The lawsuit recalls how, on November 17, Midwest Environmental Advocates received an unredacted copy of a power demand document for the Port Washington facility, showing that We Energies requested a transmission interconnection for a 1,300-megawatt facility. However, the Public Service Commission allegedly denied a request for documents on the Beaver Dam Project, saying that the redacted information had been “identified as a trade secret.”
An environmental group has filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin utility regulators, demanding that the state release records showing the expected energy use of a proposed data center in Beaver Dam that is being developed by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
According to Wisconsin Public Radio, the lawsuit was filed earlier this week by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a non-profit law firms. In court documents, attorneys claim that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin denied an open records request for unredacted documents. More specifically, the lawsuit claims that the Public Service Commission unlawfully denied the records request and is actively withholding public records.
Wisconsin Public Radio notes that the lawsuit comes as environmental activists have raised more concerns about the impact of big data centers. A recent analysis by Clean Wisconsin, for instance, found that Microsoft’s data center in Mount Pleasant and another data center being developed in Port Washington will, eventually, consume more power than all the homes in the state put together.
“These hyperscale data centers that are facilitating artificial intelligence use enormous amounts of electricity, often on the scale of large cities, sometimes even entire regions,” Midwest Environmental Advocates legal fellow Michael Greif told Wisconsin Public Radio. “We know it’s going to cause a significant increase in electrical demand within the state of Wisconsin, and that’s going to have big impacts on the state.”
The lawsuit recalls how, on November 17, Midwest Environmental Advocates received an unredacted copy of a power demand document for the Port Washington facility, showing that We Energies requested a transmission interconnection for a 1,300-megawatt facility. However, the Public Service Commission allegedly denied a request for documents on the Beaver Dam Project, saying that the redacted information had been “identified as a trade secret.”
Attorneys say that this is an excuse—and that the Public Service Commission “arbitrarily and capriciously” denied the request because “the amount of electrical load requested” could attract scrutiny, not because any of the information could be considered a trade secret under state law.
“A trade secret, under Wisconsin law, has to have independent economic value, and I don’t think that’s the case here,” Greif said. “Perhaps the best evidence of that is the fact that, in our request, we got a response from the Public Service Commission for basically the exact same information from a different utility.”
Sources
Environmental law firm sues PSC to force release of Meta data center electricity demand
Lawsuit seeks release of expected energy demand from Meta data center in Beaver Dam
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