Yeah, the good news is we're not doing it.
Wind turbines are back in action in Wisconsin.
The State Public Service Commission has approved the first big wind farm since 2011.
The Badger Hollow Wind Project with 19 turbines will complement the State's largest solar
project by the same name in Iowa County.
The PSC at the same time approved a solar project in whitewater.
Meanwhile, the federal government cut $7.5 billion from green energy projects in several
states, not including Wisconsin, just this week.
Against that backdrop, renewable energy advocates consider the latest approvals in Wisconsin
a major win.
Chelsea Chandler with Clean Wisconsin joins us with more, and thanks very much for being
here.
Thanks for having me.
So are these latest projects kind of outside the budget axis at the federal level?
There's an approval process that happens for these projects within Wisconsin.
The project's over 100 megawatts.
These large projects get approved by the Public Service Commission.
There's a really robust process that happens there.
There's environmental review.
There's technical hearings and public testimony.
Lots of opportunities for common, and so all that is happening within Wisconsin.
You know, a lot of these projects are on private lands.
You know, it's just contracts with individual landowners.
And so there are some things that the federal government is trying to do to hamper renewable
energy development, certainly.
But obviously these projects are still moving forward in Wisconsin.
So how big of a win?
We described it as a win.
But how big of a win are these PSC approvals for clean energy in Wisconsin?
Yeah, well, it's really notable that Badger Hollow is the first wind project to be approved
in over 14 years.
That's really significant.
We know that we need a lot more wind energy, solar energy to meet our energy needs and
to do so in a clean way.
Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of electricity.
So it's a really great win for people's pocketbooks, for our electricity bills.
And these also really represent huge opportunities for rural communities in terms of the economics
and the money that is flowing into the host communities, from the farmers who sign leases
to host these, where they get a long-term, stable, high-income, which is helping them
kind of weather these ups and downs with tariff wars and everything like that in commodity
crops right now.
And it's a big win for communities too, who get annual payments for hosting these projects.
And so they can use that money to do things like fix roads or lower taxes or just whatever
the local leaders team is the highest and best use.
So it's great.
So the 19 turbines of the Badger Hollow Project approved, how much energy does that produce?
It's enough to power tens of thousands of Wisconsin homes.
And energy is very efficient.
Just one spin of a wind turbine can power, or sorry, one minute of a wind turbine spinning
can power a Wisconsin home for an entire day.
So we're generating huge amounts of energy from those turbines.
How does wind work with solar?
Is that a complimentary kind of mix?
Very much so, yeah.
So solar obviously is getting energy from the sun, so we need sunlight, it does not
work at night.
The wind is blowing during the day and at night, so they work very well together.
A lot of these projects, not these ones that were recently approved, but increasingly we're
seeing projects be proposed along with storage, like batteries, and so that can also help
store when there's a lot of wind or really sunny day, store that energy away for some
of those times where we've got less of those resources.
They work well seasonally together as well, so there's less sun in the winter, although
the panels themselves are very efficient in cold temperatures, but wind is actually
more productive in the winter too, because the colder air is denser and it helps kind
of generate more electricity, so they really do pair well together.
So why is it taking so long to have a wind project approved?
There have been wind projects approved just not at this scale, so other projects that
are less than 100 megawatts get approved at the county level, and so we have seen some
of those wind projects come through in recent years, but this is the first one that's over
100 megawatts, a much bigger project to be approved at the Public Service Commission.
We just did an interview about the amount of energy new data centers are going to require.
How will this portfolio of clean energy help boost that capacity?
Any additional electricity that's coming online is going to be helpful, but these data centers
are really representing it, massive, massive energy demand.
It's kind of hard to wrap our minds around them, frankly.
Clean Wisconsin just did an analysis that showed that just for a couple of data centers that
did report their energy use, they would use as much energy or more energy than all of
the homes in Wisconsin combined, so it's really staggering.
We haven't been seeing renewables powering these data centers yet, what we're seeing
is more gas plants being proposed, that's what happened when we energies, territory,
a couple of gas plants were approved to support the Microsoft data center, we're seeing a
renewed interest in nuclear.
I will say there's a misalignment in the timeline of when we have this energy demand
from the data centers and how long it takes to build those projects.
Solar and wind are actually the fastest, they take maybe one or two years to build, gas
is more like five in nuclear, you're looking at a decade or more.
It's a really tough proposition, but every bit counts.
So meanwhile, the build out of electric vehicle charging stations in Wisconsin seems to be
back on track after funding was pulled and then a lawsuit restored it.
When the project is complete, how covered will the state of Wisconsin be for people
wanting to charge their EVs?
Yeah, our state's department transportation did an excellent job of planning and making
sure that we have good coverage, they looked at all the corridors where there were gaps,
and so when we fully implement all of this funding and get these charging stations built,
Wisconsinites will be able to travel around the state with confidence, knowing that there
was going to be a charging station on their way when they need to use it.
All right, we will watch those going up.
Chelsea Chandler, Clean Wisconsin, thanks very much.
Thank you.