Power politics

Despite hope that Wisconsin would deny the ATC powerline, it’s business as usual

by

The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin held an open hearing Aug. 20 on the controversial Cardinal-Hickory Creek project, a proposal by American Transmission Company (ATC) and other utility partners to build a line of 17-story steel power towers across a 100-mile swath of the scenic Driftless Area.

The hearing room was packed. The parking garage was full. The observers, almost all opponents of the project, were anxious but hopeful. They’d been fighting the line for years and had built to an unprecedented level of public engagement and opposition. And they had recently scored a few significant victories: The PSC’s own staff had studied the proposal and found it economically unconvincing. State reps and senators from both parties, as well as U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, were urging the commission to scrutinize ATC’s claims about the cost effectiveness and need for the project. The attorneys general of Michigan and Illinois had urged the commission to reject the plan — power customers in their states, and others in the Midwest, would have to share the $500 million tab with Wisconsin ratepayers.

Now near the end of their long campaign, the overflow audience hoped at last to get a clue about which way the commissioners were leaning.

They got more than a clue. They got a “sock in the gut,” as one observer put it. Before diving into their detailed agenda, the commissioners each announced support for the project. When commission chair Rebecca Valcq stated her position, the room gasped, murmured, then fell into stunned silence. Mere minutes into the hearing, people started to stand up and walk out. Betsy D’Angelo, one of the leaders of the opposition group Driftless Defenders, found her friends and comrades in the hall outside “standing around ashen-faced, totally shocked, commiserating, hugging each other, not knowing what the hell just happened.”

“We’re realists. I had a little bit of hope, but I wouldn’t say we expected to win,” she says. “It was just such a shock to realize they had ignored everything the public said, all the public comments, all the hearings, all the expert witnesses. They even had the nerve to ignore their own staff’s recommendations. The audacity of it!”

Rob Danielson, chief researcher/number cruncher/proselytizer of the grassroots group S.O.U.L. Wisconsin (Save our Unique Landscape), reflected on the decision a few days later. In a consolation email to supporters and followers, he blamed the commissioners’ votes on “highly engrained corporate-state-money-ego alliances.” He quoted Rebecca Valcq’s comment that “For me, the risks of not building this line and being wrong are just too great,” and noted that the other two commissioners had also invoked the word risk.

“Think about it,” Danielson wrote. “There was NO RISK other than selfish, personal reputations!” Instead, he argued that building the proposed line — half a billion-dollars-worth of steel and concrete that might never be needed — is “the very definition of high risk.” What the commissioners feared, Danielson wrote, was risk to their reputations among “their peer professional allies in for-profit utility/finance industries. . . . They violently threw their staff and everyone not in their professional circle of friends under the bus. In my view, there is no morally acceptable grounds for what they did.”

Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB), is more inclined to grant the commissioners the presumption of integrity. Asked to guess what they were thinking, he says: “I’m not in their shoes, but there was a lot of language [in the commissioners’ remarks] about carbon-free sources of power. And obviously from the perspective of Rebecca Valcq, she was appointed by Gov. Evers, and he just announced carbon free by 2050 as a goal for the state. I think it’s in that context. The utilities have pledged to decarbonize, the governor has pledged to decarbonize, and this is one of the building blocks that I think this commission sees toward that.”

Which is not to say that Content and CUB think the commissioners made the right decision. The organization hired an energy analyst to examine the proposal and eventually argued against it before the commission. “Our analysis found that some of the assumptions the utilities made were too rosy or just weren’t borne out,” says Content. CUB also questioned the vintage of the planning that produced the proposal, which is the last in a portfolio of transmission projects planned in 2011. “That’s a long time ago now. Once you factor in the new solar generation that’s been approved this year for Wisconsin, once you factor in how solar prices have fallen since 2011, how much battery storage prices have fallen, our conclusion was that time has passed this project by.

“From the customer perspective, we hope the commission is right, because we want it to lower costs. But we just weren’t convinced.”

“We’re in the fourth inning of a nine-inning game,” says Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, which represents the Driftless Area Land Conservancy and the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. They intend to appeal the decision once it is committed to writing at the end of September. And they continue to press the case before the federal agencies involved, including the Rural Utilities Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

“There are a lot of balls still in the air,” Learner says. And he expects, or at least hopes, that public opposition to the project will be energized rather than deflated by what he calls a “business-as-usual” decision.

He notes that more than 1,000 people showed up to public hearings and about 1,000 submitted written comments. “This was unprecedented public participation, and it was overwhelmingly in opposition to the transmission lines,” he says. “People are angry. People are frustrated. Farmers and other people in rural communities are tired of being taken for granted. We saw that in the last presidential election.

“In this case ATC wants to build a new transmission line to move power from somewhere out west to somewhere in the east, and is using southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless Area as a pass-through,” Learner says. “People feel they’re being taken advantage of, that the communities and resources they care deeply about are being greatly damaged for a transmission line that doesn’t provide them any benefits. They have expressed their feelings in a respectful way to the governor’s office, through their state legislators and county board members, and to the Public Service Commission, and they are feeling like they have been ignored.”

“They’re not going away.”