The Public Service Commission has hit reset on a $1 billion transmission project set to serve the Port Washington data center campus. 

Commissioners yesterday elected to revoke a key certification and close American Transmission Company’s application for the Ozaukee County Interconnection Project, a proposal to build between 90 and 102 miles of new extra-high voltage cable in and around Ozaukee County.  

The decision effectively sends ATC, which builds power lines for its parent utilities, back to the start of the regulatory process for the project. 

“This application is clearly underwater – nearly underwater – and this action revoking the completeness determination is akin to tossing it a life preserver,” PSC Chair Summer Strand said at a commission hearing yesterday.  

ATC in a statement said it was “disappointed” in the PSC’s decision. The utility did not address whether it would submit a new application for the transmission project but wrote it was “considering its options.” 

The commissioners’ decision came after intervenors in the transmission project complained about the large volume of changes the utility sought to make to its application after PSC staff deemed the application complete in December.

That started the clock on a 180-day review period, after which the commission would have been expected to issue a final decision on whether to approve the transmission project.

In the intervening months, ATC filed another 564 application documents, Strand said, revising cost and revenue projections, modifying proposed transmission routes, and proposing new temporary bypass lines.

Commission staff made 483 requests for additional data across 16 rounds of questions to reconcile conflicting information or errors in the application or to understand unexplained changes. 

The administrative law judge assigned to the case wrote in July that ATC’s changes had “unreasonably complicated” the project application. Erik Olson, an attorney for Responsible Energy Alliance, which sought to revoke the completeness determination, called it a “labyrinthine morass.”

Strand called the transmission project a “cautionary tale” of unrealistic expectations for project speed colliding with regulatory requirements. 

She emphasized the commission’s decision did not mean it had rejected the project outright, nor was it “hostile” to data centers or new infrastructure or generation projects. 

In a filing ahead of yesterday’s decision, ATC claimed the PSC had not revoked a completeness determination in the state regulators’ 95-year history and argued it lacked statutory authority to do so now. 

It also said choosing the revocation option “would rest on a foundation unlikely to withstand review.” 

We Energies and Oracle, which will power and occupy the Port Washington data center, also submitted comments opposing the revocation of the completeness determination. 

Thousands of Wisconsinites during a weeklong comment period submitted comments on whether to revoke.

Olson said the PSC’s ruling made him “proud to live in Wisconsin.” 

“Sometimes people wonder if the powerful just get their way and I think this today in Wisconsin showed the law gets its way,” Olson said.

Responsible Energy Alliance intervened in the transmission application in a bid to block a proposed transmission route the intervenors said would harm ecologically sensitive forests and wetlands in Ozaukee and Washington counties.

The commission’s decision did not address the ecological concerns raised by REA, and ATC could file a new transmission proposal along the same route if it submits the project again.