A gas leak that occurred last month on Enbridge’s Line 5 oil and gas pipeline is the largest oil and gas spill reported in Wisconsin in more than 50 years, according to a WPR review of federal data.

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Enbridge now hopes to restore service to its Line 5 oil and gas pipeline by Tuesday after a gas leak in northern Wisconsin last week.

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A Wisconsin utility company and a Madison startup announced a partnership Wednesday that could bring one of the nation's first large-scale fusion power plants to the Badger State.

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A Chicago-based energy developer is planning to build two new large natural gas power plants in northeast Wisconsin, but the company has not yet said how much the project will cost.

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Dozens of southeastern Wisconsin residents, community organizers, local leaders and environmental activists voiced their opposition to a proposal from the electric utility We Energies to raise rates during a series of meetings in Milwaukee Tuesday. 

At a rally outside the We Energies offices Tuesday morning and at a public hearing on the rate increase held by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission on the Marquette University campus in the afternoon, opponents of the planned increase by as much as $22 per month by 2028 complained that the company was raising money that would go to building data center infrastructure and executive salaries on the backs of Milwaukee residents struggling to get by. Opponents also demanded that Wisconsin change direction as the state continues to fall behind its neighbors in renewable energy development. 

The proposed rate increase comes as public attention has focused on the structure of Wisconsin’s energy system and the sources of its power due to widespread opposition to the construction of hyperscale data centers — particularly in the communities of Port Washington and Mount Pleasant. The issue has become a major topic in the ongoing race for governor as both Democrat David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, and Republican Tom Tiffany, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, argue for their vision for the future of data centers and energy in the state. 

Crowley has said he wants to require that data center developers pay the cost of their own energy use while pushing them to construct renewable sources of energy such as utility-scale solar and wind. Tiffany, whose campaign  ads attack “data center David,” has argued that data centers, wind and solar farms are all taking too much of the state’s farmland. 

Voters across Wisconsin have expressed frustration recently with the lack of oversight or regulation of polluting industry. A group of activists in western Wisconsin recently successfully challenged the state Department of Natural Resources’ decision to grant a controversial Pierce County factory farm a permit to expand on the grounds that there weren’t enough protections for local groundwater. 

We Energies’ request to raise rates would increase monthly bills by $13.35 per month in 2027 and another $8.69 per month in 2028, adding up to about $22 more per month after two years, for a household that uses 660 kilowatt-hours per month. 

At the rally in Zeidler Union Square Park, directly in front of the We Energies headquarters, attendees complained that the PSC hearing was being held on the first day of school, when many of the working families who will be most affected by the rate increase are too busy to attend; that the utility has increased rates several times in recent years as the company’s profits have continued to go up; that, on a hot and muggy late summer day in Wisconsin, poor residents in the city would have to choose between cooling their homes and other necessities and that the state’s utility companies have continued to extend the lives of coal and natural gas power plants. 

“I didn’t come here to complain. Y’all know we do not complain. That’s not what we do. We have a reason to be angry, though,” Antonio Butts, executive director of the local non-profit Walnut Way Conservation Corps, said. “They’re asking for $480 million —  $480 million on top of hundreds of millions that they’ve asked for in previous years. We have a right to be angry. We literally have a right to be angry. But being angry has never reduced our energy bill. Not one time.” 

Most of the speakers complained that the utility has continued to reap massive profits and returns to shareholders — and paid its CEO $12 million in 2025 — while many Milwaukee families are struggling to make ends meet. 

“We have a runaway monopoly that are supposed to be stewards of a necessity, a necessity that we all need,” Rev. Steve Tipton, pastor of El Bethel Church of God in Christ on the city’s northwest side, said. “We need to be warm in the winter, and you know how Milwaukee is. Y’all know how Milwaukee is. And we need to be comfortable in the summer. You see how we are sweating right now. So imagine how homes and families and people that are working, people that are working with two and three jobs that are trying to take care of their children and still keep their household together, and still have to deal with a bill where they got to make a choice whether it’s going to be groceries, their medication, or the necessity of energy.” 

Throughout the rally, speakers explicitly tied the fight against the rate increase to the broader fight against climate change and pushing Wisconsin’s energy system to use more renewable energy. 

“Climate change is no longer some distant environmental problem, it is an issue of public health, infrastructure affordability, and ultimately human safety,” Yusuf Adama, a Beloit common council member and environmental justice advocate with Walnut Way, said. “And we continue to see another reason why we need to move from our dependence on volatile fossil fuels like methane gas when our energy systems depend on fuels whose prices can fluctuate because of markets and events far outside the control of other Wisconsinites.”

State Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) was at the rally and hearing Tuesday, arguing that government officials should listen to the demands of the activists in Milwaukee on Tuesday and Wisconsinites who are fighting against data centers across the state. With Democrats confident they’ll win control of state government in November, he said he wanted to push for protections against data center-caused increases in energy and water use, cap utility rate increases at 2%, bar utility companies from lobbying and forcing more renewable energy development. 

Larson made that argument as Tiffany’s campaign for governor argues explicitly against renewable energy and for the increasing Wisconsin’s use of fossil fuels. 

“Tom Tiffany is lying through his teeth, or maybe he’s too dumb to realize,” that he’s been deceived by fossil fuel “propaganda,” Larson told the Examiner. “The cheapest form of energy is solar.” 

Adama, of the Beloit common council and Walnut Way, told the Examiner that while Tuesday’s hearing was about the rate increase, it’s important to keep the focus on the “cohesive set of circumstances” that form the state’s energy policies and push for broader policies to fight climate change.

Enbridge says it’s temporarily halting work on rerouting its Line 5 oil and gas pipeline following a gas leak in Iron County on Tuesday.

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Enbridge says it’s working around the clock to safely remove remaining vapors from a stretch of its Line 5 pipeline following a gas leak in Iron County.

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The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is asking Enbridge to halt work on its Line 5 reroute in response to a gas leak that began Tuesday.

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Microsoft, state regulators and customer advocates are raising concerns about a utility proposal meant to shield existing customers from transmission costs associated with data centers.

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Enbridge has said a parked, unoccupied semi truck rolled into an open excavation site on a Line 5 valve project, striking the pipe and releasing natural gas liquids.

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Since he was first elected, U.S. Rep. Tiffany has focused on issues related to the environment and natural resources more than any other topic — often pushing policy in directions to explicitly benefit the interests of extractive industries such as mining and logging. 

In the Senate, he sat on the committees on Agriculture, Small Business, and Tourism; Workforce Development, Forestry, Mining, and Revenue; Natural Resources; and Sporting Heritage, Mining and Forestry. During his current congressional term, Tiffany sits on the Committee on Natural Resources and chairs the subcommittee on federal lands. 

Now, Tiffany is the Republican nominee for governor with a campaign that has advocated for the state Department of Natural Resources to be divided into multiple departments in order to better support hunters. He’s also said he’d work with right-wing anti-conservation figures such as Luke Hilgemann to run the DNR. 

“We are going to revamp the Department of Natural Resources,” he said at an event in Medford July 9, Civic Media reported. “I am open to splitting the agency. I’m open to splitting the agency so you separate fish, wildlife, hunting, fishing, trapping from the environmental permitting part of it.” 

When he was in the Legislature, Tiffany helped lead Republican efforts to fire scientists at the DNR and prevent the agency from addressing climate change. In 2017, he supported the administration of Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to scrub references to climate change from the DNR website. 

When that decision was questioned, Tiffany said the criticism was “off-base” because “climate change is a theoretical construct.”

The Tiffany campaign did not respond to a request for comment or answer a detailed list of questions about his environmental policy plans. 

Mining

In 2013, Wisconsin was two years into the Gov. Scott Walker era and Republicans, with the help of their newly installed legislative maps, had maintained majority control of the Legislature. To kick off the session, Tiffany was one of the lead authors on Senate Bill 1, which was meant to ease the regulations imposed on iron mines operating in the state. 

At the time, the Florida-based Gogebic Taconite was hoping to build the largest open-pit iron mine in the world outside the Northwoods town of Hurley. 

The company, known as GTAC, had given nearly $75,000 to Tiffany’s campaign. It was also involved in the dark money scandal that rocked Walker’s first term after secretly donating $700,000 to a pro-business advocacy group run by Walker’s campaign adviser during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections against him. 

Throughout the legislative debate on the bill, in which Tiffany was criticized for stifling opposing viewpoints, Tiffany downplayed the environmental concerns raised by Democrats, environmental groups and the Native American tribes located close to the proposed mine site. 

Drafting records from the effort to write the bill showed that GTAC played a key role in drafting the legislation — an arrangement Tiffany downplayed, saying legislators “go talk to farmers” before writing a bill on agricultural issues. 

“He is really bought and paid for by mining companies, and really has no regard for the impact on the environment, local and tribal communities nearby, and you know he has a record a mile long to prove it,” Seth Hoffmeister, deputy director of Wisconsin Conservation Voters, said. The organization has on several occasions listed Tiffany on its “dishonor roll” in its legislative scorecards. 

Within two months of its introduction, Walker signed the bill into law. Despite the promises from Tiffany and Republicans that the bill would spark an iron-based economic boom, the mine never opened. GTAC abandoned the project in 2015 after a drop in iron prices. The company also cited surprise at the number of protected wetlands near the mining site. Tiffany blamed the EPA for not being friendly enough to business interests. 

A few months after the enactment of Tiffany’s first pro-mining bill, he authored a controversial proposal that would have prohibited local governments from regulating the operation of frac sand mining. The bill died after it failed to gain enough Republican support in the Senate.

In August of that year, Tiffany introduced legislation that would repeal Wisconsin’s Prove-it-first law, which since it was signed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1998 had required that any companies planning to open a sulfide mine for metallic minerals in the state prove they can operate without polluting groundwater or surface water before receiving a permit. 

For the 19 years it had been in effect, the law was effectively a moratorium on sulfide mining for copper and gold in the state. 

“Our neighbors, Minnesota and Michigan, have placed their shovels in the dirt of America’s future. It is Wisconsin’s turn to do the same,” Tiffany said when the bill was introduced. 

Aquila Resources, a Canadian mining company that owned claims on deposits in Marathon County and in a section of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Taylor County, consulted with Tiffany as he wrote the bill. 

Like the previous iron mining bill, opponents argued opening the state up to metallic mining would pollute the waters of the Northwoods in exchange for a limited number of jobs. 

Walker signed the bill into law in December of 2017. 

In 2021, Aquila’s Wisconsin claims were purchased by Green Light Metals, which last summer began an exploratory drilling project on the Taylor County site, the Examiner previously reported. No sulfide mines have been opened in the state since the passage of the bill. 

But, environmental groups are concerned that if elected governor, Tiffany would encourage more mining projects in the state. 

“The activism on the ground and the economics combined has been enough to stop any mines from moving forward. We lost that layer of protection that says you have to do it safely,” Elizabeth Ward, director of the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter, told the Wisconsin Examiner. “Tom Tiffany, if he were to be governor, would for sure say extractive industries come in here because that’s what he’s been pushing for since he was in the Legislature, and so that could be the green light the industry needs to make the numbers work.”

In January of 2021, Tiffany co-sponsored H.R. 488, which would have prohibited the president, Department of the Interior or Department of Agriculture from declaring a moratorium on mining on federal land. 

In September of 2022, Tiffany introduced H.R. 9024, the DRILL Act, which directed the U.S. Department of the Interior to issue permits for all pending applications to drill for oil and gas on public lands. The bill was referred to committee and failed to move any further. 

Tiffany also voted for a bill that opened up Minnesota’s Boundary Waters to mining.  

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), represents the northern coast of California from the Bay Area up to the Oregon border and sits on the Energy and Mineral Resources subcommittee with Tiffany. Huffman said that he personally gets along with the Republican, noting he has a good — although sometimes biting — sense of humor. 

But, Huffman said, Tiffany is hyper focused on supporting extractive industries such as mining.

“Ideology is a poor substitute for reality. Nature always bats last,” Huffman said. “You can be as sarcastic and sanctimonious as you want in attacking climate action. You can dismiss it as a hoax and a conspiracy theory, but you’re going to have to reckon with it because it’s real and not going away, it’s actually getting worse. The problem is folks like Tom not only are deniers of that reality but are leaning in on things that are going to make it more destructive.”

Renewable Energy and Data Centers

Since officially earning the Republican nomination for governor in the state’s Aug. 11 primary elections, Tiffany’s campaign has been heavily focused on data centers. Both Democratic and Republican voters have been shown in polling to be opposed to the construction of massive hyperscale data centers across the state. 

Tiffany’s focus on the issue is partially due to its salience during the Democratic primary election, in which state Rep. Francesca Hong’s nearly successful left-wing primary campaign for governor was built largely on her call for a statewide moratorium on data center construction until regulations on their energy use and cost to communities could be enacted. 

David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, has been less full-throated in his opposition to data centers, though he has said that all data centers should involve approval from local officials and be required to source their energy from renewable sources. 

Tiffany has said on the campaign trail that he’s in favor of imposing additional regulations on data centers, but his opposition has largely followed the contours of his opposition to a different kind of development — large wind and solar energy projects. 

“David Crowley wants to cover our farmland with industrial-scale wind, solar, and data centers,” Tiffany posted on X earlier this week. 

Tiffany’s campaign has argued that data centers, along with renewable energy developments, are taking too much prime farmland in Wisconsin. In a news release earlier this month, the campaign said that if the state followed Crowley’s plan to power data centers with renewables, the three hyperscale data centers under construction in Beaver Dam, Mount Pleasant and Port Washington would require solar and wind power installations that “put more than 100,000 acres of Wisconsin land at risk.” 

But Tiffany has been making the same argument for a long time. In each of his congressional terms, he has introduced a bill that would make wind and solar energy projects ineligible for federal tax benefits if the project was built on agricultural land.

At a town hall in Rice Lake shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump early last year, Tiffany was making the same anti-solar argument that he’s now combined with his data center position. 

“I have real concerns about this. We are converting thousands of acres of farmland, prime farmland here in Wisconsin, to the solar and wind facilities,” he said. “And while it’s very important to produce energy, there’s one thing that’s certainly of higher priority, I believe, for us humans, and that is to produce food. And to be sidelining this productive farmland, I don’t think it’s good public policy.”

He has been making this argument despite little evidence that the state has been inundated with renewable projects. 

A June analysis from the Solar Energy Industries Association found that about 41% of Wisconsin’s land is prime farmland — 22,499.9 square miles of the state’s total 54,382.1 square miles. 

Currently, just 22 square miles in the state are taken up by solar. Meanwhile, 274 square miles in the state, 171 miles of which overlap with prime farmland, are taken up by golf courses and suburban sprawl, the SEIA analysis found. 

Put into the Tiffany campaign’s unit of measurement, that’s 175,000 acres taken up by golf courses and sprawl and 14,000 acres by solar. 

Meanwhile, Tiffany has received campaign contributions from the lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition and while in Congress voted for bills to support the development of artificial intelligence — the technology that is requiring the construction of such massive data centers. 

“Tom Tiffany has two positions on data centers, and he’s counting on us not to notice,” former state legislative candidate LuAnn Bird said in a statement. “In the ads, he’s the guy protecting your farmland, but in front of his donors, he’s promising to grease the skids for the developers. He cast a deciding vote for the House bill that would have stripped our towns of any say over these projects, he voted to hand the corporations building them 100% tax write-offs, and he cashed a check from a data center lobbyist. It’s Wisconsin families who’ll see it on our utility bills. We can’t trust Tom Tiffany.”

Hoffmeister told the Examiner that Tiffany has spent his career supporting polluting energy industries such as coal and gas. 

“His record is horrible on energy,” Hoffmeister said. “The choices he’s made in Congress are contributing to rising electric bills, to pollution, and they’re really not in the best interest of Wisconsinites. They’re in the best interest of his corporate utility and gas and oil company donors.”

Campaign finance records from Open Secrets show that since his first run for Congress, Tiffany has received more than $135,000 in campaign contributions from the energy and natural resources sector. 

Wolves 

One of the most divisive issues in Wisconsin’s conservation politics is the management of the state’s gray wolf population — which has successfully recovered after the animal was extirpated from the state in the 1960s. 

Many residents of the Northwoods, who live closest to the wolves, have concerns about the risks posed to pets and livestock by a predator in the neighborhood. Longstanding societal fears about wolves and the desire from some people to hunt the animal also play a role in the opposition to the wolf’s presence.

But wolf supporters point to the importance of the animal’s role at the top of the food chain for the health of the state’s ecosystems as well as the importance of the wolf to the local Ojibwe tribes as reasons to support the wolf’s survival. 

Under a controversial Wisconsin law, whenever the wolf is not on the federal endangered species list, the state must hold a wolf hunt. 

Since his first election, Tiffany has been a prominent anti-wolf legislator. 

“His big priority is wolves. He wants to hunt wolves. I’m not kidding. He’s talked to me about it many times on the House floor,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens said on CNN earlier this month.

The first piece of legislation that Tiffany introduced after his election to Congress in 2020 was H.R. 8180, the Managing Predators Act, which would have permanently removed the gray wolf from the federal endangered and threatened species list in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Wyoming. 

In recent years, with the state’s wolf population hovering around 1,200 animals, the Wisconsin DNR established an updated plan for managing the wolf population, including how it would hold a hunt when required. The plan has drawn the ire of Republicans  because it doesn’t set a defined ceiling on the state’s wolf population. Instead, it divides the state into several regions in which DNR scientists would be able to determine if the wolf population in a given region should be decreased, maintained or allowed to grow. 

Republicans have tried more than once to pass legislation that would return the wolf population goal to 350 — the number set when the wolf recovery efforts first began and what many anti-wolf activists see as their preferred limit. 

Public lands and Knowles-Nelson 

Prior to his election to the Legislature, Tiffany ran a company that operated boat tours on the Willow Flowage Dam in Oneida County — a property that exists because of state conservation money. 

But as chair of the subcommittee on federal lands, Tiffany is part of a wing of congressional Republicans that have opposed the existence of public lands. He has allies in that cause in the Wisconsin Legislature, and the reauthorization of the state’s main tool for the acquisition of public lands is likely to be a major item on next year’s legislative agenda. 

For decades, the program allowed the DNR to fund the acquisition of land and maintenance of its existing properties. Despite widespread popularity among voters for both parties, the program was allowed to expire earlier this summer because of Republican objections to its purpose and an inability to reach a bipartisan solution. 

Tiffany has said he’d support reauthorizing the program if its funding was used only for maintaining the state’s current properties, but he’s long been skeptical of the program and land conservation in general. He also voted for the 2019 state budget, which included a four year re-authorization of the program. 

In 2015, Tiffany introduced legislation that would have prevented the DNR from purchasing land through the grant program if the local governments adjacent to the property did not vote to approve the purchase. The bill follows a discredited right-wing legal theory about public land known as “coordination” that demands local governments get a final say when higher levels of government want to purchase land.

That demand for local approval emerged again when conservation groups began contemplating the development of the Pelican River State Forest, the largest conservation project in state history. A group of local officials were against the project, concerned that it would diminish local property tax rolls. 

Tiffany connected those local officials with American Stewards of Liberty, a right-wing group dedicated to the end of land conservation in the country and a leading advocate for coordination, the Examiner previously reported. 

Republicans in the Legislature were able to successfully prevent the use of Knowles-Nelson dollars to fund the Pelican River project, but it was ultimately still completed. ASL went on to exert a significant level of influence over the development of land use policies in a handful of Northwoods counties, with local officials acting to make their comprehensive planning documents more friendly to mining and logging interests. 

Homes have been evacuated as a precaution after a gas leak occurred during work on Enbridge's Line 5 oil and gas pipeline in rural northern Wisconsin.

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We Energies plans to continue purchasing energy from a nuclear plant in Manitowoc County through 2053, but ratepayer advocates say there aren’t enough details yet to know whether the deal shields customers from rising costs.

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There’s no bigger issue in the Wisconsin governor’s race than data centers. Republican candidate Tom Tiffany, who was hoping to run on not canceling Thanksgiving, quickly pivoted after democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong lost the primary, moving to capture the issue that galvanized Hong’s supporters: opposing data center development. Tiffany spent the first week of the general election campaign attacking his Democratic rival by labeling him “Data Center David Crowley,” warning that Crowley’s pro-data-center policies would mean “our lakes run dry, family farms paved over.” 

Crowley, meanwhile, has not come up with a message that satisfies the Hong supporters who embraced her call for a statewide moratorium on data center construction. Neither he nor Tiffany favors a moratorium. In fact, as Baylor Spears reports, despite Tiffany’s attacks, the two candidates don’t appear to be very far apart on data center regulation. Both say they will protect communities’ right to reject new data center construction; both say the state must ensure that ratepayers aren’t stuck with higher utility bills; both promise to protect Wisconsin’s land and water and insist on transparency in data center contracts. Both have also taken money from data center supporters — Crowley from the building trade unions that want to construct the new facilities, and Tiffany from the lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, which supports nondisclosure agreements and data center tax exemptions.

Crowley, as the county executive of an industrial hub that has suffered from the loss of manufacturing jobs, has a more optimistic view of the job-creation and economic development potential of new technology than many voters in Wisconsin, a majority of whom see proposed hyperscale data centers as eyesores and energy hogs. But Tiffany, as Spears reports, is not that different. He voted for a bill in Congress that would have banned states from regulating AI and has called data centers “exciting new technology.”

What specific policies should Wisconsinites demand from their political leaders on data centers?

“There’s a simple answer,” says Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin professor who created a center for the study of “high-road” development based on shared prosperity, environmental sustainability and democracy. “First, inspect everything that has already been approved and make sure it conforms to labor, environmental and design standards,” Rogers says. “Second, no public money for people who are richer than Mammon. We are spending hundreds of millions on tax breaks we can’t afford on these data centers. That should stop immediately.”

Rogers is not against data centers in general. “Water and noise are the big issues,” he says. He wants to see strict regulation that compels companies to design structures that dampen noise pollution. Water use, he says, is not a big concern inside data centers with closed-loop, water recycling systems. Rather, it’s the massive generation of electricity that, without intelligent planning, will tax Wisconsin’s water supply. “If you produce energy in an inefficient way, it creates lots of excess heat,” he explains. “The way to cool it is with water. That’s catastrophic.” Discharging warm water into lakes and streams causes thermal shock, fish kills and algal blooms. 

But creating a more efficient and sustainable electric grid is, in Rogers’ view, a big potential upside of data center development. His hope is that data centers could spur serious investments in renewable energy and reduce the tremendous waste involved in our current electricity-generation system. That could mean more plentiful, cheaper power for ratepayers and a more rational, environmentally friendly energy grid.

“If you increase power production investment, that should be good for ratepayers, not bad,” Rogers says. “A bigger base means lower rates.”

The problems with data center development currently is “intermediate,” in Rogers’ view. “States are trying to attract data centers, there’s inappropriate siting, like in dry areas. It messes up farming and ordinary water usage.” 

“But if we are serious about climate we should be for heat pumps for all … electrify everything,” he adds.

Rogers’ position is similar to that of a candidate who didn’t get a lot of traction in the Democratic gubernatorial primary — state Sen. Kelda Roys. 

Roys’ plan to stop unregulated data center development includes passing a bill that gained 49 cosponsors in the Legislature, laying out sturdy environmental, labor and transparency regulations. In addition, Roys called for repealing tax subsidies and incentives for data center developers (something Crowley has declined to endorse), creating a statewide public negotiation team to help local communities drive a harder bargain with Big Tech firms, and demanding big upfront payments from those firms to fund a clean energy infrastructure bank. 

“Wisconsin has no fossil fuels, so every dollar we spend on hydrocarbons leaves our state,” Roys points out. Investing in clean energy is good for the state economy as well as the climate. Her plan leverages data center development to make a faster transition to a green economy. 

That’s a step further than Crowley has gone, although he is campaigning on a pledge to make data center developers “bring your own clean energy.” Tiffany has been attacking Crowley precisely for his clean energy pledge, warning that it will disfigure the landscape by blanketing Wisconsin with solar panels. A recent Tiffany campaign press release declared that “using solar to generate the equivalent annual electricity needed for just the Mount Pleasant and Port Washington data centers would consume roughly 100,000 acres of Wisconsin land.”

But just saying no to both renewable energy and data centers does not amount to a plan. For one thing, there are already 47 existing data centers in Wisconsin. Local communities are struggling over how to regulate them separately all over the state. Melissa Scanlan, the director of UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Water Policy, told the Examiner’s Henry Redman that Wisconsin’s failure to address data centers comprehensively will soon put a big strain on the state’s utilities.

“Doing it in a piecemeal way, where you’ve got local governments deciding about hosting, but then utilities that are committed to supplying the electricity and water, is going to very quickly bump up against the realities of our ability to generate electricity in a responsible way,” Scanlan told Redman. 

Rogers remains optimistic. “Data centers are coming, whether they are in Wisconsin or nearby it doesn’t matter,” he says. He doesn’t favor a moratorium in one state that drives massive hyperscale data center development over the border, when everyone in the region relies on the same water resources. “I’m not for rivalry and scarcity,” he says.

Instead, he maintains, thoughtful policymakers could address worries about data centers by creating policies that address the larger, existential environmental issues that confront us all. 

Imagine that.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We Energies signed a new 20-year agreement to purchase electricity from the Point Beach nuclear plant in Manitowoc County, resolving uncertainty about the relationship between the utility and the state’s largest power plant. 

The agreement, disclosed in a Tuesday U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, still requires sign-off from Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC).

The roughly 60-year-old facility is Wisconsin’s only active nuclear power plant. We Energies owned the plant until 2007, when it sold Point Beach to a Florida-based utility. It currently purchases most of the plant’s output from independent energy infrastructure giant NextEra Energy.

But the electricity Point Beach generates is particularly expensive. We Energies spends about twice as much on fuel as its sibling utility, Wisconsin Public Service Company; the cost of fuel for Point Beach accounts for a large share of the difference. Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group owns both utilities. The price of each megawatt hour of electricity produced by the plant rises by more than 7% each year under We Energies’ current arrangement with NextEra.

Ratepayer advocates have pushed We Energies to rethink its Point Beach contract for years. The PSC directed the utility to work with ratepayer groups to “review alternatives” to the power purchase agreement in 2019 as part of a broader rate case, and WEC Energy Group CEO Scott Lauber signaled that his company was considering alternatives as recently as last month.

We Energies’ latest SEC filing did not divulge most details of the new agreement, but spokesman Brendan Conway told Wisconsin Watch that it “will provide customers with fuel savings compared with the current (agreement) when it goes into effect.” 

If the PSC approves the proposed agreement, We Energies would buy 86% of the plant’s energy for another two decades. Its current contract is set to expire by 2033, according to the new filing. 

Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board (CUB), a nonprofit representing residential and some small commercial electricity customers statewide before the PSC, is among the most vocal critics of the current Point Beach contract.

CUB plans to review the new proposal with an “eye toward learning how much savings are in store for customers” compared to the current steep annual price increases, said CUB Executive Director Tom Content. “Given the climate and carbon commitments of the tech companies, I’ll be interested to learn whether Big Tech companies opening data centers in eastern Wisconsin want the carbon-free benefits of nuclear. That could relieve some of the price pressure being felt — every year — by 1.1 million We Energies customers.” 

We Energies is also eyeing an opportunity to add more nuclear energy to Wisconsin’s grid: the decommissioned Kewaunee Power Station. WEC Energy Group and the plant’s owner, Energy Solutions, are awaiting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to restart production at the site more than a decade after a glut of cheap natural gas from the fracking boom drove it out of business. 

There’s no shortage of demand for electricity. A draft PSC report published in June projects Wisconsin’s peak electricity demand will rise 40% in the next five years, driven largely by new data centers in Port Washington, Mount Pleasant and Beaver Dam — possibly with more to come.

We Energies signs 20-year Point Beach nuclear power deal is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Oracle moved to voluntarily drop its lawsuit against Wisconsin’s utility regulator on Monday, nearly two months after the tech giant turned to the Ozaukee County Circuit Court to challenge new credit rating requirements for data center developers in eastern Wisconsin.

With the case put to rest, the credit rating rules — intended to shield other Wisconsin ratepayers from fallout in the event a data center developer goes bust — now stand unchallenged. Oracle previously argued the requirements were overly stringent and could dissuade other companies from setting up operations in Wisconsin.

Oracle’s share price has begun to rebound after a collapse that began in early June and continued for weeks after the company sued Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC). Its credit rating, however, remains well below the threshold at which it could avoid posting hundreds of millions of dollars in collateral as a condition of buying electricity for the Port Washington data center.

Vast power needs for data center

The Nashville-based cloud computing firm is a co-developer of the data center campus in Port Washington. The trio behind the project — Oracle, OpenAI and data center developer Vantage — expect the facility to require 1.3 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity in its first phase, or enough to power roughly a million Wisconsin homes.

We Energies, Wisconsin’s largest investor-owned utility, must meet the campus’ energy needs by a tentative late-2027 deadline.

The Port Washington facility’s energy needs are so vast — an order of magnitude greater than the Saukville steel mill that was, until recently, Wisconsin’s largest electricity user —  that state rules require it to buy its electricity under a specialized rate structure.

The PSC approved that rate structure for We Energies’ largest data center customers in May. Among other rules, the commission’s order requires the facilities’ operators to pay for the construction of new power plants needed to meet their energy needs.

But constructing a new plant can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and any unpaid debts tied to the plants could fall on We Energies’ other customers if a data center operator becomes insolvent.

To shield ratepayers from a potential cost shift, the PSC set an A- credit rating threshold for data center operators seeking electric service from We Energies. Companies below the threshold must post steep collateral, either in cash or lines of credit.

That requirement could cost Oracle over $100 million per year in financial security payments. The company held a BBB credit rating when the PSC approved the credit rating standards, largely because of its aggressive borrowing to finance artificial intelligence ventures and its business relationship with OpenAI. 

S&P Global Ratings, one of the “Big Three” credit rating agencies responsible for assessing creditworthiness of government and corporate debt, lowered Oracle’s rating to a BBB- on July 9 — the bottom edge of the agency’s “investment-grade” tier.

PSC declines to reopen case

We Energies asked the PSC to reconsider the rule in June, arguing that the added cost could dissuade other companies from operating in Wisconsin. The PSC declined the request last month, and We Energies CEO Scott Lauber reassured investors on a recent quarterly earnings call that the credit requirements pose no threat to the Port Washington project’s viability.

Oracle, however, sued the commission in Ozaukee County Circuit Court as a backup to the reopener request. The company’s June lawsuit asked Judge Sandy Williams to “set aside, reverse, and remand” the credit rating requirements, arguing that they aren’t “needed to prevent harm” to We Energies’ other customers or shareholders.

The commission responded last month, accusing Oracle of trying to dodge regulatory scrutiny by seeking “to overturn over one-hundred years of established caselaw” and “dictate one-off preferential terms of service” with We Energies.

Questions remain for data center developers

Oracle’s attorneys filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit early on Monday morning.

Ratepayer advocates who supported the credit rating requirements celebrated the end of the lawsuit.

“We were confident the PSC would win and that the consumer protection safeguards the CUB team sought would remain in place,” said Tom Content, executive director of Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board. 

“CUB believes the safeguards the PSC established are critical to protect We Energies customers from the risks of tech companies overextending their borrowing, calling into question the long-run solvency of those companies.”

“This is an important win for Wisconsin since these safeguards — which We Energies claims would  ‘narrow the pool of investors’ for AI data center projects — could be used as a blueprint in other parts of the state,” said Clean Wisconsin spokesperson Amy Barrilleaux. 

The end of one legal fight doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing for the Port Washington project. The PSC voted last week to require the American Transmission Company (ATC) — the transmission utility responsible for connecting the data center to the grid — to restart the six-month application process to build the requisite transmission lines and substations, citing a series of design changes the utility made after the commission began reviewing its proposal.

Though the redo will leave ATC little time to meet its December 2027 deadline to plug in the Port Washington data center, the company has yet to announce changes to its timeline. 

Meanwhile, data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure signaled that it is considering developing facilities in Madison Gas and Electric’s territory. The utility, which serves the core of the Madison metropolitan area, is awaiting the PSC’s input on its own data center rate structure. 

MGE’s proposal would also require developers with credit ratings below A- to post collateral, with lower collateral requirements for companies rated BBB+ than for those with BBB ratings or below.

Oracle drops lawsuit challenging Wisconsin data center credit rules 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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In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025 and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”

The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling and ​“ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.

Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance ​“on a case-by-case basis to identity (sic) waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”

Then, in October, the DOE announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”

Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024 and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.

Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.

The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project appeared on the termination list in October, and the DOE has not disbursed money for it, according to federal records, though negotiations for resuming funding are underway.

This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.

According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains ​“at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.

“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.

All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. ​“You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”

The costs of losing federal funding

Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.

The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.

Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50%. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.

Alliant ​“voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.

Alliant is ​“actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. ​“While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.

Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds. 

That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capital and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to ​“improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email. 

SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD ​“has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. ​“We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”

In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation ​“grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.

The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to ​“improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”

“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility ​“recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”

At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. ​“Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”

Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.

The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.

In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE ​“will honor its $464 million grant,” which will ​“unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”

A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a ​“number of criteria,” including whether it has ​“achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it ​“remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it ​“continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”

The spokesperson added that ​“none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were ​“based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them ​“had a recipient location and/​or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete and that more than 80% of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.

But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the ​“blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.

The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.

“Once an Administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, ​“the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.”

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

Trump is blocking billions of dollars of grants that would fix the grid 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 regulators voted Thursday to send the American Transmission Company (ATC) back to the drawing board as the utility attempts to build the grid infrastructure needed to plug in the Port Washington data center. 

Public Service Commission (PSC) Chair Summer Strand called the move a “reasonable reset” after ATC repeatedly adjusted the project’s design, which commission staff and ratepayer advocates argued left both regulators and the public with a muddy picture of a grid expansion expected to cost well over $1 billion. 

ATC and its partners, however, warned the decision — likely the first of its kind for the century-old commission — could set a dangerous precedent that drives away investment in Wisconsin’s energy sector.

Data center connection at risk

ATC, which owns and operates transmission lines in the eastern half of Wisconsin, is on the hook to connect the soon-to-open Port Washington data center to the electrical grid. 

The company approached the PSC last September for permission to break ground on the project as early as this past May. Its initial application outlined a more than $1.3 billion infrastructure package, including a high-voltage transmission line and five new substations spread across Fond du Lac, Ozaukee, Sheboygan and Washington counties, needed to “reliably serve” the new data center by December 2027. After two months of back-and-forth over the “completeness” of ATC’s application, the commission took up the proposal in December 2025. 

ATC has since been vocal about the urgency of the infrastructure buildout needed to support the data center boom. The company is part of a coalition of utilities asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to speed up regional transmission projects needed to serve data centers by suspending competitive bidding, arguing that “bureaucratic red tape” presents a national security risk as the U.S. competes with China for “dominance” in the artificial intelligence race. 

Meanwhile, the utility has repeatedly adjusted its plans since December, redesigning proposed routes and adding a set of temporary bypass lines needed to avoid outages during construction. The PSC is responsible for reviewing those changes and giving other parties, namely ratepayer advocates and affected landowners, an opportunity to weigh in. 

Some commission staff sounded the alarm as the pile of revisions — and questions — grew.

“I don’t recall any other comparable cases in my experience with as many application material document revisions and ongoing design changes throughout the process,” PSC Environmental Affairs Coordinator Adam Ingwell wrote in testimony filed last month. “The sheer volume of documents and revisions, without adequate explanation, likely makes it more challenging than typical for a member of the public to find specific information about the project.”

Those concerns reached Administrative Law Judge Michael Newmark, who criticized ATC for creating an “unreasonable burden” on commission staff and the public by scattering “a plethora of changes, modifications and updates” across six months of filings. 

ATC, on the other hand, cast the revisions as “routine.”

“Every application develops during review,” the company’s attorneys wrote on Wednesday. “Changes far larger and later than ATC’s have never cast doubt” on whether an application should move forward, they added, citing a Barron County solar farm the PSC approved last March despite an “eleventh-hour” overhaul that included “relocating an entire substation.”

“There is simply no principled basis on which to treat ATC’s lesser and earlier changes more harshly,” the attorneys wrote. 

Ratepayer advocates weigh in

Ratepayer advocates generally avoid wading into fights over transmission line routes and substation siting, which Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board (CUB) Regulatory Affairs Director Corey Singletary described as a “zero-sum proposition” in which a victory for one group of landowners means shifting construction impacts onto another group of landowners.

But CUB raised concerns that ATC’s revisions make it difficult to forecast the project’s cost.

The route changes and new bypasses make the price tag “a moving target,” said CUB Executive Director Tom Content, as does the possibility that ATC still attempts to complete the project by December 2027. “Would they be paying double overtime or triple overtime to build it that quickly?” 

The Wisconsin Utility Association itself weighed in on Wednesday to warn the PSC that any additional delays in the project will “lead to increased costs for customers.”

Transmission utilities generally pass along the costs of new infrastructure to ratepayers of all kinds via their electrical bills; We Energies, for instance, estimates that transmission-related costs account for about 10% of customers’ bills. 

The PSC can’t require ATC to assign project costs to the companies developing the Port Washington data center. Only FERC, the five-person federal regulator that oversees interstate transmission, could overhaul billing rules to fully shield other customers from the costs of new lines and substations needed to serve data centers.

The commission offered an ad hoc solution this spring. The PSC’s May order creating a new billing structure for We Energies’ data center customers requires data center operators to pay a minimum transmission charge based on their projected electricity use. Wisconsin PSC Commissioner Kristi Nieto called the arrangement a “temporary stopgap measure” to protect other customers from the costs of overbuilt infrastructure if data centers use less electricity than anticipated. 

ATC and We Energies have since asked the PSC and FERC to approve a minimum transmission charge agreement with Microsoft, the operator of the vast new data center in Mount Pleasant. “This is a customer protection mechanism that follows the ‘cost causer, cost payer’ methodology,” an ATC spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.

The utilities have not yet asked the commission to approve similar agreements with the companies developing the Port Washington facility: cloud computing giant Oracle, artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and data center developer Vantage.

In testimony filed last month, Singletary urged the commission to enforce “cost containment” measures for ATC’s project, including requiring the utility to cap its annual revenues from the new transmission lines. He also suggested that the commission push ATC to disclose any bids it receives for “work to be performed and equipment to be procured as part of this project,” which he argued would help keep an eye on the company’s efforts to rein in costs. 

‘Least-bad option’

All three commissioners aired matching frustrations during a Thursday afternoon hearing on ATC’s infrastructure plans before concurring on what Commissioner Marcus Hawkins called the “least-bad option” — requiring ATC to resubmit its application and restarting the case’s 180-day clock.

“There needs to be flexibility in the process,” said Nieto, “but there also has to be some point at which the changes become significant enough that we need to evaluate whether we are still reviewing the same project that was originally proposed.”

“This PSC is not opposed or hostile to data centers, construction, generation, (or) transmission,” Strand said, calling the decision “an unfortunate outcome.” Nevertheless, she added, “this application represents a cautionary tale of when unrealistic and unreasonable speed-to-power expectations collide with a deliberative regulatory process.”

ATC has not indicated when it will resubmit its application as of Thursday afternoon, nor whether the December 2027 deadline is still within reach. “ATC is disappointed with today’s Commission’s decision and is considering its options,” a company spokesperson wrote after the hearing. 

But the company’s final filing before the hearing signaled the possibility of a legal fight. “To date, the Commission has processed the application consistent with the law,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “At this stage,” restarting the process “would be the one action to depart from that.”

Wisconsin regulators send ATC back to the drawing board on data center connection project 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.

State utility regulators dealt a major setback to a more than $1 billion transmission project that would serve the hyperscale data center campus being built in Port Washington.

The post PSC deals major blow to transmission project supporting Port Washington data center appeared first on WPR.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Click here to read highlights from the story

• Microsoft’s new 15-year electric service contract with We Energies includes outdated language limiting where power plants serving its Mount Pleasant data center could be located.
• The Public Service Commission rejected the geographic restriction, which would have limited Microsoft’s access to wind energy from neighboring states.
• We Energies says the commission’s order — not the outdated contract language — will govern Microsoft’s power purchases.
• Consumer advocates question why We Energies asked Microsoft to sign a contract that didn’t reflect regulators’ decision.

Microsoft’s new 15-year electric service contract for its Mount Pleasant data center includes a provision Wisconsin regulators previously rejected. 

Signed last month, the agreement with We Energies specifies that power plants built or purchased to serve data centers must be located in eastern Wisconsin or Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC) voted in May to remove those geographic constraints, which critics argued would cut off Microsoft’s access to abundant wind power generated elsewhere in the Midwest and Great Plains. 

We Energies says it will follow the commission’s order — as opposed to the contract’s language — while it works with the commission to resolve the discrepancy. In the meantime, some observers question how an outdated version of a high-stakes contract made it this far.

Where should data centers look for power? 

The mismatch traces back to one of many disagreements that arose during the PSC’s deliberations on a new rate structure for large data center customers: Should those facilities rely on nearby plants alone or be free to tap energy sources elsewhere?

The PSC-approved rate structure allows large data center operators to “subscribe” to new power plants, picking up the bill for purchasing or constructing them in exchange for the right to use the electricity they generate and revenue from selling surplus electricity on the wholesale market.

We Energies argued that those plants should be located as close as possible to the data centers they would serve. 

Longer distances would increase the risk of grid failures disrupting data center operations, WEC Energy Group Director of Planning Jody Arendt told the PSC in January. WEC Energy Group is We Energies’ holding company.

The local power plants would be within the territory of the American Transmission Company (ATC), a transmission utility in which We Energies owns a majority stake — a relationship that could simplify coordinating repairs and upgrades, Arendt said.

Ratepayer advocates and clean energy groups criticized the plan, arguing it would limit data centers’ access to wind energy. 

Electricity generated by onshore wind farms is, by some measures, cheaper than electricity generated by new natural gas plants. The Midwest’s regional grid operator has approved billions of dollars in grid upgrades over the past five years, in part to streamline transmitting wind energy from regions with high winds to population centers and industrial hubs. 

We Energies fully or partially owns a half-dozen planned and operational wind farms in Wisconsin, including the new Badger Hollow wind farm in Iowa and Grant counties. But neighboring states — especially Iowa and Minnesota — have far higher average wind speeds and generate vastly more wind power.

“Any Wisconsin customers should be able to benefit from lower cost resources like the wind profile in southern Minnesota,” Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Content wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch. 

The PSC ultimately sided with CUB and clean energy groups, striking the location constraints from the data center rate structure it approved in May. 

“Over-indexing on a smaller geographic area comes with its own risks,” said Commissioner Marcus Hawkins, adding that planned grid upgrades could resolve some of the challenges of powering data centers from afar. 

Outdated contract

With the rate structure approved, We Energies sent Microsoft a contract to implement the new rate structure.

Microsoft asked the PSC in June to reopen the case, in part to address “multiple errors or inconsistencies” in We Energies’ contract — including the provision limiting new power plants to eastern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula.

We Energies offered to drop the line, among other “ministerial changes that could streamline or improve” the contract.

After the PSC declined to reopen the case, Microsoft signed the contract as-is on July 16. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the contract.

Because the commission “did not reopen their decision or take up these changes,” the utility still needs to work with the PSC to fix the contracts, We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway wrote in an email. “We do not have a timeline for when the language will be updated.”

“From a practical perspective,” he added, Microsoft will be held to the PSC-approved rules, meaning it can subscribe to plants outside of eastern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. 

The companies are legally required to abide by the PSC’s terms, commission spokesperson Meghan Sovey-Lashua wrote in an email.

“To the degree there are conflicts” with the PSC’s order, Sovey-Lashua added, “there are procedural options” to bring the issue back to the commission for a resolution.

Ratepayer advocates, meanwhile, wonder why We Energies asked Microsoft to sign an outdated version of the contract in the first place. 

“There’s a basic and common-sense expectation that a utility’s filing would be revised to reflect changes the PSC made to a proposal,” Content wrote, “particularly for an issue that generated a fair amount of discussion during the seven-hour deliberation on this issue.” 

Microsoft has already signed up to purchase electricity from the planned Red Oak Ridge Energy Center in Kenosha County. We Energies is currently asking the PSC for permission to buy the natural gas plant from developer Invenergy for $1.8 billion while Invenergy awaits PSC approval to build the plant. 

We Energies says Microsoft won’t be held to contract terms that conflict with state regulators’ order 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.