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The Public Service Commission (PSC) stands at a critical crossroads in determining Wisconsin’s energy future. Appointed, not elected. Little known, but enormously powerful. Right now, they face legacy-defining decisions—chief among them, whether to approve two new methane gas plants proposed by We Energies in Oak Creek and Paris.
The question at hand is not simply whether the PSC will approve more fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s whether the Commission will continue to serve a political system held hostage by corporate imperatives of growth and profit — or rise to meet the moral demands of our moment: to protect the breath, health, and future of the people it was created to serve.
The utility’s arguments in favor of the methane gas facilities are as predictable in their pursuit of self-enrichment as they are fossilized in their refusal to imagine a future beyond extraction. We Energies claims it must build roughly $2 billion worth of fossil infrastructure for the sake of reliability, rising demand, and cost-effectiveness. Yet each of these justifications dissolves on contact with the facts.
Let’s start with “demand.” The need the utility invokes is not driven by families struggling to stay warm, but by speculative industrial expansion – particularly the exponential growth of data centers, whose energy appetites are staggering. Microsoft, one of the driving forces behind these projections, is a trillion-dollar corporation loyal only to its shareholders. It has already paused construction on their Mount Pleasant data center campus twice.
This reeks of a familiar bait-and-switch: enormous corporate promises, massive local tax subsidies, and utility-built infrastructure justified by phantom need. And we’ve been here before – on the very same construction site – with Foxconn, the so-called Silicon Valley of the Midwest; a con that initially lured billions in public support, would have diverted millions of gallons of freshwater a day, and left behind a monument to political hubris. Today, We Energies is telling us we need to generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes not for human need, but to fuel AI servers and data processors that enrich the already ultra-wealthy.
Next comes “reliability” – peddled less as a principle than a fear tactic. Fossil gas is anything but stable. Gas systems leak, explode, and rely on long, often militarized supply chains that cut through frontline communities and ecosystems, frequently in the Global South and across Indigenous territories. These systems have caused deadly blackouts, environmental disasters, and violent price swings – all while utilities market them as safeguards.
Meanwhile, states that invest in renewables are building actual resilience. Iowa — not exactly a climate radical — now generates nearly 60% of its electricity from wind, without the volatility of global gas markets or the infrastructural risks of methane transport. If we’re serious about reliability, we need to abandon the corporate-driven fantasy that fossil fuels provide it.
And finally, “cost-effectiveness,” perhaps the most egregious distortion of all. While Trump-era tariffs on Chinese solar components temporarily raised prices and slowed renewable deployment in some regions, they haven’t reversed the global trend: The cost of wind and solar continues to fall, and in many markets, renewables now outcompete fossil fuels on price alone.
If approved, these plants will raise energy bills, deepen health disparities, and extend Wisconsin’s dependence on fossil fuels at a time when nearly every relevant scientific body warns against it.
Meanwhile, communities across the state – from Milwaukee’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood to rural pockets of energy precarity – are already building the alternatives. They’re organizing weatherization programs, installing solar panels on churches and community centers, electrifying school district transportation fleets, and establishing cooperatives to lower costs and build resilience. These are not dreams. They are material experiments in a better future we all deserve, led, most critically, by those whom society deems the least deserving.
What if the PSC chose not to obstruct that future, but to accompany it? To lend legitimacy where the people have already laid the foundation? To reject the Oak Creek and Paris gas proposals will not solve every injustice. But it will interrupt a pattern. It will signal that regulation, like politics, is not neutral ground, but a contested terrain in which a struggle over ideals takes place; terrain that must now be reclaimed in the name of justice, care, and ecological survival.
We call on the Commission to reject the Oak Creek and Paris gas proposals. To create a new procedural standard for weighing community testimony as evidence. To develop and enforce strong ratepayer protection programs. And most importantly, to align your work with the energy justice vision that communities across Wisconsin are already fighting for:
- A transition away from fossil fuels that doesn’t replicate the harms of the past
- Public investments in whole-home retrofits and clean energy for those most burdened
- Democratized energy systems that serve people, not monopolies
- Regulatory processes that are accessible, transparent, and rooted in real participation
These aren’t radical ideas. They are the foundation of a livable future.
We are at a crossroads. You can be voices for a dying regime, or stewards of something new. The tide of history is turning — and the people are watching. Our lives depend on it.
Bryan Rogers is the Environmental Justice Director at Walnut Way and leads the Environmental Justice and Infrastructure Initiative (EJII), a statewide formation advancing energy justice and community-led solutions to environmental racism and systemic disinvestment.
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