LETTER: Regulators are finally waking up to power line obfuscation

To Ozaukee Press:

Ozaukee County residents deserve straight answers about the transmission lines American Transmission Company (ATC) wants to build in order to power the hyperscale Vantage data centers in Port Washington. Increasingly, what we’re getting instead is a pattern of regulators being asked to look the other way in order to serve corporate interests. But, thankfully for the rest of us, the regulators are starting to push back.

Curretly pending before the Public Service Commission, ATC’s application to route two massive new 345 kV lines through some of the last undisturbed “greenfield” territory in Ozaukee and Washington Counties was declared “complete” back in December. Since then, ATC has filed more than 560 additional documents and 168 data-request responses—so many changes, in fact, that the commission ordered ATC to produce a clean, updated version of its own application. When that new version finally came in on July 10, the section that’s supposed to justify routing the lines through the greenfields, rather than along the existing utility corridor the law says should come first, was unchanged word for word from November.

A local citizen coalition, the Responsible Energy Alliance, has asked the commission to revoke its completeness finding, and within two days three more parties—the Uttech family, the Liss family and the local land trust Restoring Lands —have filed their own responses, agreeing that ATC’s application was never really complete, even back in December,when the PSC made its determination.

Restoring Lands’ filing adds a striking new detail: discovery in the case shows the data center’s ultimate power needs could grow by another 2.2 gigawatts beyond what ATC has disclosed.

That’s not the only place regulators have been asked to skip a hard look at this project. Just last week, Sierra Club Wisconsin and Midwest Environmental Advocates sued the Wisconsin DNR after records showed the agency had initially told Vantage a full environmental impact statement (EIS) would be required for the data center—only to reverse course after Vantage, in emails to local government officials in Port Washington, warned that an EIS would “kill the project.” The DNR has never explained that reversal to the public.

Now, the agency faces a lawsuit.

Different agencies, different dockets, but the same basic question: when a project this large and complex runs into a rule that’s inconvenient, does the rule bend, or does the project?

Our neighbors, the wildlife and farmland this route would cut through, and the historic and culturally significant Indigenous landscape that would be compromised for this project all deserve a process that answers that question honestly, in the open, before a single tree comes down—not after.

The time has come to push back, honor the legal requirements, and take the time to get this right.

Joseph P. Gromacki

Town of Fredonia