Fight over who expands Wisconsin’s power grid heads to Washington 9%
By Paul Kiefer8% Wisconsin Watch8%
7/15/2026, 3:40:28 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Framing Effect, and Recency Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.2% saturation with 159 hits. Analysis detected 1,444 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,209 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 26.3% and a BS Rank of 9% (14,560 of 16,008 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 91.00% of the article peer group.
Wisconsin’s largest transmission utility is seeking federal intervention months after the Midwest’s regional grid operator awarded a major project to a startup competitor.
The American Transmission Company (ATC), which owns and operates transmission lines across eastern and central Wisconsin, asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last month to force the grid operator to either redo its bidding process or award the full eastern Wisconsin project to ATC.
The request escalates a protracted fight over who profits from billions of dollars in new transmission investments — costs that electricity customers pay through their utility bills — and whether competitive bidding limits those costs.
The race to serve energy-hungry data centers has raised the stakes, and ATC’s request is intertwined with plans to connect a massive data center campus in Port Washington to the grid by the end of next year.
The fight to build transmission lines
Wisconsin’s latest high-capacity transmission buildout began in 2022, when the nonprofit Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) approved $10 billion in upgrades across the Upper Midwest.
Another round of approvals in 2024 brought the total projected price tag to roughly $32 billion.
The upgrades are a core part of MISO’s effort to improve grid reliability and connect population centers to abundant electricity from renewable sources, especially from wind farms on the Great Plains.
Included in the buildout are a set of transmission lines and substations circling Milwaukee, stretching south to the Illinois border and north to Fond du Lac and Sheboygan.
MISO originally expected the projects to enter service by 2033.
Decade-old federal rules require competitive bidding for multistate transmission projects, and utilities and developers from around the country lined up to compete for a share of the Midwest’s buildout.
The winners gain a reliable source of revenue via a fixed “return on equity” — profit per dollar invested — approved by regulators and paid for by electricity customers.
Supporters of the bidding requirement, including Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board, say it forces developers to compete on cost, thereby shielding ratepayers from cost overruns and excessive profits.
But investor-owned monopoly utilities have spent years seeking exemptions from competition, contending that the requirement hinders efficient grid development.
Those lobbying efforts have paid dividends elsewhere in the Midwest: Minnesota and Michigan, for instance, enacted right-of-first-refusal (ROFR) laws giving local utilities first dibs on any transmission projects within their territory, including those planned by grid operators like MISO.
Utilities argue ROFR laws ensure projects go to the companies best-equipped to complete them: local monopolies with well-established relationships with local labor and regulators.
The companies also argue that claims of cost savings from competitive bidding are overblown.
Wisconsin lawmakers have repeatedly rejected ROFR proposals, including one introduced in 2025 by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester .
Data centers raise the stakes
With no Wisconsin law shielding it from competition, ATC has sought other means to control projects in its territory.
Two months after bidding on the eastern Wisconsin project last July, ATC asked the state Public Service Commission (PSC) for permission to build infrastructure for a planned data center campus in Ozaukee County.
Port Washington’s city council approved the campus shortly after MISO signed off on the nearby transmission upgrades.
ATC, which manages the existing local transmission infrastructure, is responsible for ensuring the campus connects to the grid by December 2027.
Three of the substations ATC proposed to state regulators would occupy roughly the same locations as MISO’s planned substations, though the data center would require higher-capacity infrastructure on a shorter timeline.
Winning the larger project would allow ATC to meet both needs with one set of substations, but if MISO chose another bidder, the utility said it would still seek state permission to build substations for the data center.
Instead, MISO initially awarded the project to Chicago-based Viridon, a startup owned by private equity firm Blackstone.
Viridon’s roughly $350 million bid was the lowest — just over half of MISO’s estimate and more than $100 million below the next-cheapest bid.
In its January announcement , MISO acknowledged the budget “may not be achievable” but cited Viridon’s promises to limit cost overruns and profits as reasons to pick the company over its competitors.
ATC pressed the issue.
MISO agreed in February to move up the eastern Wisconsin project deadline to 2027.
A month later, the operator reassigned the three substations to ATC outright, citing uncertainty over whether Viridon could clear the administrative hurdles in time to meet the new deadline.
Viridon kept only a fraction of the original eastern Wisconsin project, including a set of transmission lines and one substation, all still scheduled for completion by 2033.
ATC appeals to Washington
As ATC awaits PSC’s final approval of the eastern Wisconsin buildout, the utility has opened a new front in its fight against competition by asking FERC to step in.
In April, a group of utilities calling themselves the “Grid Acceleration Coalition” asked FERC to exempt at least some major grid upgrade projects from the competitive bidding requirement.
The coalition argued that “bureaucratic red tape” can tack months onto project timelines and strain the country’s ability to “achieve dominance” in artificial intelligence.
ATC is a member of the coalition, as is Xcel Energy, owner of Northern States Power Company-Wisconsin.
“This complaint is about whether our country will seize, or squander, a generational chance to own the next century,” the utilities wrote, pointing to the tug-of-war over MISO’s eastern Wisconsin project as an example of delays that could stymie AI development.
FERC has been flooded with similar requests as the nationwide data center boom strains grid capacity and spurs utilities to spend billions of dollars on new infrastructure.
The fragmented U.S. energy system is poorly equipped to manage the scale of the buildout, and the five-person commission has begun weighing in on questions about speeding grid connections and shielding residential ratepayers from data-center-related costs.
The Grid Acceleration Coalition’s April request specified that it did not seek to “claw back” projects already awarded via competitive bidding.
ATC’s June complaint goes further.
The utility asked FERC last month to either “re-bid” or “reevaluate the existing bids” for MISO’s eastern Wisconsin project, arguing the grid operator botched its earlier review.
If FERC agrees, Viridon could lose its remaining portions of the project.
Tom Content of the Citizens Utility Board told Wisconsin Watch that CUB will “support a full evaluation of the process and any concerns,” but said the timing of ATC’s request — months after MISO first awarded the project — was a surprise.
ATC said it brought the issue to FERC rather than appealing to MISO because the commission offers a more neutral venue.
The company said it does not know when FERC will decide whether to take up the request.
It remains unclear whether ATC’s effort to reopen bidding would delay construction of the substations needed to plug in the Port Washington data center to the grid.
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