We Energies Plans New Gas-Fired Power Plant

We Energies hopes to build a new natural gas-fired power plant in Kenosha County, the utility arguing the project is critical to meeting increasing demand from industry in southeast Wisconsin.

The project is projected to produce up to about 590,000 tons in greenhouse gas emissions annually.

The plan to build a new roughly $300 million gas plant in the town of Paris is part of a planned $2 billion investment in natural gas infrastructure by We Energies. The biggest chunk of that is a $1.2 billion project to transition the Elm Road Generating station at the company’s Oak Creek site from coal to natural gas.

Those projects, along with a 33-mile natural gas pipeline in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties, still need to be approved by the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin.

The Paris plan calls for a new natural gas facility with seven reciprocating internal combustion engine, or RICE, units that can produce 128 megawatts. The company also plans to build fuel storage and handling infrastructure at the site, and the plant would connect to an existing substation nearby.

The new project will complement the natural gas plant that’s already in Paris, which came online in 1995 and is used primarily to help the company meet demand at peak usage times, said Brendan Conway, a spokesperson for We Energies.

The company hopes to begin construction next year and bring it online in 2026.

Conway said the plan is part of the utility’s long-term “generation reshaping strategy” that includes investments in renewable energy and natural gas, as well as stopping the use of coal by 2032.

As part of that strategy, Conway also said We Energies’ parent company, WEC Energy Group, plans to spend $9 billion on renewable energy projects by 2029.

“The idea is that the backbone of our energy that our customers are getting in the coming years is going to be from solar, wind, nuclear — carbon free, clean renewable energy,” he said. “But that isn’t always there to meet the needs of our customers, particularly in the hottest days of the year, the coldest days of the year and extreme weather.”

Conway says the new Paris plant will be used about 20 to 50 percent of the time, and the seven RICE units in the plant can be “ramped up and ramped down” quickly.

That’s critical, he said, because the company is projecting between 4.5 and 5 percent growth in electric sales from 2027 through 2029, fueled by industrial development in southeastern Wisconsin. That includes a power-hungry Microsoft data center campus under construction in Mt. Pleasant and plans from an undisclosed company for a second data-center campus in Kenosha County east of the planned gas plant site.

“These RICE units can ramp up within minutes, can quickly meet the need, stabilize the grid, provide power,” he said. “And then when it’s no longer needed, ramp back down.”

But the proposed plant’s annual greenhouse gas emissions from the project equate to up to approximately 590,809 tons per year, according to an environmental impact statement filed with the Public Service commission. The greenhouse gases associated with the project include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and sulfur hexafluoride.

Abby Novinska-Lois, executive director of Healthy Climate Wisconsin, said her organization is “incredibly concerned” about the plan, calling it an investment in “outdated technology.”

“We have clean energy resources and energy efficiency and demand response programs that could account for the same amount of energy needs but would have a lot fewer public health impacts,” Novinska-Lois. “We’re concerned that our utilities, like We Energies, keep investing in approaches that will cost Wisconsinites more in their utility bills, will cause health impacts and will hurt our climate.”

She also said she has concerns about siting the plant in Kenosha County because the county is already considered a “nonattainment area” for ozone air pollution, meaning it is not meeting federal health standards for ozone.

“It’s impacting rates of asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and other respiratory infections that people in Kenosha County are currently suffering from,” Novinska-Lois said. “We are currently not meeting the federal standard and building out another project like this could make that worse.”

She isn’t the only one concerned about the plant’s potential impacts to air quality.

In a letter to the PSC this week, Molly Collins, Wisconsin advocacy director for the American Lung Association, called on regulators to strengthen the project’s environmental impact statement “to more fully explore alternative investment strategies that better align with our shared clean air and sustainability goals.”

“No community should continue to bear the burden of air pollution levels that harm public health,” Collins wrote. “Wisconsin can provide reliable power to residents without jeopardizing their health.”

Conway said the utility has heard the criticism regarding its planned natural gas investments. But he also said the company has an obligation to provide reliable energy at times when renewable resources are less efficient.

“We need to have more dispatchable power, not less,” Conway said. “But make no mistake, we’re also investing significantly in new clean energy over the coming years.”

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We Energies plans new gas-fired power plant to meet growing demand in southeast Wisconsin was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.