Reading Time: 2 minutes

Editor’s note: This story has was updated Oct. 29 with comments from Wisconsin Sierra Club and Clean Air Wisconsin. 

The U.S. Department of Energy announced a $5.1 billion loan to Alliant Energy on Wednesday, including $1.6 billion for Wisconsin Power and Light, Wisconsin’s third-largest electrical utility.

Alliant spokesperson Cindy Tomlinson told Wisconsin Watch that the loan may support the construction of a natural gas storage facility in Rock County and a pair of battery storage facilities — one in southwestern Wisconsin and another near Sheboygan — among other possibilities. Two of those projects still require approval from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. The loan itself doesn’t name those projects, and Tomlinson noted that the federal dollars could also support efforts to restart or repurpose shuttered power plants or build new natural gas plants. 

The company estimates Wisconsin ratepayers will save $400 million over the life of the loan. “To the extent that tax dollars are used to help pay for projects that are approved,” Wisconsin  Citizens Utility Board (CUB) Executive Director Tom Content wrote in an email, “that should lower the overall cost over 20-40 years.” CUB has not yet reviewed Alliant’s ratepayer savings claim. 

The deal dates back to the final days of the Biden administration, when the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office focused on shoring up clean energy projects that otherwise struggled to get bank loans. The office mulled canceling existing clean energy loans after President Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, Bloomberg reported.

The new loan language doesn’t explicitly bar spending on renewable energy infrastructure. It instead allows the utility to direct funding to “energy infrastructure and related projects that increase energy supply or enhance grid reliability, including but not limited to nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, geothermal or hydropower power generation facilities.”

“The Energy Department is delivering on President Trump’s promise to lower electricity costs and unleash the full potential of American energy,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. 

Environmental advocacy groups were dismayed to learn Alliant may use the loan to fund natural gas projects. 

“Clean, renewable energy like wind and solar are more affordable than gas infrastructure, and they come without the massive water use and pollution that fossil fuels have,” Wisconsin Sierra Club Senior Campaign Coordinator Cassie Steiner wrote in an email. “This grant that props up gas plants, a more expensive, financially volatile, and polluting fossil fuel energy source, will harm residents. We are going to pay for this dirty infrastructure with our health, our water, our air, and our bills.”

“They’re taking our tax dollars to pull us in the wrong direction,” added Brittany Keyes, clean air policy manager for Healthy Climate Wisconsin. “This is going to make the Rock River Valley sicker.”

Alliant also applied for a federal grant in June to extend the life of coal-fired generators it owns at the Columbia Energy Center near Portage. The utility previously planned to retire the plant’s coal units before the end of the decade.

Federal loan could fund Wisconsin natural gas and battery storage projects 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.

Wisconsin is facing another major test of how it plans its energy future.

We Energies has proposed a new 750-megawatt natural gas plant in Wrightstown, the Fox North Energy Center. If approved, it could begin operating around 2032 and run for 30 years or more. With Fox North added to the queue, We Energies now has roughly 4.25 gigawatts of methane gas generation awaiting Public Service Commission approval.

The utility says the buildout is needed to meet rapidly growing electricity demand and maintain reliability. Data centers are a major part of that growth.

But projected demand does not make new gas plants inevitable.

Wisconsin is being asked to make decades-long energy decisions based on electricity demand forecasts that are changing faster than our regulatory system. That is exactly why new methane gas plants must first prove they are the cleanest, lowest-cost, lowest-risk option before customers are committed to paying for them.

Before Wisconsin commits customers to decades of fuel costs and long-lived infrastructure, regulators should ask a more important question: What combination of resources can meet that demand reliably, affordably and with the least long-term risk?

That means comparing new gas plants not just with one solar farm or one battery project, but with complete portfolios of solar, wind, storage, energy efficiency, transmission, distributed resources, nuclear power and demand flexibility.

Other states, including Minnesota and North Carolina, have already shown that regulators can challenge utility assumptions and require closer examination of alternatives rather than treating new gas plants as the default response to projected load growth.

Wisconsin can do the same.

That approach is already gaining support in Wisconsin, including among labor leaders who see comprehensive energy planning as an opportunity to create good-paying jobs.

Climate Jobs Wisconsin, whose leadership includes representatives of Wisconsin building trades and construction unions, recently advanced a “35 by ’35” clean-energy and good-jobs agenda. The proposal envisions roughly 35 gigawatts of new clean-energy resources by 2035, including storage, utility-scale solar, wind, nuclear generation and networked distributed power. A plan  developed by the PSC would map what gets built, where and when, establish resource targets and create a grid-investment roadmap.

That is exactly the kind of planning Wisconsin needs.

Whether policymakers ultimately adopt those exact numbers is less important than the principle behind them: Evaluate the whole system before locking customers into decades of costs.

And expanding clean energy does not have to mean sacrificing Wisconsin’s best farmland or open space.

Renewable development can be directed toward brownfields, marginal and previously disturbed lands, rooftops, parking structures, industrial parks, sites near substations and existing infrastructure. Solar can also be integrated with agricultural production through agrivoltaics, allowing farming and energy production to coexist rather than compete.

Wisconsin should be able to protect prime agricultural land while dramatically expanding clean energy. Those goals are compatible if we plan carefully.

The jobs case matters, too.

Climate Jobs Wisconsin’s agenda is built around creating clean-energy careers with prevailing wages, registered apprenticeships and local hiring. It proposes tying those labor standards to PSC approvals and expanding Wisconsin’s ability to build new energy infrastructure with skilled union labor.

That is important because Wisconsin’s energy transition should not be framed as a choice between workers and the environment.

Done well, it is an industrial green growth strategy.

It can create careers for electricians, operating engineers, laborers, carpenters, pipefitters and other skilled trades while reducing exposure to volatile fuel costs and strengthening Wisconsin manufacturing.

The rapid growth of data centers makes this kind of comprehensive planning even more important.

Wisconsin families, farmers, manufacturers and existing businesses should not become the financial backstop for those investments.

If a gas plant is justified largely by projected data-center demand, regulators should determine how certain that demand really is, what alternatives were considered, who will pay for the plant and who bears the stranded-cost risk if forecasts change.

Transparency is equally important.

That means disclosing projected electricity and water use, infrastructure requirements, tax arrangements and long-term impacts before commitments become difficult to reverse.

It also means using transparent Community Benefit Agreements, so benefits are public, measurable and enforceable.

Transparency is not anti-development. It is how responsible development earns trust.

Wisconsin does not have an electricity shortage. It has a planning challenge.

The choice before us is not new gas or reliability. It is whether Wisconsin evaluates all available resources together before committing customers to another generation of long-term fossil fuel infrastructure costs.

The Fox North proposal gives Wisconsin another opportunity to get that right.

A new gas plant should have to prove it is necessary. It should not be treated as inevitable.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Wisconsin’s state tax on gasoline and diesel is 30.9 cents per gallon, which has not increased or decreased since 2006.

In 2005, lawmakers repealed annual gas tax increases tied to inflation. That law took effect in April 2006, so the 30.9 rate has stayed the same for the last 20 years.

The gas tax, also called the motor vehicle fuel tax, is the largest source of revenue for the state’s transportation fund. In July 2026 alone, Wisconsin’s gas and diesel tax generated nearly $99 million.

While some states have waived their gas taxes amid high prices, Wisconsin has never done so. In Wisconsin, a gas tax holiday would have to pass in the Legislature and get the governor’s approval.

In addition to the state rate, federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 for diesel, which haven’t changed since 1993.

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Department of Revenue: Motor Vehicle Fuel Tax
• Wisconsin State Legislature: 2005 Wisconsin Act 85
• Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: Motor Vehicle Fuel and Alternative Fuel Tax
• Wisconsin Department of Revenue: Fuel Tax Statistical Report: July 2026
• Indiana Department of Revenue: Gasoline Use Tax: Gas Tax Holiday
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Some states are waiving gas taxes as prices soar. Could Wisconsin?
• Congressional Budget Office: Increase Excise Taxes on Motor Fuels and Index Them for Inflation

Has Wisconsin’s tax on gas and diesel stayed the same for 20 years? 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.