Congress’s permitting delay shows up in Adams County as a higher electric bill.
I get my power the way most people here do — from Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, the co-op headquartered in Friendship, the largest rural electric cooperative in Wisconsin. Nothing about the national debate lands here as a debate. It lands when the Public Service Commission signs a rate case and the number on the bill moves, and it lands again when the co-op’s capital plan has to decide what to build and what to wait on. A cooperative does not have shareholders to absorb a bad decade of planning. It has members. When the timeline for getting power from where it is generated to where it is used runs five, ten, or fifteen years, the cost of carrying that uncertainty does not disappear into a federal ledger. It gets financed, serviced, and billed to the households and the dairies on the line.
That is the mechanism the Washington argument is really about. A data center, a semiconductor fab, a critical-minerals project — none of them generates a single product without transmission, and none of them waits politely at the back of an interconnection queue while the litigation runs. During the years a project sits in that queue, somebody still studies the interconnection, upgrades the substation, and reinforces the line. Under today’s rules those reinforcement costs get spread across a member base that includes a lot of people who will never see any benefit from the facility that caused them. The Senate bill’s clause requiring data centers to pay for all of their associated transmission costs is the clearest thing in the whole package, because it names the question every rate case in this state eventually asks: who pays, and for whose load?
The letter that landed on congressional leaders’ desks this week answers that question from an unusual direction. Former officials from the Trump, Biden, and Obama administrations — one letter, four congressional leaders, the point made once and plainly — argue that U.S. advantages in capital, talent, and natural resources “matter less if a company cannot build a factory quickly enough to reach market or if the infrastructure required to power it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to plan and complete.” Jason Furman, Obama’s former chief economist, put the domestic half of it bluntly: “We wanted to throw a lot of money at the problem, and as we researched it, we realized that the problem was permitting, not money.” The letter also notes that China has built more high-voltage transmission in the past fifteen years than the entirety of U.S. history. I have watched this county argue for thirty years over whether the money or the permission was the binding constraint. The answer has been on the gauge the whole time.
The bill itself came together in the Senate last month — an overhaul of environmental review, grid-strengthening provisions, and the cost-allocation rule above. Trade groups for oil and gas and for renewables are both for it, which is the tell: those two industries agree on almost nothing except that the paperwork is the bottleneck.
The opposition is organized and it is not wrong about everything. A coalition of 185 community, labor, climate, and environmental-justice groups is urging congressional leaders to defeat the bill, arguing it would gut safeguards and hand a golden ticket to AI data centers and the people who finance them. Camden Weber of the Center for Biological Diversity said, “We can’t let this trillion-dollar industry keep ravaging neighborhoods and making Americans pay more for their electricity.” The neighborhood half of that is a real local question — siting, setbacks, noise, farmland conversion, and a county board deciding whether to welcome a facility it cannot fully price. I have sat in rooms where that decision was made badly in both directions. But blanket opposition to the permitting bill does not stop the build-out. It only decides where the build-out goes and who carries the cost while it waits, and right now that cost is arriving in places like this one, on bills like mine.
The clock is a political one. The election map is shifting, and Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, says “folding our hand now or in the lame duck makes no sense when we can keep working on this.” He may be right about the politics. The co-op’s capital plan does not get to vote in November. Jake Sullivan, who signed the letter, said it plainly: “They’re not waiting around.” We wrote about that same standoff at the Washington AI-race summit back in September, and the collision has only sharpened since.
Wendell Berry’s test for a proposal is whether it solves for pattern — whether it fixes one thing without breaking two others. A bill that clears the interconnection queue, makes the facility causing the reinforcement pay for it, and leaves the county a real voice in siting comes close to passing that test. It is the floor, not the ceiling. Move it before November, or explain to the members of a rural cooperative in central Wisconsin why the delay was worth their money.