The grid to nowhere

An argument against building giant transmission lines

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Marilyn Pedretti lives off the grid, in a straw-bale house she built on land her family has been farming for more than 50 years.

She has LP gas and a wood stove for heat, solar panels and batteries for electricity, and an LP generator for emergencies. She might be the last person in western Wisconsin who needs the huge power lines being built in her neighborhood. But she doesn’t think anyone needs them, and her neighbors are inclined to agree.

Pedretti has been around. She’s worked for former Gov. Tony Earl and former U.S. Rep. Bob Kastenmeier; she’s served on the staff of the U.S. Senate energy committee; she earned a degree in ministry from Viterbo University; she’s ladled soup in a Catholic Worker house in Kansas City, and built houses for the poor in El Paso, Texas. (That’s where she learned straw-bale construction.) She returned to the family farm in 2001 at age 38 and sat on the La Crosse County Board for six years. She farms a couple acres of organic vegetables and is now clerk of the town of Holland, which is near the Mississippi about 12 miles north of La Crosse.

In 2008, when a consortium of utilities came to build transmission towers across the Mississippi and along U.S. Route 53, Pedretti and her neighbors put up a fight. The highway, she says, is “kind of a bridge to people seeing what our town is.” And the towers are a blight: up to 175 feet tall, as close together as 700 feet, built on concrete-and-steel caissons up to 50 feet deep and 10 feet in diameter — as much as half a million pounds of concrete for a single tower. “They just come in and blast everything away and put in these power lines that are gigantuous. They’ve whacked off trees — they just destroy the land that’s in their way. It’s like this huge raping of the soil.”

Pedretti and her neighbors wrote letters, hired lawyers, went to meetings, signed petitions. The town board voted unanimously to oppose the project and asked the responsible regulators, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, to withhold approval.

The towers now loom over the highway. “You can see them for miles,” Pedretti says.

That project, called CapX2020, was only the injury. The insult came in 2013, when the American Transmission Company (ATC) proposed another line of towers, 180 miles worth, to extend the line east to substations in Madison and Middleton. This is the “Badger Coulee” line, which would run along the same blighted stretch of Route 53 on the other side of the highway — a symmetry that residents of the town failed to appreciate.

This time they were better prepared. The town received “intervenor” status from the Public Service Commission and engaged a lawyer to argue its case. When the PSC approved the project anyway, they sued. When they lost the suit, they appealed. Meanwhile, construction on the line is complete on the Madison end and gets closer to Holland every day; with each tower that goes up, the town’s chance of beating the project goes down. Nevertheless, they persist. They still hope to get the routes reconfigured so the towers line only one side of highway 53. And they’re pressing for other towns that might face this situation in the future. “I think what we’re trying to say is, ‘Hey, you can’t be pushing us around, we’re gonna keep fighting these things.’”

Now the fight moves south to the so-called Cardinal-Hickory Creek project, a new line proposed to connect Middleton with Dubuque County, Iowa, to be built by ATC and two partners, ITC Transmission and Dairyland Power Cooperative. It will span 100 to 125 miles right through the Driftless area — one of Wisconsin’s most scenic landscapes, an important conservation resource, and home to such tourist attractions as American Players Theatre, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, the House on the Rock, and Blue Mound and Governor Dodge state parks.

With each succeeding project the opposition becomes better focused and more organized. Drive around the Driftless in the vicinity of the proposed construction and you’ll see banners and lawn signs everywhere (including on my own property near Spring Green) — pictures of electric bolts and looming power towers with slogans like “No ATC Lines” and “Protect the Driftless Area.” The Dodgeville-based Driftless Area Land Conservancy is the highest-profile opponent; it has engaged the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a Chicago-based public interest firm, to argue against the line before the PSC and the federal Rural Utility Service, which also has a hand in the decision. There are also grassroots efforts, web sites and conferences and an “Inter-Municipal Energy Planning Committee” made up of six local governments in the path of the proposed towers.

The opposition may be having an effect. It’s standard in projects of this kind for the builders to propose two different routes. Inevitably, skeptics say, one is more practical and less offensive — concentrating the blight along highways and rail corridors — while the other seems designed to despoil as much natural beauty as possible. On Feb. 19, shortly after the Dane County Board voted 33-0 to oppose the project, ATC announced it had chosen its “preferred” route, which predictably runs along U.S. Route 18 through Blue Mounds and Mount Horeb. But opponents of the plan have decided as a matter of strategy that they won’t be divided into competing NIMBY factions. They’re fighting the whole project regardless of route.

The transmission companies have not yet filed their formal application with the PSC. ATC has just announced that they will file this spring, probably in April, with the line scheduled to go live in 2023. Opponents know from experience that once the application is filed, the process favors the utilities. Their focus now is pressuring the regulators to use broader criteria than they have in the past. To ask, in effect, if these gigantuous towers serve anyone besides the companies that want to build them.

The issues involved are complicated and very technical. The opponents’ objections are varied and numerous. Basically their case can be reduced to a few arguments: the lines are not needed; they are too expensive; there’s a better way.

Not needed: The Badger Coulee and Cardinal-Hickory Creek lines make up one of 17 “multi-value projects” planned by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which coordinates electricity transmission and grid infrastructure in a region that stretches from Manitoba south to Louisiana. Although it’s not-for-profit, and has a stultifying technocratic name with an acronym to match, MISO is not a public institution but an industry group whose board is made up of utility execs and investment people. MISO developed its portfolio of 17 transmission projects with an eye toward long-term regional planning and renewable energy. (And, skeptics suspect, another eye on the lucrative, high-priced energy markets of the Northeast.) Part of its rationale is to bring wind power eastward from places where it is readily produced, like Iowa and South Dakota.

Planning began as early as 2005. When MISO announced the portfolio seven years later, it was assuming that electricity demand in the mid-states region would grow at the rate of about 1.125 percent per year. But that growth didn’t happen. Part of the reason was the economic slowdown of 2008 and the subsequent loss of manufacturing facilities. But the economy has worked through most of those changes and still demand looks flat. LED bulbs, efficient appliances, improved building standards, and increased awareness of energy efficiency in general are holding it down.

ATC spokesperson Kaya Freiman says that future growth estimates justify these new lines. “While the pace of electric demand growth has slowed since the economic downturn, electric demand is projected to grow each year in Wisconsin,” says Freiman. “The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin noted in its Strategic Energy Assessment 2022 that ‘Wisconsin utilities continue to forecast annual load growth to be approximately 0.5-1.6 percent through 2022.’”

But Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB), disagrees. “I think 2007 was our peak year for electricity use,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve come back to that level yet. And from year to year it doesn’t grow much. It used to be that ATC could bank on these growth rates to help propel the rationale for building more of these lines, but right now we’ve got a really hot economy in the Madison area, with technology companies and things like that, and it looks like we’re going to have Foxconn in southeastern Wisconsin, and I still don’t see the utilities forecasting a ton of growth. And that’s true across the region, across the Midwest.”

Meanwhile the price of solar power is plummeting, and battery technology is advancing at a pace that was unthinkable even five years ago. In January, Xcel Energy announced that proposals for solar-plus-battery systems in Colorado brought median bid prices that were 20 percent less than the previous known low from just six months before. The energy market is changing so fast that long-term planning, as virtuous as it sounds, is looking like a bad idea. These towers could be obsolete before they go into service.

Too expensive: ATC’s Freiman also argues that the MISO projects were planned in large part “because of their ability to enable access to wind power.” She notes that “a number of regional wind power advocates, including RENEW Wisconsin and Wind on the Wires, have noted the importance of projects such as Cardinal-Hickory Creek for improving access to wind power.”

The notion of wind power lends the project a greenish sheen, but opponents point out that not all wind is created equal. While producing wind power is relatively cheap and very efficient, building high-voltage transmission lines to move that power hundreds of miles is not so cheap. If the Cardinal-Hickory Creek line comes in on budget, it will cost about $500 million, at least $4 million per mile. Another cost will be paid in power loss. The 345 kV lines used in these projects can lose as much as 4.2 percent of generated power for every 100 miles they travel.

The new lines will not be limited to carrying wind power. They’ll also be open to all other sources including coal plants. Though coal is on the wane, despite the best efforts of our president, it still accounts for more than 60 percent of the power generated in Wisconsin. Theoretically, the ability to sell power into lucrative markets in the east could provide life support for a carbon-belching coal plant that deserves to die a quiet death.

Though MISO claims, vaguely, that its projects yield “economic benefits,” the lines are likely to cost Wisconsin ratepayers a lot of money. Through their utility bills, consumers will pay not only for a share of the huge capital expenditures involved, and ongoing maintenance and operating costs over many years, but also for the transmission companies’ profit — a return on those expenditures that is virtually guaranteed to the companies’ owners. That guarantee, enshrined in regulation, is why utility stocks are the favorites of seniors and conservative investors. They offer a steady return at very low risk.

“ATC and ITC are not doing this as a charitable venture,” says Howard Learner of the Environmental Law & Policy Center. “They are for-profit companies that make their money by building more transmission. If the Wisconsin Public Service Commission approves the line, these companies will be locking in a future profit of 10.2 percent annually for 40 years. You and I are probably not getting 10.2 percent on our bank accounts or on most of what we invest in. This is a very lucrative guaranteed profit. It creates a powerful incentive to build more transmission whether it’s truly needed or not, or is the best and cleanest alternative.”

When they build, you pay. According to the latest report available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Wisconsin’s average residential electricity rates are 14th highest in the nation and second highest (behind Michigan) of 12 north central states from the Dakotas east to Ohio. “We’ve had billions and billions and billions of spending on both power lines and power plants over the last 15 years, and that’s pushed our rates from the lowest in the Midwest to among the highest,” says Content. “And well above the national average.”

CUB has not taken a position for or against the Cardinal-Hickory Creek line. They will wait to see and evaluate the formal application from ATC and its partners. But “at a time when our rates are so far out of whack,” Content says, “it’s hard to justify a lot more investment in steel from the customer’s perspective. We kind of need to take a time out on some of these projects.”

Even if you assume that demand will eventually go back up — that electric cars, for example, will become so common someday that we’ll require new sources of power — this is not the time to build new lines, Learner says. “Defer it. When you build massive 17-story towers and a large, high-voltage transmission line going more than 100 miles from rural Iowa across the Upper Mississippi Wildlife and Fish Refuge, through the heart of the Driftless area’s conservation and park lands and the Military Ridge Prairie Heritage area, that’s not something you easily say five or 10 years from now, ‘Oops, we don’t need it, let’s take it out.’”

There’s a better way. Opponents of the transmission projects point to an energy future organized around conservation and “distributed energy resources,” or DER: for example rooftop and community solar, smaller-scale wind farms, and biofuel plants selling into local markets over existing transmission lines.

The advantages of these sources are that they can be locally planned and controlled, don’t require massive new infrastructure investments, will almost certainly be less environmentally destructive, and are more flexible and less susceptible to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. One caveat is that except for rooftop solar, these solutions still require use of the grid, which needs to be maintained and improved by owners that for now, at least, depend on new transmission for their profits.

Legacy utility interests worry about a future in which their ability to sell power is limited but their obligation to maintain and improve the grid remains. They would add that distributed resources and conservation might not be sufficient to “keep the lights on” in the future — that new transmission will improve reliability, one of their mantras. But their planning scenarios assume an increase in demand that has not materialized and might never, if we continue to make progress with conservation and DER.

There’s plenty of room for progress. According to MISO figures, transmission projects worth about $5.14 billion were built or approved in Wisconsin between 2005 and 2016 — an average of $428 million per year. Because the costs of MISO projects are shared regionally, not all of that amount is paid by Wisconsin ratepayers — according to ATC, in-state consumers will pay 10-15 percent of the cost of Cardinal-Hickory Creek, for example. But what if some of those millions were directed to the state’s energy efficiency program instead? Wisconsin’s Focus on Energy program produces more than $3 in energy savings for every dollar it spends, and another $1.50 worth of economic benefits like jobs. The program’s budget is currently about $90 million per year, which ranks 34th of the 50 states and lower than any contiguous state in per capita terms, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Or what if some of that money were directed to distributed energy resources? How many community solar projects could be financed with those dollars? How many homeowners could be moved by subsidies or tax breaks to install solar arrays on their rooftops?

These are the kind of questions citizens are asking ATC to answer, and the PSC to consider, as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek project lumbers toward what many fear is a foregone conclusion. They ask in meetings, in thousands of public comments and petitions, and in resolutions from more than 100 town, village and county governments. They want ATC and the PSC to reexamine the need for the projects, to compare them with non-transmission alternatives, to be specific about how and when the promised “economic benefits” will show up on their electric bills, and to explain their planning to the public in “clear, consumer friendly” language.

But if the Badger Coulee line is any indication, they’re not going to get what they’re asking for. ATC’s idea of the “public involvement” stage, where Cardinal-Hickory Creek is now, is to host open houses where beleaguered employees stoically answer questions, hand out colorful route maps and fact sheets, and invite the public to comment online or on mail-in cards. (In the past, they have also employed security guards to keep opponents from distributing their fact sheets — see Isthmus August 17, 2007, “ATC has the power.”) The comments, questions and resolutions are collected online for all to examine, but the big question has already been decided: MISO thinks the lines ought to be built, the transmission companies want to build them, and the public’s quibbling is not about to change their minds.

A century ago, Wisconsin was on the leading edge of power policy. In 1905, the progressive Gov. Robert La Follette established a revolutionary railroad commission that took control of private companies’ rates, schedules and services. In 1907 the commission was expanded to include electric utilities, and that turned out to be the switch that electrified the nation.

Today, Wisconsin brings up the rear in energy innovation. New York has undertaken a sweeping program called REV (“Reforming the Energy Vision”), which aims to supply half the state’s energy needs from renewable sources by 2030 and to eliminate 80 percent of carbon emissions by 2050. The program restructures rates and incentives to transform utilities from monolithic builders and producers into “platforms” that connect users of power with disparate local energy sources (think Lyft or Airbnb).

In Illinois, the Future Energy Jobs Act gave support to two financially troubled nuclear plants, and in exchange the state’s biggest utilities agreed to expand efficiency programs, integrate community solar (which they had been resisting), and add 4,300 megawatts of solar and wind power — enough for millions of homes — by 2030.

In Oregon and Washington, the Bonneville Power Authority recently scrapped plans for an 80-mile, 500 kV, $346 million transmission line that had been announced in 2009. BPA administrator Elliot Mainzer said that the utility was “embracing a new more flexible, scalable, and economically and operationally efficient approach to managing our transmission system.”

Meanwhile, Wisconsin stumbles along with the power paradigm of the past. The state seeks to supply only 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources; of the 29 states that have “renewable portfolio standards,” as they are called, Wisconsin’s is one of the lowest. A trade group called the Gridwise Alliance ranks Wisconsin 39th of 50 states in progress toward a modernized electric grid. The investment research firm Regulatory Research Associates ranks Wisconsin among the top three states (with Alabama and Virginia) for favorable regulatory environment — which means favorable to investors, not favorable to you. Wisconsin spends less on energy efficiency than its peers, has higher retail rates, and rolls out the red carpet for grand building projects that its residents probably don’t need.

If Wisconsin energy policy is to enter the 21st century, ultimately the Legislature will have to do the dragging. Meanwhile the Public Service Commission, appointed by the governor, is all that stands between the utility giants like ATC and the ratepayers, landowners and little municipal governments resisting them.

Marilyn Pedretti is not a fan of the PSC’s work. “I don’t think they did a good job of proving a need,” she says. “They took whatever ATC provided and called it good. They just rubber stamped it. They held the hearings they had to hold, and their attitude was kind of ‘Yeah, you guys never want these power lines, we know, but it’s gonna happen.’ Those three commissioners had their minds made up before they even came to the hearings.

“It’s the Public Service Commission! And they didn’t do any public service. They paid lip service. The PSC needs to do a better job.”

There’s always a first time. 

Transmission expansion and the Cardinal-Hickory Creek line will be the subject of a day-long conference to be held in Dodgeville on Friday March 2. It’s free and open to the public. Details are available at http://bit.ly/Go2Forum.