Virginia, 25 out of 31 data center projects had NDAs. In one New Mexico county, county staff negotiated for a $165 billion data center with an NDA that kept elected officials in the dark.

Several states are targeting NDAs. 

At least three — Florida, Michigan and New Jersey — are considering legislation to prohibit governments from signing data center NDAs. A Georgia bill would prohibit NDAs that hide information about data center electricity or water usage. New York is considering a bill to limit NDAs for economic development proposals generally.

Now, similar legislation is pending in Wisconsin.

Last week, state Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, citing questions about transparency over the Menomonie proposal, introduced legislation to prohibit NDAs for data center proposals in Wisconsin.

“I’ve never seen such overwhelming opposition from all sides of the aisle,” he told Wisconsin Watch, describing constituents’ feelings about data centers and secrecy surrounding them.

Moses said he understands the need for confidentiality in economic development generally, but because data centers have such widespread impact, public notice is paramount.

“The earlier the better,” he said.

Braun, the data center coalition leader, said the public should be notified when a data center proposal is ready to be considered for approvals by elected officials — after municipal staff do due diligence to determine whether things such as zoning, utility capacity, water and sewer would make a proposal potentially viable.

Balch, who helped defeat a proposed data center in the Racine County village of Caledonia, where he lives, said the public should be alerted well before local elected officials consider such votes.

“You have to use your judgment,” he said. “But at some point, you need to realize this is not a normal thing and we need to look out for the residents.”

At least four Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers 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.

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Lawmakers in Washington often insist data centers, which require thousands of acres and enormous amounts of energy, are a municipal issue. But residents organizing against their construction say candidates up and down the ballot will have to answer for their concerns — especially if those politicians are going to campaign on affordability.

“This absolutely plays into affordability,” said Christine Le Jeune, a founding organizer of Great Lakes Neighbors United in Wisconsin. “People are concerned about rapidly rising energy prices.”

Le Jeune’s group launched a petition to recall the mayor of Port Washington, a Wisconsin town on Lake Michigan where construction began last month on a $15 billion data center to service OpenAI and Oracle through the Stargate project backed by President Donald Trump.

The recall effort is one of the bolder actions in a wave of local protests against data centers sweeping Wisconsin and the country.

Le Jeune said Mayor Ted Neitzke failed to take into consideration residents’ concerns that they will end up “on the hook” for data centers’ energy usage when he went ahead with the Stargate plans.

Neitzke did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers feel insulated from the grassroots resistance threatening local elected officials.

“It’s going to be more (of) a challenge in gubernatorial races and state races because that’s where those decisions are made. We don’t have as much, in fact very little to do with it at a federal level,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, who represents the Dane County area.

That may not last long.

“The destruction of what they’re trying to do is going to be on the forefront of our minds as we listen to these politicians,” said Wisconsin retailer David Aversa.

In Ozaukee County, residents like Aversa are organizing against American Transmission Company’s plan to construct power lines, which they said will raze woods and waterways on or near their properties, potentially devaluing their homes. The power lines would serve the Port Washington data center currently being built.

Aversa was offered up to $5,000 by ATC to appraise his land as the company plans power line construction, according to a NOTUS review of communications from the company.

Data centers are subject to local zoning and permitting laws, but that doesn’t mean federal lawmakers’ hands are tied.

What lawmakers plan to do around growing utility price concerns is less clear. Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed a national moratorium on data center construction last month, an idea that has failed to gain traction among Democrats.

Preventing data centers from raising energy prices has become something of a unifying issue for both parties and the president, who said in a Truth Social post earlier this month that he does not want to see electricity bills rise as a result of the AI infrastructure. The Trump administration signed an agreement with 13 governors, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, to slow rising electricity prices in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest attributed to data centers.

Wisconsin lawmakers who spoke to NOTUS largely agreed that their constituents shouldn’t bear the costs of private companies’ energy use.

“Existing ratepayers and commercial users should not have their rates go up as a result of someone that’s coming in using massive amounts of electricity,” said Rep. Tom Tiffany, the front-runner in Wisconsin’s Republican primary for governor. “The data centers are going to have to answer the question, ‘How do we get enough energy to be able to run our operations yet not harm our neighbors?’”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin echoed Tiffany’s call for protecting ratepayers, though she said any moratorium on data centers must be considered by the state Legislature first.

“The developers of these need to have commitments to the local community that they won’t see, that they won’t have to shoulder the costs of the energy use and water use by these data centers,” Baldwin said.

Sen. Ron Johnson said data centers’ impact on the state’s electrical grid is a “very serious concern,” adding that he is unsure local officials have “really factored it in properly.”

When asked whether residents should take on the cost of data centers’ energy, Rep. Glenn Grothman, whose district includes Port Washington, hedged.

“It varies in different situations,” Grothman said.

Microsoft, which is building “the world’s most powerful AI datacenter” in Racine County, pledged last week that it will pay to ensure its developments do not raise electricity prices for people living nearby.

While the announcement is good news for one corner of Wisconsin, many across the state still worry that they will end up with the bill for the construction of data centers and related infrastructure.

The residents of Port Washington will reimburse Vantage Data Centers the development costs for its data center — plus 7% annual interest — from new property tax revenue generated by the development.

To some, cases like Port Washington’s are even more important than rising energy rates.

“The focus should be more on if they’re going to build something, they should have to pay for all the infrastructure costs related to it,” Pocan said. “That means power lines, that means a lot of other infrastructure.”

Pastor Patti Plough, who chairs the Protect Fredonia Coalition organizing against the ATC transmission lines, said the expansion of AI infrastructure can hit Wisconsinites where it hurts most.

“If you ruin their property, and ruin the value of their property, what really stands out more?” said Plough, whose home lies near a contingent route for the power lines. “The destruction of their property, right? No one wants to pay more, but the destruction of your property and then more?”

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Data centers become a flashpoint in Wisconsin politics 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.

Data centers are mushrooming all over the country, with many planned projects on deck in Wisconsin. We need to get ahead of them by putting in place protections for the state's energy and water resources. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)

Wisconsin stands at a pivotal moment.

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and hyperscale data centers are arriving quickly, bringing enormous demand for electricity and water. The real question is not whether these investments will come, but how we manage them and who pays the costs if we get it wrong.

Families want affordable bills. Businesses want reliable power. Communities want clean water and economic opportunity. We need a  common-sense approach to guide how we respond to rapid data center growth.

An unprecedented load and a real affordability risk

The scale of proposed data centers is unlike anything Wisconsin has seen.

Just two projects, one in Port Washington and another in Mount Pleasant, have requested nearly four gigawatts of electricity combined. That is more power than all Wisconsin households use today.

Meeting this demand will require massive investments in power plants, transmission lines, substations, pipelines and water infrastructure. But under Wisconsin’s current utility model, these costs are not paid only by the companies driving demand. They are instead spread across all of us who pay electric bills, including families, farms, and small businesses that won’t benefit from data center power.

For small businesses operating on thin margins, even modest increases in electric or water rates affect hiring, pricing and long-term viability. In rural communities with fewer customers sharing infrastructure costs, the impact can be even more severe.

This concern is already becoming real. Utilities are citing data center demand to justify new methane gas plants and delaying coal plant retirements. Utilities doubling down on fossil fuels should give every one of us pause.

Why costly gas is the wrong answer

Building new methane gas plants for data centers would lock customers into decades of fuel price volatility, even though cleaner options have become cheaper and faster to deploy.

Wind, solar and battery storage can come online far more quickly than fossil fuel plants and without exposing families and businesses to unpredictable fuel costs. Battery storage costs alone have fallen nearly 90% over the past decade. 

Across the country, these tools are replacing methane gas plants in states as different as Texas and California.

There is also a serious risk that we will pay higher bills for decades, even when data centers stop using those methane gas plants. In Nevada, a major utility has acknowledged that only about 15% of proposed data centers are likely to be built. When speculative projects fall through, all of us are left to pay for infrastructure we actually never needed.

This is not ideology. It is basic financial risk management, and basic fairness.

Clean energy is the lowest-cost path

Wisconsin policymakers and elected officials need to put guardrails in place to protect everyday residents from the AI bubble that’s threatening the state. The core principle should be that data centers operate on 100% clean energy, not as a slogan, but because it is the lowest-cost and lowest-risk option over time.

A smart framework would require developers to:

• Supply at least 30% of their power from on-site and Wisconsin-based renewable energy
• Offset additional demand through energy efficiency, demand response – at least 25% of peak capacity and smart grid flexibility
• Participate fully in utility efficiency and renewable energy programs rather than opting out
• Each data center project should require a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement that clearly defines community protections and benefits, negotiated among developers, local governments, neighborhood-based organizations and underserved communities

This approach reduces peak demand, lowers infrastructure costs and protects existing customers while allowing data centers to advance.

Major companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta have already publicly committed to operating on carbon-free energy. We need to hold them to that. Wisconsin risks losing our competitive advantage if we default to gas-heavy solutions instead of offering clean, flexible grids.

Water is a non-negotiable constraint

Energy is not the only concern. Water matters just as much.

A single hyperscale data center can use millions of gallons of water per day, either directly for cooling or indirectly through power generation. In communities with limited water systems, that can crowd out agricultural use and raise residents’ water bills.

Wisconsin should require closed-loop cooling systems, full accounting of direct and indirect water use, and ongoing public reporting to ensure local water supplies are protected.

A practical path forward

Wisconsin does not have to choose between economic growth and affordability. We can do both if we insist on clear guardrails.

That means requiring data centers to pay the full cost of service, powering growth with clean energy first, and protecting water resources and ratepayers from unnecessary risk.

Data centers are coming. The question is whether Wisconsin families and small businesses will be partners in that growth or be left paying higher bills for decades to come.

If we choose smart clean power over costly gas, Wisconsin can lead.

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• Officials from the town of Carlton and Cloverleaf Infrastructure told Wisconsin Watch the company is no longer pursuing a data center project near the Kewaunee Power Station. 

• The resolution happened in late 2025. 

• Cloverleaf Infrastructure is still interested in building a data center in northeast Wisconsin. 

• Meanwhile, plans for EnergySolutions to build a new plant at the Kewaunee Power Station are slowly moving forward. The company submitted files to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week.

Leaders of data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure have decided against pursuing land to build a data center in the town of Carlton in Kewaunee County after local residents opposed the idea. 

The company scrapped its plans in the northeast Wisconsin farming community in late 2025, Cloverleaf and town of Carlton officials confirmed last week. 

“The town chairperson said, ‘I don’t support data centers. I don’t think this is a good fit,’” Cloverleaf’s Chief Development Officer Aaron Bilyeu said. “We shook hands and said ‘thank you.’” 

Cloverleaf’s decision to back off makes Carlton one of the latest towns to fend off companies looking for the space to erect often-massive data warehouses powering artificial intelligence, social media and cloud computing. 

Wisconsin Watch reported in October that some Carlton residents were nervous about selling local farmland to build a data center after town officials said interested developers reached out to them.

Those fears were stoked by news that Carlton’s shuttered nuclear power plant may see new life. The plant’s owner is seeking government approval for a new nuclear power station at the site because it believes data centers and artificial intelligence will increase the state’s energy demand. 

“I’m against big business,” said town Chairman David Hardtke, who has pushed back against the idea for months. “People in the town of Carlton do not want the AI (data) center.” 

Similar dilemmas have played out in other rural Wisconsin communities, as residents try to block tech giants from settling in their towns. 

In recent weeks, Cloverleaf offered to buy property for a data center in Greenleaf, a village in Brown County. The move drew outrage from community members, leading Cloverleaf officials to ax the proposal last week. 

The decision in Carlton was a much quieter conclusion for residents of a county where cattle outnumber people by nearly 5 to 1. Some community members told Wisconsin Watch they were nervous about what losing more farmland would mean for local families and business owners.

“Once they take land away, you know, it’ll never come back,” Chris Kohnle, president of the local Tisch Mills Farm Center, told Wisconsin Watch in September. 

Others were less concerned, telling Wisconsin Watch that Kewaunee County has stagnated since the nuclear plant shuttered. They shared hopes that investment from big business could create more economic activity, well-paying local jobs and a reason for young people to stay in the area.

“If you bring in an employer like that who is paying, you’re going to see development. You’re going to see new homes being built, and more businesses move in,” Kewaunee County resident Dan Giannotti said in August. “Because right now we’re just stagnant … nothing’s happening to speak of.”

Despite striking out in Carlton and Greenleaf, Bilyeu said Cloverleaf is still looking for a data center site in northeast Wisconsin. 

Wisconsin is attractive to developers because of the tax incentives it offers and its cool climate. Data centers need cooling methods to prevent overheating — making Carlton’s proximity to a massive water source particularly attractive.

“We’re not the only ones looking for data center sites in the area,” Bilyeu said. “We’re just the only ones that are forthright, and we’ll actually talk to people and identify ourselves and let people know what we’re doing and what we’re interested in.”

Carlton still remains on the precipice of much potential change, as the Kewaunee Power Station project inches forward. 

Last week, plant owner EnergySolutions submitted files to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that company spokespeople describe as “an important next step” in getting government approval to bring nuclear power back to the site. The permitting process is lengthy, and even if everything goes smoothly, they don’t expect construction would begin until the early 2030s.

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

Kewaunee County town staves off interest from data center developers 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.

Organizers gather in Menomonie, Wisconsin in early December, 2025 to protest against a $1.6 billion data center proposal in their community. Residents’ concerns over data center development in rural Wisconsin revolve around lack of project transparency, water and energy usage, and financial impact on local tax bases. (Stop the Menomonie Data Center Facebook group)

This story was produced by the Daily Yonder

Blaine Halverson joked that his only exposure to data centers was from the Mission Impossible movies in the 1990s. That was, until one came to his town. Over the last seven months, Halverson’s community of Menomonie, Wisconsin, population 16,700, has become a flashpoint in a growing debate over data center development and local control in the state.

Halverson has lived in Menomonie, which is just over an hour east of Minneapolis, for most of his life. Like many others in his rural community, Halverson didn’t know much about the hyperscale data centers, built by the world’s largest technology companies, that are cropping up across the U.S. to power artificial intelligence. Then, in July 2025, Halverson was on vacation with his wife when he learned of a $1.6 billion data center proposal slated for around 320 acres of farmland on the outskirts of Menomonie.

Immediately, Halverson had questions.

“All of a sudden, I was activated,” said Halverson. “What really activated me was how far along this was, and that the public was just finding out.”

Over the next six months, Halverson and dozens of other concerned Menomonie residents coordinated a local opposition campaign that on January 5, 2026, resulted in Menomonie’s City Council revising a zoning ordinance to bar Balloonist, LLC, the developer representing an undisclosed ‘tech giant’, from moving ahead on construction. 

An attorney for Balloonist LLC did not respond to the Daily Yonder’s request for comment.

Halverson’s frustration about the project’s lack of transparency is one that has echoed throughout the state. In other rural counties and in villages sandwiched between larger cities like Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay, data center proposals in places like Beaver Dam, Port Washington, and Caledonia have been met with fierce opposition from residents. Developers eyeing land in Greenleaf, a village outside of Green Bay, and in Grant County, which borders the Mississippi River, have also faced community backlash. Commonly cited concerns revolve around project secrecy and the data centers’ projected energy usage, water needs, and financial impact on communities with small tax bases.

Beyond requiring vast amounts of power and water to keep operations running 24/7, large data center proposals in rural areas often represent a significant, if not dominant, share of the community’s tax levy. This leaves residents fearing what will happen if the planned data centers do not live up to their promises, should the stock market take a turn, the developers go bankrupt, or the technology inside the warehouse-like structures become obsolete. 

“They’re not seeing the long-term risks,” said Prescott Balch about the elected officials who push for data center development in Wisconsin’s rural communities. Balch is a retired software developer and former technology executive at U.S. Bank. He also lives in Caledonia, Wisconsin, a rural village south of Milwaukee whose residents ousted a 244-acre Microsoft data center that was slated for land zoned for agriculture in October of 2025. 

“No investment advisor, for example, would ever let you do [that] with your investment portfolio. They’d get fired for saying, ‘Put all your eggs in this one basket.’ It doesn’t matter how solid that one basket is. It’s still one basket with a lot of risk if it walks out the door,” Balch said. 

A hot spot

Over the last year, rural Wisconsin has become somewhat of a hotspot for data center developers. The allure for Big Tech companies racing to build infrastructure to train and run complex AI models comes in the form of tax incentives, low-cost land, and, in many rural communities, flexible zoning codes. 

But residents like Halverson and Balch are taking notice and starting to organize together. Opposition groups that have formed in communities faced with data center proposals are using digital tools like Facebook and Signal to connect with one another across the Badger State. Now, a growing coalition of rural residents and environmental organizations are urging state legislators to regulate data center development and, in some instances, taking legal action to improve transparency. 

The debate over Wisconsin’s data center boom is both rooted in local governance and relevant to the national conversation about rising electricity costs. In an election year, data center infrastructure has become a political issue, yet it’s one that rural coalition members insist is nonpartisan. What’s on the ballot, including a crowded gubernatorial race, could influence that. 

Why Wisconsin?

To grasp why data centers are coming to Wisconsin, you have to understand a particularly wonky part of the state’s tax code, according to Port Washington resident Michael Beaster. A resident of the rural city just north of Milwaukee, Beaster opposes the $15 billion campus being built by Vantage Data Centers to serve end-users Oracle and OpenAI as part of their $500 billion Stargate campaign to develop AI infrastructure across the U.S.

The wonky policy Beaster is talking about is a tax incremental district, or TID.

In Wisconsin, a TID lets developers pay their property taxes into a separate box from the rest of the community as a way to capture property value growth associated with new projects. During construction, a developer, like Vantage, contributes taxes to this special box to cover infrastructure costs associated with their project, like new roads and power lines. Depending on the terms of the TID, that tax money is then kept in the box until all infrastructure costs have been paid, often a period of 15-20 years.

Typically, this kind of tax policy helps small- or medium-scale developers, like new packing plants or housing developments, pay for their associated infrastructure costs over time. With hyperscale data centers, however, rural residents worry that the high costs of the developments’ power and water infrastructure will rack up for the community to pay while the developers’ taxes sit in a special box. 

“If the village decides to raise the tax levy, it comes off the backs of the current residents only, and that is completely and utterly invisible right now to most people,” said Balch, who worked to reject Microsoft’s proposed data center campus in Caledonia last fall.

In November of 2025, the city of Port Washington approved a TID that enables Vantage to pay upfront for the estimated $175 million in infrastructure costs, plus $91 million for an electrical substation and $187 million in interest, associated with their data center campus, including upgraded water and sewer mains and new power infrastructure. Port Washington will then be responsible for paying Vantage back for those infrastructure costs over time.

The TID is set up as a pool of money to remain open for up to 20 years for the city to draw from to reimburse Vantage. Some residents, including Beaster, have expressed concerns that the financing model could end up raising taxes for locals. On January 2, 2026, a Port Washington-based group of activists filed a lawsuit against the city to challenge the TID.

“People don’t want to see their communities handed over to large corporations,” Beaster said.

Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke did not respond to the Daily Yonder’s request for clarification on whether the city’s TID would result in higher taxes for residents.

Last summer, a bipartisan measure in Wisconsin’s legislature updated the state’s tax incremental financing policy to exempt data centers from caps on the amount of money that can be held in a TID. The act mentions both Port Washington and Beaver Dam by name and was signed into law by Democratic Governor Tony Evers on July 8, 2025. In addition to TIDs, Wisconsin also offers a sales and use tax exemption to incentivize data center development. The exemptions are offered on a ladder based on a developer’s intended investment and the host county’s population, with less populous counties requiring less investment. For rural counties, the minimum investment required to claim the exemption is $50 million. 

For Asad Ramzanali, former deputy director for strategy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden Administration, it is this kind of policy that goes against the idea that data centers should have to pay their “fair share”.

“When the largest companies, the most well-resourced companies, in the history of the world are behind these data centers, it feels particularly unfair to have states level tax breaks for construction,” Ramzanali told the Daily Yonder.

“People should not have to pay increased utility bills. People should not have to pay for transmission lines going up, [and] people shouldn’t have to deal with dirty water sources because of a data center.”

Nonpartisan, but political

With local pushback to data centers picking up steam, state legislators are taking note. Beaster said that’s a change from the attitude that some legislators had a few months ago, when his rural community members were mobilizing against the data center in Port Washington last summer and fall. 

“When we started really getting involved in trying to mobilize, we tried to write letters and emails and stuff to state legislators, and they just weren’t very responsive,” Beaster said. “It felt to us like they were more interested in bringing these things here than regulating them.” 

In early December, 2025, Democrats introduced a bill to regulate data centers and entice them to take climate-friendly steps. Under the proposed legislation, residents would be protected from footing the utility costs associated with data centers. If passed, the bill would also subject data centers to an annual fee, ranging from $2-3 million, to fund clean energy and low-income heating assistance programs. The legislation also includes a measure to hinge state tax incentives, like the sales and use tax exemption, upon data centers using at least 70% renewable energy. 

In January, 2025, Republicans introduced a data center bill of their own, with similarities including mandated reporting on water usage and restrictions on passing development-related utility costs onto families and small businesses. The Republican legislation would also mandate that data centers wanting to use renewable energy would need to build those energy sources, like solar, on the same property. 

The utility provisions in both the Democrat and Republican-backed bills come as the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) prepares to hear a case in February of 2026, from We Energies, the state’s largest utility, that will determine how much data centers will have to pay for their infrastructure, and how much gets passed onto other ratepayers. 

We Energies has requested a pay structure that holds data centers accountable for 75% of their capital costs. That request has been challenged by the Wisconsin chapter of the Sierra Club, which argues large customers like data centers should be held responsible for 100% of their associated costs.

“This is the decision for how much the largest utility is making large customers pay, and right now the proposal is really bad for an average residential customer,” said Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator at Sierra Club. The PSC is expected to hand down a decision on the 2026 rate structure in the spring. 

Even as data center regulation captures lawmakers’ attention at the state capitol in Madison, organizers in Menomonie, Port Washington, and Caledonia maintain that local opposition isn’t tied to party. 

“One of the things that has been really amazing to me about this process is that I know the people I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder with in this group, a lot of them never vote the same way I would when we go into the into the voting booth in November,” Halverson said of his work in Menomonie. 

“If it’s your farmland and your community, you’re an extreme environmentalist, and if it’s your power bill going up, then you’re a fiscal conservative.”

“This bill is not coming from left field… This is something we've been talking about," Rep. Shannon Zimmerman said about his data center regulation bill. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Assembly passed a Republican bill Tuesday to implement state regulations on data centers being built in Wisconsin. Democratic lawmakers said the measure wouldn’t effectively hold companies accountable, hold down electric rates for Wisconsinites or protect the environment.

Data center development is booming in Wisconsin. Microsoft this week proposed adding 15 data centers to a project in Mount Pleasant. Some projects in development has triggered pushback from area residents. According to datacentermap.com, there are at least 40 data centers currently in the state and more in development. Local governments, including in Madison, where the city council became the first in the state to pass a one-year moratorium on approvals for data center projects, are considering their roles in regulating or pushing forward projects. 

AB 840, coauthored by Rep. Shannon Zimmerman (R-River Falls) and Sen. Romaine Quinn (R-Birchwood), establishing regulations of data centers, passed 53-44. Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart) joined Democrats voting against the bill, while Rep. Steve Doyle and Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) voted with Republicans in favor of the bill.

“This bill balances the strategic and economic benefits of AI and data centers to the state while balancing concerns that ratepayers may have over energy, and that some may have over environmental implications,” Zimmerman said at a press conference ahead of the floor session.

Democratic lawmakers were critical of the bill, saying it doesn’t go far enough to protect Wisconsinites. 

“We need to take action to regulate data centers, but we need to get it right. Unfortunately, the GOP bill that we’re voting on today will not do what it promises,” Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) told reporters ahead of the floor session, adding that the bill process was “rushed.” The GOP bill was introduced on Jan. 9, and received a public hearing on Jan. 14. 

“It will not hold corporations accountable in the way that we should, and it doesn’t protect our communities entirely from the higher energy costs that are being discussed,” Neubauer said.  She asserted that Republican lawmakers “don’t actually want to regulate data centers or large corporations.” 

Zimmerman said the bill is responsive to concerns from constituents.

“Hands down the concerns are concern over ratepayer protection, concern over water, concern over land, and protection of those sort of things,” Zimmerman said. “This bill is not coming from left field… This is something we’ve been talking about.”  

Whether the bill becomes law is up in the air. It must pass the Senate and be signed by Gov. Tony Evers, who has expressed some skepticism about it.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback said on Jan. 14 that “the one thing environmentalists, labor, utilities, and data center companies can all agree on right now is how bad Republican lawmakers’ data center bill is.” 

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said he didn’t know why Evers “would ever consider vetoing this bill, especially considering the fact that it is really based on what the citizens have said.” 

“I don’t think being on the side of not wanting data center regulation is anywhere near the middle, so we have been very thoughtful in what we put forward,” Vos said. 

The Republican bill includes a number of requirements including having the Public Service Commission (PSC) ensure that no costs related to construction of electric infrastructure for data centers are allocated to other customers and requiring that any renewable energy facilities that are primarily serving a data center must be located within the data center site. Democratic lawmakers said the requirement would stifle the development of renewable energy in Wisconsin and expansion of the state’s energy portfolio. 

“Their limits on renewable energy would come at a significant cost to consumers and are clearly a continuation of the GOP’s ongoing allegiance with the fossil fuel industry,” Neubauer said. 

Zimmerman said, however, that requiring renewable sources on site would ensure that a local community is benefiting from jobs that are created. 

Under the bill, water used for cooling purposes in a data center is required to be contained in a “closed-loop cooling system,” or “or any other system that uses an amount of water equal to or less than the amount that a closed-loop cooling system would use.” A closed-loop cooling system uses a fixed amount of water to keep data centers cool.

An amendment to the bill states that the requirements will only apply to large data centers that begin operating or undergo construction after the bill takes effect.

Data center operators also will be required to submit annual reports to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) on the total amount of water used in a year. An amendment to the bill also says that data center developers should as much as possible encourage hiring of Wisconsin residents. 

“This bill is not a reaction to any of those data centers acting in various ways. This is just smart legislation to make sure we have the rules of the road going forward,” Zimmerman said. 

The bill also says no one can  operate a large data center unless they file a bond in an amount sufficient to cover the estimated cost of fulfilling any required reclamation with the DNR.

An amendment to the bill also clarifies that if the permit granted for the construction of a large data center expires before the center is finished, then the owner must notify the DNR and local government. It requires that if it isn’t finished by the date then the owner must work to restore the land as much as possible. 

Zimmerman said the provision gives flexibility to local governments for recourse in the case  a project is abandoned. 

According to the Wisconsin Lobbying website, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Wisconsin Inc. registered in favor of the bill. There are several more groups registered against the bill, including Wisconsin Conservation Voters and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Construction Electrician Local Unions. 

Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Angela Stroud (D-Ashland) and Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), have proposed their own legislation to regulate data centers. That bill, AB 722, would place data centers in their own class of “very large customers” to ensure that everyday ratepayers don’t bear the costs of data centers’ energy demands. It would also take steps to regulate data centers and encourage renewable energy use. Lawmakers introduced the bill as an amendment during the floor session, but Republican lawmakers voted it down.

Stroud said the GOP bill is a “concept of an idea.” 

“There’s nothing in the bill that the PSC could actually implement to do the job it says it’s going to do,” Stroud said. 

Stroud said her proposal, while “not perfect,” would “get us as close as possible to the central goal of protecting the public by controlling costs, creating transparency and making sure that we’re keeping as much value in our communities as possible.”

Under the Democratic bill, data center companies would be required to pay an annual fee to the Department of Administration (DOA); revenue which would go towards renewable energy programs. It would also have companies submit quarterly reports to the PSC on the amount of energy being used by data centers as well as information on the source of the energy. Water utilities would also need to publicly report when a single customer will account for more than 25% of the total water usage in the district. 

The bill would require that companies pay workers at construction sites the prevailing wage rate or if the employee is a union member, then the rate in the worker’s collective bargaining agreement — whichever rate is higher. It also says that to qualify for sales tax exemptions available to data centers under current law, companies would need to meet labor requirements and source 70% of their energy from renewable sources.

Vos said that the Democratic bill will “have very little impact on the average person unless you’re a union activist or someone who wants renewable energy everywhere.”

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A debate playing out in Wisconsin underscores just how challenging it is for U.S. states to set policies governing data centers, even as tech giants speed ahead with plans to build the energy-gobbling computing facilities.

Wisconsin’s state legislators are eager to pass a law that prevents the data center boom from spiking households’ energy bills. The problem is, Democrats and Republicans have starkly different visions for what that measure should look like — especially when it comes to rules around hyperscalers’ renewable energy use.

Republican state legislators this month introduced a bill that orders utility regulators to ensure that regular customers do not pay any costs of constructing the electric infrastructure needed to serve data centers. It also requires data centers to recycle the water used to cool servers and to restore the site if construction isn’t completed.

Those are key protections sought by decision-makers across the political spectrum as opposition to data centers in Wisconsin and beyond reaches a fever pitch.

But the bill will likely be doomed by a ​“poison pill,” as consumer advocates and manufacturing industry sources describe it, that says all renewable energy used to power data centers must be built on-site.

Republican lawmakers argue this provision is necessary to prevent new solar farms and transmission lines from sprawling across the state.

“Sometimes these data centers attempt to say that they are environmentally friendly by saying we’re going to have all renewable electricity, but that requires lots of transmission from other places, either around the state or around the region,” said state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, at a press conference. ​“So this bill actually says that if you are going to do renewable energy, and we would encourage them to do that, it has to be done on-site.”

This effectively means that data centers would have to rely largely on fossil fuels, given the limited size of their sites and the relative paucity of renewable energy in the state thus far.

Gov. Tony Evers and his fellow Democrats in the state Legislature are unlikely to agree to this scenario, Wisconsin consumer and clean energy advocates say.

Democrats introduced their own data center bill late last year, some of which aligns closely with the Republican measure: The Democratic bill would similarly block utilities from shifting data center costs onto residents, by creating a separate billing class for very large energy customers. It would require that data centers pay an annual fee to fund public benefits such as energy upgrades for low-income households and to support the state’s green bank.

But that proposal may also prove impossible to pass, advocates say, because of its mandate that data centers get 70% of their energy from renewables in order to qualify for state tax breaks and a requirement that workers constructing and overhauling data centers be paid a prevailing wage for the area. This labor provision is deeply polarizing in Wisconsin. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers in his party famously repealed the state’s prevailing wage law for public construction projects in 2017, and multiple Democratic efforts to reinstate it have failed.

The result of the political division around renewables and other issues is that Wisconsin may accomplish little around data center regulation in the near term.

“If we could combine the two and make it a better bill, that would be ideal,” said Beata Wierzba, government affairs director for the nonprofit clean energy advocacy group Renew Wisconsin. ​“It’s hard to see where this will go ultimately. I don’t foresee the Democratic bill passing, and I also don’t know how the governor can sign the Republican bill.”

Urgent need

Wisconsin’s consumer and clean energy advocates are frustrated about the absence of promising legislation at a time when they say regulation of data centers is badly needed. The environmental advocacy group Clean Wisconsin has received thousands of signatures on a petition calling for a moratorium on data center approvals until a comprehensive state plan is in place.

At least five new major data centers are planned in the state, which is considered attractive for the industry because of its ample fresh water and open land, skilled workers, robust electric grid, and generous tax breaks. The Wisconsin Policy Forum estimated that data centers will drive the state’s peak electricity demand to 17.1 gigawatts by 2030, up from 14.6 gigawatts in 2024.

Absent special treatment for data centers, utilities will pass the costs on to customers for the new power needed to meet the rising demand.

Two Wisconsin utilities — We Energies and Alliant Energy — are proposing special tariffs that would determine the rates they charge data centers. Allowing utilities in the same state to have different policies for serving data centers could lead to these projects being located wherever utilities offer them the cheapest rates and result in a patchwork of regulations and protections, consumer advocates argue. They say legislation should be passed soon, to standardize the process and enshrine protections statewide before utilities move forward on their own.

Some of Wisconsin’s neighbors have already taken that step, said Tom Content, executive director of Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group.

He pointed to Minnesota, where a law passed in June mandates that data centers and other customers be placed in separate categories for utility billing, eliminating the risk of data center costs being passed on to residents. The Minnesota law also protects customers from paying for ​“stranded costs” if a data center doesn’t end up needing the infrastructure that was built to serve it.

Ohio, by contrast, provides a cautionary tale, Content said. After state regulators enshrined provisions that protected customers of the utility AEP Ohio from data center costs, developers simply looked elsewhere in the state.

“Much of the data center demand in Ohio shifted to a different utility where no such protections were in place,” Content said. ​“We’re in a race to the bottom. Wisconsin needs a statewide framework to help guide data center development and ensure customers who aren’t tech companies don’t pick up the tab for these massive projects.”

Clean energy quandary

Limiting clean energy construction to data center sites could be especially problematic as data center developers often demand renewable energy to meet their own sustainability goals.

For example, the Lighthouse data center — being developed by OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage near Milwaukee — will subsidize 179 megawatts of new wind generation, 1,266 megawatts of new solar generation and 505 megawatts of new battery storage capacity, according to testimony from one of the developers in the We Energies tariff proceeding.

But Lighthouse covers 672 acres. It takes about 5 to 7 acres of land to generate 1 megawatt of solar energy, meaning the whole campus would have room for only about a tenth of the solar the developers promise.

We Energies is already developing the renewable generation intended to serve that data center, a utility spokesperson said, but the numbers show how future clean energy could be stymied by the on-site requirement.

“It’s unclear why lawmakers would want to discriminate against the two cheapest ways to produce energy in our state at a time when energy bills are already on the rise,” said Chelsea Chandler, the climate, energy and air program director at Clean Wisconsin.

Renew Wisconsin’s Wierzba said the Democrats’ 70% renewable energy mandate for receiving tax breaks could likewise be problematic for tech firms.

“We want data centers to use renewable energy, and companies I’m aware of prefer that,” she said. ​“The way the Republican bill addresses that is negative and would deter that possibility. But the Democratic bill almost goes too far — 70%. That’s a prescribed amount, too much of a hook and not enough carrot.”

Alex Beld, Renew Wisconsin’s communications director, said the Republican bill might have a hope of passing if the poison pill about on-site renewable energy were removed.

“I don’t know if there’s a will on the Republican side to remove that piece,” he said. ​“One thing is obvious: No matter what side of the political aisle you’re on, there are concerns about the rapid development of these data centers. Some kind of legislation should be put forward that will pass.”

Bryan Rogers, environmental director of the Milwaukee community organization Walnut Way Conservation Corp, said elected officials shouldn’t be afraid to demand more of data centers, including more public benefit payments.

“We know what the data centers want and how fast they want it,” he said. ​“We can extract more concessions from data centers. They should be paying not just their full way — bringing their own energy, covering transmission, generation. We also know there are going to be social impacts, public health, environmental impacts. Someone has to be responsible for that.”

Utility representatives expressed less urgency around legislation.

William Skewes, executive director of the Wisconsin Utilities Association, said the trade group ​“appreciates and agrees with the desire by policymakers and customers to make sure they’re not paying for costs that they did not cause.”

But, he said, the state’s utility regulators already do ​“a very thorough job reviewing cases and making sure that doesn’t happen. Wisconsin utilities are aligned in the view that data centers must pay their full share of costs.”

If Wisconsin legislators do manage to pass data center legislation this session, it will head to the desk of Evers. The governor is a longtime advocate for renewables, creating the state’s first clean energy plan in 2022, and he has expressed support for attracting more data centers to Wisconsin.

“I personally believe that we need to make sure that we’re creating jobs for the future in the state of Wisconsin,” Evers said at a press conference, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. ​“But we have to balance that with my belief that we have to keep climate change in check. I think that can happen.”

A version of this article was first published by Canary Media.

Disputes over clean energy may doom Wisconsin data center bills 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.

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Anticipated spikes in demand for energy to supply Wisconsin’s data center building boom come on the heels of decades of declining power and water use, according to a new report.

A Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis shows there are more than 40 data centers operating in Wisconsin with another four planned. The sprawling facilities host computer servers, which store data and support a global surge in the use of artificial intelligence.

The data center building boom has been met by local opposition groups concerned about the facilities’ resource needs. But the Policy Forum report shows it’s all happening after years of declines in demand for electricity and water.

Using projections submitted to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission by utility companies, the Policy Forum estimates the state’s peak electrical demand is expected to increase to around 17 gigawatts by 2030, driven largely by data centers. In 2024, Wisconsin’s peak demand was rated at 14.6 gigawatts. Over the past 20 years, total electricity sales have fallen by 9% over the past 20 years.

Wisconsin Policy Forum Senior Research Associate Tyler Byrnes told WPR a big part of the decline since 2005 is due to fewer commercial customers paired with more energy efficiency measures. He said during that span, utilities have pulled aging, coal-fired power plants offline and shifted toward more renewable energy. 

“Into that landscape, now we’re seeing these really big data centers come online,” said Byrnes.

Some utilities in Wisconsin are expected to seek state permission to build new power plants or expand existing ones to meet the data center demand. Byrnes said that will bring a need for more transmission lines, though local impacts will vary depending on where the data centers are located.

The Policy Forum’s analysis shows most existing facilities are in south central and southeastern Wisconsin. With other large-scale data centers planned for more rural areas like Beaver Dam and DeForest, he said utility companies may need to build out more infrastructure.

Wisconsin water demand has fallen for decades. Will data centers impact rates? 

Another major concern raised during the data center debate is the facilities’ hefty water demands.

Opponents have complained that developers haven’t been transparent about how much water they’ll need to cool computer servers. In September, environmental advocates sued the city of Racine to force the release of projected water needs of a $3.3 billion data center campus located at the former Foxconn site in Mount Pleasant. The city released figures showing the project will need more than 8 million gallons of water per year. 

To put that into context, the Policy Forum looked at historical water sales reported by the Racine Water Works, which will supply the Mount Pleasant data center project. Between 1997 and 2022, the utility saw water sales decline by 2.1 billion gallons annually. Byrnes said that taken as a whole, the demand for water from data centers is “a drop in the bucket” in a lot of cases.

As with electrical demand, Byrnes said water demand has decreased due to fewer industrial customers and increased efficiency efforts. Because cities like Racine still need to maintain the same level of infrastructure, which is more expensive due to inflation, the revenue from each gallon of water sold has to be spread further. That means potential rate increases.

Byrnes said data centers have been turning to closed-loop cooling systems, which use less water, but cities like Racine would still be selling more water, which would help cover fixed infrastructure costs. 

“Potentially, it could maybe blunt some of the (water rate) increases,” Byrnes said. 

DeForest, other local governments grapple with data center proposals

With the rise in data center developments in Wisconsin, local governments and state lawmakers are working to figure out how to regulate them.

The DeForest Village Board recently took no action on a citizen petition calling for referendum votes before any data center project could be approved.

In Menomonie, the city council voted to restrict where and how data centers can be built months after the mayor halted a $1.6 billion proposal. A similar zoning ordinance is being considered in the city of Jefferson.
 
At the same time, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers have proposed different ways to regulate data centers. One GOP bill is aimed at ensuring data centers and not other customers would pay for any required improvements to the state’s power grid. The Democratic bill is aimed at requiring data centers to get the bulk of their power from renewable sources.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Data center boom follows decades of declining electricity and water use in Wisconsin 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.

Interior of a modern data center. (Stock photo by Imaginima/Getty Images)

Dozens of data centers have been built in communities across Wisconsin, with more planned or in process. In many of these communities, the proposed data centers have sparked significant local opposition. 

Both Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature have proposed bills to regulate the growth of data centers as community leaders across the state have asked for more direction from the state government on the approval of what are often massive facilities. 

So far, the state has had little input on data center construction outside of a provision in the 2023-25 state budget which exempted data center construction projects from paying sales taxes. 

The Democratic bill, introduced last year by Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) and Rep. Angela Stroud (D-Ashland), would require data centers to report the level of energy and water they’re using, fund the development of renewable energy projects and ensure the cost of increased energy demands aren’t passed on to regular consumers.

The Republican bill, introduced this month, also requires the Public Service Commission to prevent energy use and infrastructure costs from being passed on to consumers, requires the data center to use a closed-loop water cooling system to limit the amount of water needed and includes provisions that would require the data center company to cover the cost of restoring the land it’s built on if the data center is closed or unfinished. The bill also includes a provision that requires any renewable energy created to power the data center be sourced on site. 

Last year, the issue of data centers was a common theme on the campaign trail in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, as voters respond to the effects of hosting more of the centers than any other state. 

Here in Wisconsin, communities are grappling with how to make agreements with the big tech companies hoping to build the data centers, how to avoid the broken promises at the top of mind of many Wisconsinites after the Foxconn development in Mount Pleasant failed to live up to its lofty initial projections and how to manage the often huge demands the data centers make on local water supplies and energy. 

Despite those challenges, the construction of a data center can offer benefits to local governments — mostly by boosting property tax revenue from a development that won’t consume many local government services. 

Unlike many other issues, the question of data center development has not become politically polarized, with a range of positions among candidates of both parties. 

“Data centers are a new issue that has not taken on a partisan edge in the public mind,” Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, said. “This is likely to change because among politicians Democrats are more skeptical about data centers and Republicans are more enthusiastic about them. If this partisan divide continues or even becomes sharper, the public is likely to begin mimicking the positions taken by party leaders. But at least for a while the issue is likely to cut across party lines.”

In Wisconsin’s crowded open race for governor, most of the candidates told the Wisconsin Examiner they were supportive of some level of statewide regulation on data centers. 

Democrat Missy Hughes’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Her public comments on the issue are included below. 

Mandela Barnes 

The former lieutenant governor said in a statement to the Examiner that it’s important that data center construction not increase utility rates, not damage the environment and use Wisconsin union labor. He also said the companies developing the centers need to meaningfully work with the communities they’re trying to build in. 

“A lot of communities feel left out of conversations about what is going on in their own backyard and that is not fair,” Barnes said. “Any development of this scale must meaningfully engage local communities and address their concerns and input throughout their proposal. We must also ensure that data center projects do not drive up utility rates for Wisconsinites or contribute to harmful pollution, and that they invest in training and hiring Wisconsin workers to staff these facilities.”

Joel Brennan 

The former secretary of the Department of Administration said in a statement from his campaign that the desire of tech companies to move fast is in opposition to the government’s need to engage the public transparently. 

“Wisconsinites shouldn’t have to foot the bill for AI or data center projects, period. At a time when affordability is a challenge in every community, taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for construction, operations, or higher utility costs. No one should have to worry about affording their heating bill because a data center has driven up energy prices,” he said. “It’s reasonable for people to have concerns about AI, and I share those concerns. The technology is moving fast, and companies often prioritize speed. Government’s responsibility is different: transparency, accountability, community engagement, and coordination with local communities who stand to be impacted by these projects. Data centers can create jobs and support local economies, but only if they’re done right — protecting taxpayers and our natural resources, and ensuring that the benefits truly serve Wisconsin communities.”

David Crowley 

At a gubernatorial candidate forum in November, Crowley was mostly supportive of data center development, saying the government shouldn’t be picking “winners and losers” and instead “make sure that this is fertile ground for entrepreneurs and businesses to either stay or move right here to the state of Wisconsin.”

In a statement to the Examiner, a campaign spokesperson said Crowley wants to encourage investment in Wisconsin’s economy while enforcing stringent environmental regulations, making sure companies pay the cost of increased energy use and giving local governments the power to say no to a data center project. 

“Growth that drives up rates or drains local resources is not innovation. It’s a bad deal,” the spokesperson said. “Communities will have clear authority to condition or deny projects based on energy and water use, demand transparency, and community benefit agreements, because the people who live with these projects deserve the final say. Crowley’s approach is simple: Wisconsin will lead in technology and economic growth without raising utility bills, without sacrificing our natural resources, and without letting Big Tech write the rules. Development will be transparent, accountable, and judged by whether or not it delivers real benefits to the people who live in Wisconsin.”

Francesca Hong

In a policy framework released last week, the Madison-area representative  to the state Assembly called for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers while the state works out how to responsibly manage their effects. Hong also wants to end sales tax and use tax exemptions for data centers, require the construction of more renewable energy sources and increase environmental protections on data centers. She is also a co-sponsor on the Democrats’ data center bill in the Legislature. 

In an interview with the Examiner, Hong said Wisconsin’s political leaders have a responsibility to listen to local opposition to data centers. 

“Our communities deserve long-term investments and contributions to their local communities,” she said. “The bipartisan opposition that is building coalitions against AI data centers means that elected officials have a responsibility to get more data on data centers, which is what informed our decision to support a moratorium on the construction of new data centers.” 

Hong said that on the campaign trail she has heard from voters who want Wisconsin to be “a hostile environment for AI data centers.” She added that it’s a bipartisan issue, which presents an opportunity to her as a Democratic socialist running for governor.

“I think there’s an opportunity here, not only for us to engage the left and bring them into electoral politics here in Wisconsin, but actually build that coalition amongst voters who are across the political spectrum and recognizing that as working class people, they’re getting screwed and they’re stressed, and they’re right to demand that their government do more to hold corporate power accountable,” she said. 

Missy Hughes 

At the November forum hosted by the Wisconsin Technology Council, Hughes, who as the former head of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation was involved in efforts to build the Microsoft data center at the former Foxconn site, promoted their positive potential for the state. 

“To have some of these data centers land here in Wisconsin, provide incredible property tax and revenue for the communities that are really determining how to pay their bills, how to build new schools, how to build new fire departments, it’s an opportunity for those communities to access some of that investment and to benefit from it,” she said, adding that a data center isn’t right for every community and local pushback should be considered. 

Sara Rodriguez 

A spokesperson for the current lieutenant governor said that she would issue an executive order to freeze utility rates while state officials develop a long-term data center plan. 

That long-term plan would include ways to prevent energy costs from increasing while making sure local residents get a say. 

“Sara strongly believes data center projects should be developed collaboratively with local communities. That means early community input, clear communication, and transparent planning to reduce misinformation and ensure projects make sense locally,” the spokesperson said. “Data centers aren’t the right fit for every community, but when done right they can bring real benefits — including jobs, redevelopment of otherwise unusable land, and new revenue that can help local governments lower taxes for residents, as we’ve seen in places like Janesville.” 

The campaign added that agreements with local governments must include provisions to prevent developers from bailing out and abandoning communities. 

“Sara also believes all details must be negotiated up front in binding agreements. If utilities make grid investments or communities commit resources, developers must be on the hook if a project is delayed or canceled,” the spokesperson said. “Families and local governments shouldn’t be left holding the bag. Wisconsin can support growth and innovation, but only if it’s fair, transparent, and doesn’t raise costs for working families.” 

Kelda Roys 

The Madison-area state senator is a co-sponsor of the Democrats’ data center bill and in an interview with the Examiner, said that as governor she’d support regulation that follows a similar framework to the legislation. 

“I think there needs to be a statewide strategy with guardrails that protect our workers, our environment and our consumers from massive price increases,” she said. “I’m very skeptical of this idea that the biggest and richest and most powerful companies in the world should get to just come in and pick off local communities and local elected leaders one by one and make these sweetheart deals in the dark that screw over the public. And I think in the absence of statewide standards and transparency, that is what is happening.” 

She said the state should use its sway to insert itself as a negotiating party in agreements with data center developers in an effort to keep energy costs low, reduce environmental impact and protect Wisconsin workers. 

She also said that the state government doing something to ease the budget crunch facing local governments will put those local officials in a better position when deciding whether or not to allow a data center to be constructed. 

“Part of the reason that we’re having this problem is that we have put local governments in an impossible situation because of the fiscal mismanagement and the harm of Republican politicians,” she said. “Communities will have more bargaining power when they don’t feel like, ‘Gosh, we’re desperate for more revenue, and our hands are really tied by the state. This is the only option,’ right? They will be in a stronger negotiating position if this is a nice to have, but not a necessary to have. And that’s the position that we want communities to be in. I want Wisconsinites to be able to have a say in our communities’ future, to be able to have an open and transparent process where we can say, ‘actually, we don’t think that this site is an appropriate one for a data center.’”

Josh Schoemann

The Washington County executive said at the November candidate forum there is an “abundance of opportunity” with data centers but that the state needs to be “very, very strategic and smart about where” data centers are built. In a statement from his campaign, he said the state needs to prioritize developing nuclear power to provide enough energy for data centers and everyday Wisconsinites. 

“I have great optimism about the potential for data centers and AI for Wisconsin, but it must be people focused,” he said. “Our lack of sufficient energy supply and distribution is a real threat to strategic growth and personal property rights. Growing up in Kewaunee, we had clean and efficient nuclear power right in our community. We need to get back to nuclear energy as a large part of a diverse energy portfolio — not just for data centers, but for the multitude of new homes we need for people, as well as more innovation and industry.”

Tom Tiffany 

The Republican congressman and frontrunner in the party’s primary has often opposed the development of large solar farms in and around his northern Wisconsin district, arguing they’ve taken too much of the region’s farmland out of commission. 

In a statement from his campaign, Tiffany said the development of data centers should be handled “responsibly.” 

“As demand for internet infrastructure continues to grow, data centers present new opportunities for economic development, but like any innovation, they must be developed responsibly,” he said. “Wisconsin families and small businesses should not be left footing the bill for increased electricity demand, local residents deserve a seat at the table when decisions are made about these projects, and taxpayer subsidies should not be used to build data centers on productive farmland. Growth should be responsible and transparent, without shifting costs onto existing ratepayers.”

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It’s a new year in Wisconsin, and an election one, too. There are many state government and politics storylines we plan to follow at Wisconsin Watch in 2026 from major policy debates to races that could determine the future of the state. 

But we value accountability here, including for ourselves. Before we dive into predictions for the year ahead, we want to look back at what our state team thought might happen in 2025.

Here’s what we predicted and what actually happened. 

2025 prediction: The Wisconsin Supreme Court will expand abortion rights.

Outcome: True.

The court in a 4-3 July ruling struck down Wisconsin’s 1849 near-total abortion ban, determining that later state laws regulating the procedure enacted after the ban superseded it. 

There are still restrictions on when someone can receive an abortion, including a ban on the procedure 20 weeks after fertilization and a 24-hour waiting period and ultrasound before an abortion is performed. President Donald Trump’s big bill signed in July has also threatened Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics in Wisconsin that offer abortions. A federal appeals court in December paused a lower court ruling and allowed the Trump administration to continue enforcing that part of the law.

2025 prediction: Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature will again strike a deal to increase funding for public education and private voucher schools, similar to the compromise they made in 2023.

Outcome: Mixed.

Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature did reach an agreement on K-12 education funding during the budget process, approving a $500 million boost for special education funding. But this wasn’t like 2023, when conservatives secured significant funding increases for private voucher schools.

General school aid was kept at the same level as previous years. The Department of Public Instruction in October said, because of that decision, 71% of school districts will receive less general aid during the current school year. Private voucher school funding increased based on past per pupil funding adjustments. As a result of revenue limits going up $325 a year for the next 400 years (no change there from Evers’ creative veto in 2023) and general aid staying flat, property taxes increased significantly. 

2025 prediction: The state Supreme Court election will set another spending record.

Outcome: Nailed it!

Total spending for the 2025 state Supreme Court race between liberal candidate Susan Crawford and conservative Brad Schimel hit $144.5 million, shattering the record set in 2023. The spending in last year’s race broke records even without a $30.3 million giveaway from tech billionaire Elon Musk to conservative voters in the state.

As Larry Sandler recently reported for Wisconsin Watch, it was another year demonstrating how expensive and highly political Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court elections have become over the years. 

2025 prediction: Ben Wikler will be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Outcome: Swing and a miss!

Former Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee in February. Wikler was the runner-up in the contest. 

Following the DNC chair race, Wikler announced in April he would not seek reelection as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Devin Remiker took on the leadership role following the state party’s convention in June. 

It’s not clear what’s next for Wikler. He announced in October he would not seek the Democratic nomination for governor. 

Wisconsin Watch predictions for 2026

There is a lot on the line this year, especially with several key elections on ballots in the spring and fall. Here are storylines we expect to follow in 2026.

2026 prediction: The Wisconsin Supreme Court election will NOT set a new spending record.

The big factor here is that the outcome of the April race won’t determine who controls the majority of the court, which lowers the stakes compared to elections in 2023 and 2025. The contest is expected to be a race between Appeals Court judges Chris Taylor, a liberal, and Maria Lazar, a conservative. 

A clearer picture of the fundraising for the 2026 race will appear after campaign finance reports are released this month. Lazar entered the race in October, so her campaign fundraising since then is not yet available. 

Taylor, who announced her campaign in May, reported raising more than $584,000 as of July. Following the August announcement that conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley would not seek reelection, a spokesperson for Taylor’s campaign said it had raised more than $1 million.

2026 prediction: Data centers will continue to be a major subject of public interest in Wisconsin as public outcry causes the Public Service Commission to delay approvals of new power plant projects.

Public protests against data centers punctuated the 2025 news cycle as tech giants saw pushback in communities where they sought to build. The Marquette University Law School poll conducted in October shows a majority of Wisconsin voters across the state believe the costs of data centers outweigh their benefits. 

The public opposition to data centers and rising utility bill costs will lead to closer scrutiny of power plant projects, which the Public Service Commission is set to review this year.

2026 prediction: In the governor’s race, Republicans will focus on rising property taxes. Democrats will focus on rising health care costs. But the ultimate X factor will be the public mood about what’s happening at the federal level — just as it was in 2018. 

Already in December, Republicans have slammed Evers’ 2023 creative veto that increases public school funding for the next 400 years as a centuries-long property tax increase. Democrats have condemned Republicans for not voting to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies, which expired at the end of December.

Federal issues and public opinion about Trump will ultimately be what sways voters to one party or the other. During the 2018 governor’s race between Evers and then-Gov. Scott Walker, health care was a key issue with Walker authorizing a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act and Evers calling to expand BadgerCare. But as we’ve noted before, the public is turning against public education in favor of lower taxes, which could keep Republicans in Wisconsin from suffering major swings the party has seen in other states in 2025 off-year elections.

2026 prediction: Democrats will flip at least one chamber of the Legislature for the first time in nearly two decades (not counting that short-lived Senate flip after the 2012 recall elections).

New legislative maps being used for the first time in state Senate races and midterm elections favoring the opposite political party from the one in the White House are signs it could be a good year for Democrats to secure at least one chamber of the Legislature — if not both. 

The more likely of the two is the Senate, where Republicans hold an 18-15 majority. Democrats need to flip at least two Republican seats and hold onto the Eau Claire area seat held by Sen. Jeff Smith, D-Brunswick, to win the majority. The party is targeting GOP districts currently held by Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine; Sen. Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield; and Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, where new maps have yet to be tested. Kamala Harris won those three districts, and Democrats running in other states in 2025 have made double-digit gains.

The Assembly, where Republicans hold a 54-45 majority, could also be in play, but Democrats need to flip five Republican-held Assembly seats. Of the 12 Assembly districts in 2024 decided within less than 5 percentage points, five were won by Republicans. Assembly Democrats would need to flip those five seats and hold onto the other seven close districts from 2024 to win the majority. 

Democrats already flipped 10 seats under the new legislative maps in 2024 during a year when Trump’s name atop ballots gave a boost to Republicans. If Democrats see big wins across the country, there could be down-ballot momentum to flip the Assembly. 

2026 prediction: Fundraising by candidates for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District will exceed 2024, especially as that seat draws national attention in the Republican fight to keep the U.S. House majority.

Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden defeated Democrat Rebecca Cooke by less than 3 percentage points in 2024. Van Orden raised nearly $7.7 million and Cooke brought in nearly $6.4 million during the 2024 cycle, outraising all other Wisconsin congressional candidates at the time, according to Open Secrets. 

The 2026 race for the 3rd District is likely to be a rematch between Van Orden and Cooke, who have already raised millions for the 2026 cycle. As of late September, Van Orden reported bringing in about $3.4 million and Cooke nearly $3 million. National attention on who wins the U.S. House majority will also bring more money into the race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put the 3rd District on a list of “offensive targets” for 2026.

Here are 5 Wisconsin political predictions for 2026 (and a review of our 2025 predictions) 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.

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A version of this story was originally published by Circle of Blue.

On a warm fall afternoon, dairy farmer Chris Kestell pushes through prairie brambles taller than himself, tracing a path overgrown with thickets and swarming with bees as he hikes toward a hidden waterway.

Though the route is unidentifiable to the untrained eye, Kestell, 47, has lived here, in the small town of Waldo, Wisconsin, for nearly all his life. His father first walked this path 70 years ago, and his two young boys, 8 and 10 years-old, mark the third generation to follow this practiced journey.

After several minutes, he comes to rest beside a fallen tree. In its petrified tangle of roots, guarded by a tiny plastic gnome, a collection of spoons, bowls, and mugs fit like perfect puzzle pieces. Kestell takes a silver ladle from the snarl and kneels over a wall of dirt, from which a steady trickle emerges.

These are the headwaters of the Milwaukee River, known locally as Nichols Creek. According to Milwaukee Riverkeeper data, it is the “most pristine” monitored waterway in the entire 900 square-mile rivershed, and one of the only regional waters where brook trout reproduce naturally. 

As he has done since he was a young boy, Kestell brings the water to his lips. “By a certain age, everybody drinks here,” he says. “The creek is a landmark for this area. When you’re a kid, you’re like, ‘Wow, this is pretty awesome.’ It’s a special place.”

Deep in this quiet wooded alcove, Nichols Creek is a cultural touchstone and habitat of ecological importance. Safe and secure for generations, residents fear it is suddenly at risk of severe damage from a new era of energy transition in Wisconsin. 

The waterway — along with drinking water wells, protected woods and wetlands, and newly restored floodplains — is caught in the spreading network of high-voltage power lines. 

According to Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) documents, more than 400 miles of new high-voltage power lines are either under review or approved in Wisconsin. Similar projects have also been greenlit in Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and the other three Great Lakes states in recent months, together totaling well over 1,000 miles. 

As part of its Plymouth Reliability Project, the American Transmission Company (ATC), a local electric utility, plans to install seven miles of high-capacity lines through the Waldo area. Part of the route would pass directly over Nichols Creek, raising concerns over deforestation around the county’s only stream designated as “outstanding” by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Meanwhile, a second ATC expansion, the Ozaukee County Distribution Interconnection project, proposes the construction of five new energy substations and corresponding transmission lines just southeast of Waldo. The preferred route would require the clear-cutting of old-growth forest and intersect the Cederberg Bog Wilderness — “the most intact large bogs in southeastern Wisconsin,” according to the Wisconsin DNR, and a registered National Natural Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Our entire business is based on people coming away from the city and spending the weekend here in the trees,” said Katy Rowe, who co-owns Abloom Farms, a resort and wedding venue located on the northern edge of the bog. “Eminent domain should not be used as a weapon against normal American citizens that have decided to live a quiet life in the country.”

According to ATC’s website, these projects are “needed to ensure electric reliability and address current and future energy needs in the community and the surrounding area.” But those needs aren’t due from the smattering of dairy farms, lonely county roads, and modest old homes that comprise rural Waldo, population 467. 

Nearly two dozen data centers in southeastern Wisconsin alone are either proposed, built, or in-development, but the two newest are not like the others. More than 20 miles away, in the city of Port Washington, a 672-acre campus built by Vantage Data Centers broke ground on Dec. 17. Even farther, some 70 miles south, Microsoft is building a 315-acre facility near Racine. 

Though seemingly far enough away to be irrelevant to Waldo, the new sites’ thirst for power knows few bounds. When fully built, the Vantage and Microsoft locations will together require a 24/7 electricity supply totaling 3.2 gigawatts — greater than all of Wisconsin’s homes combined. 

Power generated by natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, wind, and battery storage stations across the state’s central and eastern regions are all in the mix to bring data center campuses online. Transmission lines, running through Waldo, will transport the electricity they demand.

When reached, ATC declined to comment on the Plymouth Reliability project.

But the company in public testimony has downplayed the project’s potential effects on wetlands and says it will take measures to minimize the impact. 

The project as proposed “will not directly impact stream channels or have direct discharges to streams,” Erika Biemann, senior environmental project manager for ATC, wrote in testimony before Wisconsin’s PSC.

Waldo’s story is not a one-off. New state and federal legislation are incentivizing data center development and encouraging power lines’ rapid rise across the region, potentially running roughshod over other communities. 

In February, Illinois — which by one count leads the Great Lakes region with more than 200 data centers — enacted a law allowing tax incentives for the construction of new battery storage facilities and high-voltage transmission lines. A month later, lawmakers in Indiana (75 data centers) enacted a law aiming to make transmission lines more efficient and cost-effective to construct. Similar legislation went into effect in Ohio (192 data centers) in August.

On a national scale, President Trump signed an executive order this January declaring an energy emergency and ordering agencies to “expedite the completion of all authorized and appropriated” energy infrastructure. The order directs the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to speed up their review of permit applications to develop wetlands for transmission lines and other energy projects. The Corps is reviewing such permits for new lines in Wisconsin and other states. 

In late October, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to change permitting and rulemaking procedures to “significantly reduce” the amount of time and oversight required to bring data centers onto the grid. 

Literally caught in the middle of a new epoch of surging energy demand and supply in the Great Lakes region, residents say they are contending with powerful economic trends that could be devastating to the environment, and already are weighing on their spirits. 

Back at his family home, Kestell points to a large rock on his front lawn. The new power lines, Kestell said, would run right over his uncle’s final resting place.

“This is not rural electrification anymore, bringing power to poor farms” said Kestell’s father, Tom, also a farmer in Waldo. “This is an elite, wealthy class of people who are invested in these power stations and data centers, who are going to make probably trillions of dollars off this. And the people who they infringe on in the meantime? They’re just collateral damage.”

Homes and ponds face risk

What’s developing in Waldo is a case in point. The wetland area through which Nichols Creek flows is the source of local residents’ well water. 

“Water comes, goes back down into the ground, and then becomes a collection of underground springs,” said JoAnne Friedman, the town chairperson of Lyndon, Wisconsin. “When you try to imagine how much water is underground here, it is a phenomenal amount.”

The water recharge process, and the natural filtration trees and other plants provide, is threatened by the right-of-way easements that the 138-kilovolt power lines require. All vegetation between 60 feet and 110 feet to either side of the lines would need to be cleared during their construction. 

The loss of maple and cedar tree cover, Kestell said, threatens both the warming of Nichols Creek and soil erosion on the side of county roads that already slump and flood when storms roll through. 

“With all of these projects, they don’t realize how much mitigation people who have these properties have done to prevent erosion,” said Friedman, who has needed to enlarge her property’s 20-foot-deep retention pond from half an acre to two acres to manage gushing ephemeral streams during springtime snowmelt and heavy rains. 

Living at the bottom of a small sloped valley, she said she has planted so many trees she “lost count,” all to help redirect flows from damaging her home. If ATC’s transmission line route is built, she said, this cover would all be clear-cut. 

Hundred-year-old trees would also be razed from the backyard of Randy Pietsch, a retired dairy farmer who has lived along the banks of Nichols Creek for more than 50 years. The trout pond he keeps on his property has long been open to friends and family for fishing, though he closed it several years ago and has no plans now of reopening. 

“I’m not hopeful for anything,” he said. “Why they have to come through here is beyond me. I can’t imagine that electric line’s good for fish. They just want to steal the land, that’s all. It’s sad, it’s stressful. You lose a lot of sleep at night.”

ATC says the project will not significantly affect the creek. 

“The loss of forested riparian habitat along Nicholas Creek would not be significant, especially considering the large riparian forest buffer both upstream and downstream from the proposed route crossing,” Biemann, the ATC environmental project manager, wrote in public testimony. 

Olivia Poelmann, a PSC environmental analysis and review specialist, testified that the project’s cumulative environmental effects are “not expected to be significant and are mostly temporary, with a large majority of impacts occurring primarily during the construction phase of the project.” 

But most startling, residents say, are the effects of ATC’s preferred route on their properties, many of which have been in their families for multiple generations. 

In some cases, the transmission lines’ right-of-way easements extend several feet inside peoples’ homes. One resident, Nolan Harp, said that the lines would run within 40 feet of his front door, placing half of his house within an easement. As a result, five 40-foot tall trees in his yard would be cut down, and his private well would need to be moved.

“That’s my sole source of water. It’s an old well, but it works, it’s clean, and it’s good,” Harp said. “But you can’t have something like that under power lines.”

Harp said that ATC has offered to dig up the open well, its casing, tank, and pump, and replace them elsewhere on his property. But the headache of additional construction, and the obvious hazard of power lines running above his house, has him considering other options.

“I don’t want to move, but if they insist on putting that power line up, I don’t think I can live here,” Harp said.

In late January, the $33.5 million Plymouth project was approved by the PSC, though it added a condition that prevents ATC from using eminent domain to build their power lines. ATC subsequently petitioned to reopen the application on the grounds that PSC cannot revoke that right, which is protected under Wisconsin state law. In April, this petition was granted. 

Kestell, who founded an organization called Neighbors 4 Neighbors to fight against the project in court, estimates that residents have spent $250,000 of their own money on legal fees.

At the end of the day, their homes and health are the most important concerns. 

“When they put these towers in, some of them are going down 30 or 40 feet, possibly hitting the aquifer when they’re digging foundations,” said Kestell, who estimates his own front door will be within roughly 20 feet of an easement. “We’re just not sure about contamination.”

Wisconsin Watch contributed reporting.

As data centers boom, rural Waldo braces for high-voltage lines over wetlands and homes 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.