EDITORIAL: Power line corridors cutting up nature: unthinkable

If more evidence is needed that it is a colossal mistake to build one of the world’s largest data center campuses in a quiet, green countryside far from developed industrial areas but near homes, farms and a scenic community, it can be found in the offices of the Wisconsin Pubic Service Commission in Madison.

There sits a proposal seeking approval by state utility regulators for high-voltage power line routes to meet the extravagant electricity demands of the Port Washington data centers.

Because the data-center campus is not near the power and transportation infrastructure that serves dedicated industrial locations like the Foxcon site at Mount Pleasant, where Microsoft is building 15 data centers, the proposed power line routes cut through the forests, wetlands, prairies, farms, residential parcels and nature preserves of Ozaukee and Washington counties.

The preferred routes submitted by the American Transmission Company—so obviously detrimental to natural areas, particularly in rural Saukville and Fredonia—make it clear that ATC cares little about the environmental harm its power corridors do.

The PSC is required to consider all properly filed petitions for power-line approval. This one deserves rejection on its face, but various impacts of the project will have to be weighed by regulators before they make a decision. The key facet of that process will be an environmental assessment that should result in a finding that these paths of destruction through natural areas must not be approved.

The two routes ATC favors would carve a 150-foot-wide swath through whatever stands between them and the data centers, including land of such high natural value that it is protected by conservation easements and preservation efforts enabled by the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program.

The corridors would be permanent, kept open for access to transmission towers as high as 15-story buildings by heavy-duty maintenance vehicles. Homes and farms along sections of the routes would be impacted, but the brunt of the damage by the power line intrusion would be suffered by the ecosystems and animal and plant habitats it would endanger.

This is not the stuff of radical environmentalists’ fever dreams or tree-huggers’ anxieties. Established scientific principle has long held that habitat fragmentation causes the decline of species.

Cutting natural areas into pieces by means of a high-voltage power line pretty much defines habitat fragmentation, so it should be expected that the final PSC environmental impact statement will find this a disqualifying factor ruling out the ATC preferred routes.

Expected but far from assured. In an eye-opening op-ed essay in last week’s Ozaukee Press, Tom Stolp, executive director of the land trust Restoring Lands, pointed out that the PSC’s draft environmental impact statement understates the “magnitude of impacts” by suggesting that environmental damage is a possibility, rather than a certain outcome.

It’s not a matter of what could happen, but what will happen, Stolp wrote. “Clearing a 150-foot-wide corridor will fragment ecosystems, installing transmission towers approaching the height of the Statue of Liberty will permanently alter rural landscapes. These are not possibilities—they are outcomes.”

Restoring Lands is committing legal and scientific resources in vigorous opposition to the ATC preferred routes. Other organizations and individuals are lining up to advocate for rejection of those routes.

Needed pressure is building on the PSC. Fortunately, the commission has an easy out. Instead of the preferred routes ATC is lobbying for, it can approve an existing corridor alternative that gets the requisite power to the data centers with minimal environmental and aesthetic damage by routing transmission lines through corridors that are already being used for high-voltage electrical infrastructure.

ATC doesn’t like that alternative, but it is widely supported. Among those urging the PSC to choose it is the Ozaukee County Board, which passed a resolution endorsing the use of the existing corridor, citing its avoidance of environmentally sensitive areas and its alignment with county land-use and farmland preservation plans.

The decision is expected in late fall. In making it, the regulators should keep in mind two words in the commission’s name—“public service.”

The transmission lines serve no public need. The 345-kilowatt power they will deliver is not needed to provide homes, businesses or entire communities with electricity. Their sole purpose is to enable the operation of a data center campus serving billion-dollar corporations that are riding the artificial intelligence boom from their headquarters in Texas and California.

Should the treasures of undisturbed natural areas and the animal and plant life they support be sacrificed to accommodate power corridors routed heedlessly through a fragile environment? It is unthinkable.