A standing-room crowd filled the community center beneath the Bekkum Memorial Library in Westby to hear Nick Hylla of the Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA) — an energy-education nonprofit — explain why the cost of electricity is changing, and changing fast. The stop was part of MREA’s Energy in Your Township series, co-hosted with the Chaseburg Farmers Union and Ethos Green Power Cooperative.
MREA didn’t come to talk about our campaign. The evening was an education session, not advocacy. But for anyone following the proposed MariBell/BECI 765 kV line, it did something useful: an outside expert, with no stake in No 765 Line, walked a local audience straight into the questions we’ve been asking all along.
Your electric bill is going up — and it’s structural
The presenter’s blunt prediction: electricity prices are headed for sustained increases — he projected roughly 6% a year, triple the historical pace of about 2%. The engine isn’t the cost of the power itself — it’s capital investment. Utilities recover the cost of what they build from ratepayers, plus a guaranteed rate of return. The more they build, the more they earn.
Asked for the simplest version, a longtime ratepayer advocate in the room pointed to a state energy assessment and boiled it down to three things: new power plants, new transmission lines, and a guaranteed return on both. That’s not a campaign talking point. That’s how the system is built to work.
Source · MREA presentation; Wisconsin Strategic Energy Assessment (as cited at the meeting)
Wisconsin’s total retail electricity sales were lower in 2024 than in 2005 — flat-to-declining demand across two decades.
Source · EIA Form EIA-861, 2005–2024Benefit per dollar spent, as estimated by MISO’s own Independent Market Monitor — against a planning case that claims $1.80–$3.50.
Source · Potomac Economics (MISO IMM)Data centers — not the Driftless — are driving the demand
If demand is rising, where is it coming from? Not from here. The new load reshaping utility forecasts comes from enormous data centers, concentrated elsewhere in the state — not the Driftless, where electricity use has been flat to declining for two decades, down 2.9% since 2005.
It’s the same gap the campaign has documented: the growth the grid is racing to serve isn’t ours, but the bill is shared.
Source · EIA Form EIA-861; utility load forecasts discussed at the meeting
What the 765 line is actually for
Looking at a live map of the grid, the discussion traced the line’s purpose. In Iowa and southern Minnesota, cheap wind power often has nowhere to go — at midday, with no transmission to carry it, prices there can fall below zero and turbines sit idle. Far to the east, prices run high. A line like this moves power from where it’s stranded to where it sells, with analysis pointing to the broader 765 kV “backbone” feeding the high-priced PJM market east of us.
A public MISO plan — and Wisconsin helps pay for it.
This is a publicly planned MISO project — not a private or “merchant” venture — but its multi-billion-dollar cost is allocated to Wisconsin ratepayers and others across the region. We’d help fund a line built largely to send power somewhere else, even as MISO’s own Independent Market Monitor estimates the benefits at under 40 cents per dollar spent.
Source · MISO Long-Range Transmission Plan cost allocation; Potomac Economics (MISO IMM)There are cheaper ways to keep the lights on
One of the evening’s clearest points: when a region needs more capacity, “non-wires alternatives” — energy efficiency, demand response, battery storage, and local solar — are far more cost-effective than building new long-distance transmission. The cheapest, most flexible grid investments tend to be the ones closest to home.
That matters here. The case for a 765 kV line through the Driftless has to clear a simple bar: is it the best use of the money, or just the most profitable one to build?
Source · MREA presentation
If a right-of-way agent has contacted you
The meeting also surfaced a point every landowner should hear. The 765 line goes through the Wisconsin Public Service Commission in a CPCN proceeding — a process where the public can formally intervene and comment, and where the Commission requires the developers to study alternative routes.
Just as important: a land agent should not be telling you they can take your property by eminent domain before the PSC has even granted a certificate. A landowner at the meeting reported being told exactly that. If a representative has pressured you that way, you have more standing — and more time — than you may have been led to believe.
Start on the Landowners page — your rights, what to do in the first weeks, and how to get support. You don’t have to navigate it alone.
MREA is an independent education nonprofit. It is not part of No 765 Line, and we’re reporting its analysis, not speaking for it. The predictions and figures here are the presenter’s and the public record’s, sourced throughout. We don’t claim the grid never needs investment. We ask something narrower: whether this line, paid for here, holds up — on cost, on need, and on the people in its path.
