The head of American Transmission Company is urging state lawmakers to pass a controversial “right of first refusal” bill, while an advocate for Wisconsin electricity customers argues there’s no need to make the change.
The legislation would give utilities already doing business in Wisconsin the right of first refusal to construct, own and maintain a new transmission line that connects to one of their existing lines. It recently cleared the Assembly but now faces a potential hurdle in the Senate.
Speaking yesterday during an online panel hosted by Competitive Wisconsin, ATC President, CEO and Chair Teresa Mogensen said “we should pass it as quickly as possible” to speed up the process for approving new projects.
“If you don’t have [ROFR] and you have high-voltage large lines that you have to compete for and run a competitive process, that adds a minimum of a year to the timing of figuring out who’s going to build it,” she said, adding outside operators’ unfamiliarity with Wisconsin’s regulatory process slows it down.
But Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Tom Content said the state customer advocacy group is “part of a large coalition” that opposes the bill, even as Wisconsin’s major utilities line up in favor.
“Competitive bidding is working in other states,” he said yesterday. “In recent months, courts in Iowa and the U.S. Supreme Court have weighed in that these things are unconstitutional. We need to actually have competitive bidding going forward. It’s already working in the MISO region.”
The bill was drafted as billions of dollars in new transmission line work is coming to the state and region. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the regional electric grid that covers the upper Midwest, has approved $10 billion in new projects over the next 10 years, and Wisconsin is expected to see about $2 billion of that total.
After the state Assembly passed the bill last week, Senate President Chris Kapenga referred the bill to the Natural Resources and Energy Committee, even though the Senate version has already cleared a committee chaired by the bill’s co-author, Sen. Julian Bradley, R-Franklin.
Meanwhile, Natural Resources and Energy Committee Chair Rob Cowles, R-Green Bay, has scheduled a public hearing Monday on the bill, which has split his GOP colleagues. He told WisPolitics on Tuesday he was still weighing options for the legislation. Without a committee vote, the bill would likely need support from two-thirds of the chamber to pull it to the floor for debate.
See more on these developments at WisPolitics.
–By Alex Moe
