Wisconsin PSC Forces ATC to Restart $1.7B Port Washington Data Center Grid Application; FERC Gap Leaves Ratepayer Cost-Shift Unresolved

The Wisconsin Public Service Commission voted August 7 to reject American Transmission Company’s application to build $1.7 billion in grid infrastructure connecting a large data center at Port Washington (Ozaukee County), ordering ATC to restart the application from scratch. PSC Chair Summer Strand said design changes had been so extensive that regulators and the public could no longer assess what was actually being approved. The cost-shift exposure is explicit: roughly 10% of residential We Energies bills already flow to transmission costs, and ATC’s cost-recovery structure would likely spread the new connection costs across all ratepayers. But the PSC has no authority to reassign those costs to the data center developer directly — only FERC can order that, leaving the underlying problem unresolved even after the restart. No hyperscaler has been publicly identified for the Port Washington project.

This is the same Ozaukee-area grid fight Oracle previously sued the PSC over when it tried to impose a credit-rating requirement to prevent exactly this cost-shift (2026-06-19–oracle-sues-wisconsin-psc-data-center-ratepayer-cost-shift) — the PSC’s do-over order shows the commission still trying to slow the same project down procedurally after losing the direct fight over cost allocation. It is a state-level echo of the jurisdictional gap Texas’s Abbott order is trying to close by forcing disclosure before connection (2026-08-03–abbott-freezes-texas-data-center-grid-connections-ercot-audit) — in both states, state regulators can delay or demand disclosure, but cost-assignment authority sits with FERC, which has taken no action.