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Oracle is looking to Wisconsin’s only operating nuclear plant to power its Ozaukee County data center.

We Energies announced an agreement with the cloud computing giant on Oct. 2 that would allow Oracle to “subscribe” to between 10% and 20% of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant’s electricity generation. That electricity would help meet the energy needs of Project Lighthouse, the data center campus in Port Washington that Oracle is co-developing with artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. 

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The agreement still requires approval by Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission. If it is approved, We Energies spokesman Brendan Conway said it could spare the utility’s other customers roughly $300 million in fuel costs over the next five years.

The 60-year-old Point Beach plant in Manitowoc County is the state’s largest generator, but the electricity it produces is more expensive than alternatives. We Energies spends about twice as much on fuel as its sibling utility, Wisconsin Public Service Company (PSC). The cost of nuclear fuel for Point Beach accounts for much of the difference. 

We Energies owned the facility until 2007, when it sold Point Beach to independent energy infrastructure giant NextEra Energy but continued purchasing most of the plant’s electricity output. The utility’s current purchase agreement expires in 2033, but We Energies recently signed on to continue buying roughly 86% of the plant’s electricity for another 20-year term. 

Meanwhile, We Energies filed a separate application with the PSC on Oct. 2 seeking approval  to build a new natural gas power plant on the site of the Fox Energy Center in Outagamie County. The proposed plant would more than double the site’s electricity output.

Disclosure: The OpenAI Foundation recently awarded a grant to Wisconsin Watch but has no control over its editorial decisions. We will update our funding page to reflect the grant. A list of donors and funders through 2025, as well as our donation acceptance policies, can be found here.

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Paul Kiefer became Wisconsin Watch’s data-driven accountability reporter in September 2026, focusing largely on immigration and data reporting. He joined the newsroom in 2025 as a Roy W. Howard fellow. Paul grew up in Washington state and first set foot in a newsroom as a teenage producer-in-training at a Seattle public radio station. He went on to cover criminal justice in Washington for the Seattle news site PubliCola and InvestigateWest. He headed east in 2023, working as a state politics reporter for Delaware Public Media before earning a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and interning on the Washington Post’s metro desk.