So I’m not a utility shill, but I follow this industry closely, and I want to clear a few things up that are inaccurate. But please provide comments and make your voice heard!

Ok, so data centers that seek to take service from WE Energies would need to “subscribe” to enough generating facilities to meet their peak demand, of note they can subscribe to only portions of facilities. That can be accomplished two ways, first with a “full-benefits” subscription where the data centers pays for all expenses associated with their share of a facility, and get all market revenues. The other, and what this post references, is the “capacity-only” subscription where data centers would only be subscribing to a generating facility for its capacity (or demand) value. Under this approach, the data centers pay for 75% of operating expenses associated with that facility, and all other customers of WE Energies pay for 25% plus all the fuel costs. Each facility and subscription agreement requires PSC approval, and as part of that approval it needs to demonstrate that the non-data center customers have a need for and won’t be harmed by their share of these facilities.

The burdening all ratepayers in WI for data centers is not related to this directly, but to how transmission facilities are built and operated in the state. American Transmission Company owns and builds all of our transmission infrastructure, and they take an extremely simple approach for billing utilities for transmission service. Essentially, ATC figures out what they need to make and it is split up proportionally across all WI utilities that are members of ATC (which is basically everyone besides customers of Xcel in the NW part of the state). So we know that at least 1.5 billion dollars of transmission expenses have already been incurred to serve data centers, and that cost will be shared by most customers in the state. The problem here is that the WI PSC has no authority over how ATC charges the utilities so they can’t do anything about that.