Hundreds of landowners, farmers and local officials are expected to pack the Kilimanjaro Room at the Kalahari Resort tonight for a town hall confronting one of the most contentious infrastructure fights in recent Wisconsin history: the proposed 765-kilovolt transmission line that would carve a corridor through nine southern Wisconsin counties.
Doors open at 5 p.m., with the program beginning at 6. Congressman Tom Tiffany headlines the event with numerous local elected official invited as well. The town hall is being organized by No 765 Line, Inc., alongside the Lake Wisconsin Land and Community Alliance and CAM 765, Inc. These are grassroots groups that have formed over the past several months as landowners learned their farmland could sit in the path of the Bell Center–Columbia–Sugar Creek–Illinois/Wisconsin State Line project, known as BECI.
As The Heartland Post has previously reported, BECI and its sister project, MariBell, exist because Wisconsin’s grid operator, MISO, built its regional transmission plan around a future grid carrying far more unreliable and intermittent wind and solar generation, much of it sited hundreds of miles from the mostly cities that actually consume the power. Gov. Tony Evers’ 2022 pledge to make Wisconsin carbon-free by 2050 accelerated that shift, pushing utilities toward retiring dispatchable coal and gas plants in favor of remote renewable generation that now needs new transmission corridors to reach customers.
Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, has made that connection central to his campaign against the project. “Wisconsin should not become a web of massive transmission lines crisscrossing our farmland because politicians failed to build reliable power right here at home,” he said this week, as Congressman Derrick Van Orden joined him in writing to Gov. Evers urging a halt to the routing process.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Tiffany’s Democratic opponent, has said he opposes the 765-kV project as currently proposed, but his broader energy platform, including a county net-zero pledge and support for statewide carbon scoring on major developments, tracks closely with the policies that created the demand for transmission lines like BECI in the first place. Crowley was invited to tonight’s town hall but, according to organizers, is unavailable to attend.
