Transcript

A transcript of the 48-minute episode as it aired on September 22, 2026. Lightly edited for clarity: filler words and false starts are trimmed, and nothing that was cut from the audio appears here. Speakers appear with their permission.

Cold open

AL BUSSI do believe it's unnecessary. If we decide as a goal, we want to achieve energy independence, it becomes completely unnecessary. We don't even have to be energy independent. It's still unnecessary.

Al Buss, the Vernon County Energy District, and MariBell

MICHAEL BROWNEAl Buss lives with his wife in a 170-year-old log home in the town of Kickapoo in Vernon County. He is the president of Vernon County Energy District, a small nonprofit that started on Earth Day in 2020 with one idea, keep the money Vernon County spends on energy in Vernon County. Vernon County is on the path of MariBell, the 765-kilovolt line proposed by Dairyland Power Cooperative and a NextEra subsidiary [Editor’s note: the MariBell developers are Dairyland Power Cooperative and GridLiance Heartland, LLC. GridLiance Heartland is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Transmission.] from Marion, Minnesota to Bell Center, Wisconsin. The developers say they expect to file for a permit this fall [Editor’s note: the developers have not published a season. Their project site says: “We anticipate filing the CPCN application with the PSCW in 2026, with a final decision from the PSCW approximately 12 months after the filing of the application.”]. A second project, BECI, is proposed further east. This episode is about the first one and about what the people who would live under it have been building instead. I recorded this with Al at WDRT in Viroqua. I asked him first whether the district lobbies. He said no and explained why.

The district does not lobby

AL BUSSWe kind of consciously made this decision a while back. It's like, do we focus on changing the system or do we focus on helping our neighbors change what they're doing, and we intentionally made the decision. That's the piece that's missing.

MICHAEL BROWNEThere's a ton of organizations out there lobbying Congress, lobbying the fossil fuel companies, lobbying the utilities.

AL BUSSThere's a ton of organizations doing that work, but I see very few organizations in the field helping somebody figure out, "Okay, what's true? What should I do myself?

MICHAEL BROWNEWhat can I do that's going to make the difference?" That's where we're like, "Here's the piece that's missing and let's fill that gap." I can imagine that at some point, you get to that, you've done so much help, but then you realize that policy is almost what's holding back from creating broader or deeper levels of help.

AL BUSSOh, absolutely. The policies are in the way, and many of those policies are in the way. It's easy to get angry with the policies or angry with the utilities, however, they're doing what they do. They've got their vested interests and they are pursuing those interests. They don't necessarily align with what us as individuals are our best interests. I guess I can't fault them for pursuing their interests. We can choose to do our best to not support those interests.

MICHAEL BROWNEIt's hard, at least for me, when I look at the system and say, "Well, the system is working the way the system was designed," and I don't really appreciate how the system was designed because it's not in my best interest. It's in the best interest of a profit.

AL BUSSA heck of a lot has changed in the last 120 years. Tons has changed, really. It's a whole different world. Now the ability to invest in generation is, for $110, you can buy a solar panel and hang it on your, in front of your house. We have, inverters have gotten really inexpensive. The controls to set all this stuff up has gotten so inexpensive. Batteries have come down in price, and literally in the last 10 years, it has been a sea change of going from, "I am dependent upon the grid," to, "I can be independent of the grid," and when we talk energy independence at the, with, the energy district, what we're talking about is not just electricity, though. And I think that's where a lot of people, are starting to see, starting to understand this. If you install a solar array to offset your electric bill, that's great. It's really good, but it's only a portion of your energy needs. And so if you can install solar that offsets your electric bill, but then it also charges your EV, so now you've offset what you pay at the pump, and then put in a heat pump and offset what you spend for heating your home and heating your water, the payback on that solar system shortens radically. it's the difference between like a 14 to 15-year payback to a seven or eight-year payback.

MICHAEL BROWNEOh, wow.

AL BUSSSo when you're all in on energy independence, the economics rapidly ramp up in your favor.

MICHAEL BROWNEYeah. Well, thank you, Al Buss from the Vernon County Energy District. This is Michael Browne with the "Not a Done Deal" podcast, and today I've got Al in the studio, and we just touched on some of these awesome topics, and I've got one question for you before we jump into, the background, where this idea came from. We just talked a little bit about independence and dependence with energy. In your opinion, is a 765-kilovolt line the opposite of energy independence, or is that just too simplistic of an explanation?

Is the line necessary?

AL BUSSIt somewhat is too simplistic. I do believe it's unnecessary. I wouldn't necessarily call it the opposite of energy independence, but if we decide as a goal we want to achieve energy independence, it becomes completely unnecessary. And even, we don't even have to be energy independent. It's still unnecessary.

MICHAEL BROWNEBut there again, it kind of comes back to, what the incentives, the utilities operate under versus the incentives that we're looking at as individuals, homeowners, rate payers, small businesses, large businesses, different incentives. And it definitely does not serve us as individuals. No, it doesn't. And I love the explanation that you just offered about the PSC and this idea of effectively a regulated monopoly. And for any one of us who is looking to, potentially get into energy generation, 50 years ago that was not possible. I think many people might look at today and say, well, it's not possible for me to get into the solar game by putting panels on my home because I can't afford the X many thousands of dollars. It's complex. But you just offered that, you may not necessarily need an entire array on your entire home just to get started. And I think that as we enter this conversation publicly with what these transmission lines mean for us, everyone is starting to wake up to realize that there is a regulated monopoly out there. And we are not necessarily incentivized to be saving electricity, generating our own electricity. I know when I look at my bill, there's a flat rate whether I turn the lights on or not. And that flat amount is not inexpensive. That's substantial to the bill itself.

AL BUSSThat's correct. Yeah. Yeah.

The fixed charge

MICHAEL BROWNEAnd every utility has that, your fixed fee that's on the bill every month. Your electric bill has that.

AL BUSSIt's even higher if you're in a rural area, the electric co-ops, it's in the neighborhood of $50 a month [Editor’s note: Vernon Electric Cooperative's residential facility charge is $48.50 a month, rates effective September 1, 2026. Vernon Electric's own site lists Dairyland Power Cooperative as the source of both its generation and its transmission, and Dairyland is a MariBell co-developer.]. yeah, your gas bill has that fixed fee. And so, being dependent upon those, you pay that fee. You haven't bought one electron of electricity yet. You haven't bought one molecule of natural gas yet. That is what you pay literally just for the privilege of being connected.

MICHAEL BROWNEAnd what a privilege that is to receive that bill.

AL BUSSYeah. And kind of back to the idea of like making electricity to use less or, interestingly enough, while I like energy efficiency, the idea of using less, the trouble with that is you're still dependent, even if it's on a smaller scale, you still need it to live. When you can find independence, those things kind of become irrelevant, and that's how we break the cycle.

MICHAEL BROWNEAnd so this core idea is really at the heart of the founding of Vernon County Energy District. And I'll be the first to admit, when I saw this term and I met you for the first time, I really had no idea what I was looking at. And it was difficult for me to understand what this organization was and what it's going for.

MICHAEL BROWNESo for our listeners today, can you break it down for us, please?

AL BUSSSure. Yeah. there were, I guess about, there was 15 or 20 of us had gotten together and first heard about this idea of an energy district. And for me, what really attracted me to that idea was, kind of like I was saying earlier, there's, there are no organizations out there who are actually helping our neighbors figure out what they can do, there's, like I say, there's a lot of organizations lobbying the rest of the world. But what is actually saying, what should I be doing? What's going to be the best for me? And part of the idea of that as well is what's best for me as a resident of Vernon County may not be the same as what's best for me as a resident of Vilas County in northern Wisconsin or as a resident who lives in Arkansas, so we need to figure out what works here for us. So and we began, literally from day one with this idea of local energy independence. And from the beginning, we looked at it as a holistic energy approach, not just our electric bill. So and what we found is those of us who were already, whether intentionally or accidentally pursuing this idea, what we've seen is there's just so much that, there's misinformation, there's also misunderstandings, there's also just, perceptions that we have about things that really are outdated, it might have made sense 30 years ago or 50 years ago when our parents were paying electric bills, they don't necessarily make sense anymore now. And so, we grouped together and said we're going to start this energy district so that we can, serve our area and make everybody, help everybody be better off.

The district started on Earth Day 2020

MICHAEL BROWNESo in this idea of an energy district, are you still working within a regional grid system? Or is that completely separating a county, for example, from the grid itself?

AL BUSSIt's yeah, and while we're not part of the electric company, we are not affiliated, we're a nonprofit standalone pursuing our mission. And here's part of what I like to say is by focusing on a county level, it's a big enough area that we can have an impact. The other thing, it's a small enough area, we can have an impact. if you try to push the whole state in one direction, that's a big boulder that you're trying to push and trying to actually have a meaningful impact is pretty challenging. I also believe that the best way to move other parts of the state is to not try to get them to do it, but to do it ourselves model it, when we show what success looks like, other people are going to want it other parts, other areas are going to want, I want what you're doing. And so that's there again, that's our focus on let's work on ourselves right here, more so than trying to push legislation or outside lobbying, I'll leave that to the folks who are doing that work, they're doing a great job, and I'm happy they're there. I actually will work to influence them to help to sort of influence the message.

Heat pumps, EVs, and what actually works

MICHAEL BROWNEI've read a little bit on the energy district and some of the technology components or pieces that have made this future that you're referring to here, things like real time rates or the right to generate or individual solar, community solar, how do those things actually work? And if they're working so well, why aren't they being adopted further?

AL BUSSAnd what's in the way like, what's, what's holding us back? what, maybe before we get into that, what I guess what I would like to do is just tell a little story of, friend, a guy friend of mine, a guy who lives on the south side of Westby. Oh, perfect. Yes, him and his wife moved to the area about I think it was about 10 years ago, not long after they bought their house, they put on solar panels, and their electric bill went to zero. Pretty good. Right off the gate. That's amazing. A couple of years later, when they needed a new car, they decided to buy electric. That's what they looked at. That's what they chose, and they had to add a few more solar panels, but not many. But by increasing a little bit their solar array, they now power their car with their solar panels. And so their electric bill is still zero, and they pay nothing at the pump. Then when they, their house is partially heated with electric, so they do still have a gas bill, but tremendously offset by their solar panels as well. So as an individual, as individuals, that's kind of what energy independence looks like. it's fairly simple, but it's not necessarily easy, because it takes kind of being willing to do something that not everybody else is doing. Yeah, there's education and investment and a little risk.

MICHAEL BROWNEYou may not know how it's going to work?

AL BUSSSome of these are, they're all pretty tried and true, and becoming much more, the level of risk you're taking to buy an EV is pretty darn low. They work. They work well.

MICHAEL BROWNEPeople drive them all over the country all the time.

AL BUSSSo that risk part is much less of a thing. It's more comfort zone.

MICHAEL BROWNEPeople are afraid of something new.

AL BUSSBut so when you do this, the best way to optimize your energy independence is, there does need to be a little bit of management behind it. you need to put a little bit of like, when does my car charge? Yeah. And it's even a little more relevant here in Wisconsin than it would be in, say, Arizona or Southern California? Those parts of the country have, pretty clear skies most of the year. So they have a lot of really sunny days. We have really sunny days for a while, but then we might have four, five, six, seven, 20 days of gray cloudy weather and our production is less. So we need to be able to adjust and work with, what's actually happening. And that's where, when energy management comes in, it's like, and it doesn't have to be that I'm running around controlling everything that can be automated. But when you, when you set your stuff up geared towards this self-consumption, you're adapting to the intermittency of renewable energy. What's interesting when you look at that and then look at how our electric grid is set up, the electric grid is set up in a way where, right now, for most people, the only thing they can do to lower their electric bill is use less electricity. And unfortunately, that's a really blunt tool. It's because here's the thing, in the middle of an August day when it's really hot and it's 4 p. m. in the afternoon, everybody comes home and jumps in the shower. Now their electric water heater turns on and starts drawing power. And then, half hour before they got home, their programmable thermostat lowered the temperature on their air seas. So their AC compressor is running, maybe they throw a pizza in the oven. So now their oven is running, which is why we have these big demand peaks at those periods of time, and we have no incentive to avoid using electricity during that time. Whether we run our stuff then or run our stuff at 2 in the morning, it costs us the same, even though the actual expenses behind it are radically different. If you can have your car charge at 2 in the morning or have your smart water heater program so, you've got hot water in the tank when you get home, you can still take a shower, but it actually regenerates that heat in the middle of the night when there's much less demand. So that's what by real-time rates. Is rates that actually match real-time grid conditions. So when you start to manage your use, we all know that the price of gas goes up and down, and, we may change our behavior a little bit around that. So we all understand things are more expensive sometimes than they are at others, and we adjust accordingly. If we had real-time rates that really reflect actual grid conditions, we're beginning to manage our energy use.

Peaks, rate design, and not building power plants

MICHAEL BROWNEWe have an incentive to manage our energy use. So you're not actually advocating for necessarily a higher bill for people, but you're advocating for a greater understanding of the impact of your use.

AL BUSSExactly. So, using less electricity is nice. It reduces the amount of fuel they put into the power plants. When we change our energy use to avoid peaks, now we stop building power plants. Now we eliminate the argument for these power plants. We eliminate the argument for big transmission lines [Editor’s note: MariBell and BECI are part of MISO's Long-Range Transmission Plan, Tranche 2.1, approved by the MISO board in December 2024. Whether county-level generation and load shifting change that regional case is a question for the Public Service Commission record, not something local action settles on its own.]. we're not, we may actually end up using a little more energy overall. However, our overall, impact, our footprint based on our use goes down a lot. And that's, we don't, I don't really focus on using less energy. I focus on using the right energy.

MICHAEL BROWNEThat makes a lot of sense. I know that in the number of people that I've spoken with, I listen to a lot of conversations, and I hear others out there saying that the amount of energy that Wisconsin needs is not possible to be created locally, meaning, we need to import fossil fuels to burn. you'll hear terms of clean coal or small modular nuclear reactors, any number of technologies that a proponent of that technology is speaking about. one of the technologies we're focusing on here is, or that you're talking about here is solar. And I hear others talk about wind. And I know that as we're talking about transmission lines, this becomes a divisive topic because solar in terms of putting it on your home is one thing. And this is the independence you're talking about. Solar as a large utility scale array taking up hundreds or thousands of acres. That is a different conversation entirely. how does the idea of independence and renewables work into this conversation overall?

Does Wisconsin need more power?

AL BUSSSure. Sure. renewable energy is the cheapest energy money can buy. Putting up your solar panels anywhere, $110, $120 to buy a solar panel and put it up, that's the cheapest electricity money can buy. The argument isn't really about whether or not we should have renewables or these others. The argument is who's going to own them. the business model of the utilities is they generate power, we buy the power. So if we generate our own power, that business model kind of breaks.

MICHAEL BROWNEThat's why it's getting resistance, because it goes against their incentives to make money and control the system.

AL BUSSExactly. Exactly. I'm not a big fan of big thousand-acre solar arrays that the utilities own. I've driven through some of them. It's a little shocking to be in an area that is just solar panels as far as the eye can see. I don't mind at all driving past a field of, here's 10 acres of solar panels. and utilities argue that, okay, well, yeah, but the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. And they're right, but the fact is the wind always will blow. the sun always will shine. The sun is one of the most reliable things we know of. So those energy sources are there and will always be there. They may not necessarily be there at the exact moment that we think we want them. And so that's kind of their argument for the natural gas peaker plants or we're going to put this renewable, this nuclear power in it that doesn't. Nuclear power happens to be the most expensive power money can buy [Editor’s note: per Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026, unsubsidized, new U.S. nuclear has the highest floor at $175 to $255 per MWh and gas peaking the highest ceiling at $144 to $276. By that measure new nuclear is one of the two most expensive sources of new power. The same report puts the marginal cost of running existing U.S. nuclear at $26 to $36 per MWh, below every new-build option it lists, and bases its nuclear figure on Vogtle units 3 and 4.]. Really? It does. It is the most expensive power you can get. And think about it, the spent fuel rods aren't here, it's not like here's a little dirt we got to clean up, 10,000 years later, we're setting up a ton of future generations to have to deal with the mess.

MICHAEL BROWNEWe can't even agree on where it goes right now. Right. It's sitting in various places. I know Genoa hosts some of it right now along the Mississippi River of all places. It's a wild thing once you get into it.

AL BUSSOnce you have it. Yeah. Nuclear power is great, there's a reason the sun is, so many millions of miles away. It's a big giant nuclear reactor and it works. It's fusion, nuclear power is great. Just use the right nuclear power. We don't have to master it and tame it here. And it's at our own demise if we do. Right.

Open-house talking points, batteries, and the extension cord

MICHAEL BROWNEWhen we hear these talking points that I heard time and again at developer open houses of, well, we want the lights to turn on when you flip the switch, don't you? In your mind, is this an argument for a 765 kilovolt transmission line?

AL BUSSNo. two of the, we talked about energy management already, this idea of automating when there's a lot of stuff, we don't necessarily care when it runs just so long as it runs. But the other technology that has really radically changed, renewables and the ability for us to do this are, batteries that we can put in our home.

MICHAEL BROWNESo energy storage that can go in our homes.

AL BUSSIt's kind of interesting, the average home uses about 900 kilowatt hours a month [Editor’s note: EIA's FAQ still says about 899 kWh on 2022 data. EIA's Table 5.A for 2024 gives 863 kWh for the United States and 645 kWh for Wisconsin. All three are residential averages and say nothing about commercial or industrial load.]. Okay. That averages out to 1.2 kilowatt hours an hour, every hour. That's about as much power as a blow dryer drive.

MICHAEL BROWNEOn a given hour.

AL BUSSYeah. A blow dryer continue? Okay. Yeah. A blow dryer running for an hour would draw about that much power. So if you think about it, what that means is if we put in some batteries, they don't even have to be big batteries, but if we put in some batteries, we do some energy management in our homes, the average house could literally be powered by an extension cord. In theory, you could power a house with an extension cord.

MICHAEL BROWNEI like that visual, by the way, because at least in my mind, energy is this esoteric theoretical number, and I have a hard time putting actual value to it. When you tell me the blow dryer for an hour, I can visually see that, and I can understand the amount of power that actually is. Yeah.

AL BUSSNobody's talking about building big giant transmission lines because we're all getting blow dryers. Right. Right. [Laughter] Yeah.

MICHAEL BROWNEBut I'll admit, as a homeowner, the idea of generating my own power and then adding in a battery system, that's daunting, right? That's a cost, and especially in today's world where costs are rising and wages not commensurate, and inflation at the same time, a lot of people are struggling, and I think we're all kind of looking to programs that might be able to help us, but those programs are not being funded anymore.

AL BUSSRight. How do we go about doing this? and some of it, I think, is kind of, it's shifting our perceptions a bit. there was a study done in the state of Wisconsin. The question was asked if the entire state of Wisconsin was to generate our own power locally and meet our own energy needs locally, economically, what is the impact of that? And the answer is, every year, the state of Wisconsin, $14 billion leaves our state to import energy [Editor’s note: the study is COWS at UW-Madison, by David Abel and Katya Spear, February 4, 2019, prepared for La Crosse County's Office of Sustainability. It puts Wisconsin's energy spending deficit at $14.4 billion on 2016 data.].

Energy spending that leaves Wisconsin

MICHAEL BROWNEIn the form of

AL BUSSSo this is $14 billion cash we all take out of our wallets, and that leaves the state to import energy. That's like, that's gasoline, coal, coal for the coal plants, natural gas, all of those things. And that's not what we spend on energy. That's what leaves. So like, for example, when you go to the gas station and fill up your tank, about 85 cents of every dollar leaves the state. About 15 cents is, the person behind the counter, the person who owns a gas station, maybe the guy who delivers the gas to the tanks there. So some of that money is in our local economy. But 85 percent of that leaves the state to import energy. When you look at electricity, that number is now about 60 percent [Editor’s note: the COWS report does not state a share for electricity. Its Table 1 gives $3.45 billion of electricity flowing into Wisconsin against $7.43 billion in total electricity spending, and it is the one row in that table with no out-of-state percentage printed. The ratios the report does state are 95 percent of coal spending, 85 percent of natural gas and 85 percent of petroleum, taken from Wisconsin Energy Statistics.], okay? So there are still some local economic impact of what we spend on the electricity. But the majority of that money leaves Wisconsin. So if you take that $14 billion of the state of Wisconsin and just per capita, I did the math, that works out to $76 million in Vernon County [Editor’s note: this is Al Buss's own per-capita arithmetic from the statewide figure. The study reports no county figures. Petroleum is $9.2 billion of the report's $14.4 billion, so a flat per-head split moves fuel spending onto a county whose driving patterns the study never examined.]. So we've got a population of 31,000 people here. That means it works out to about $10,000 for every family of four every year. So when we ask the question, "How do we afford to make these changes?" We're already sending $76 million a year out of our county to import energy. We have money. We have the money. We just need to start diverting, increasing portions of that towards breaking away from this dependence that we have. So programs that help are great. But if they're not there, we do have, we do have money. We can, we're spending it right now, and we're spending it every day. We can work and hope and wait for the system to change, or we can grab what we can and change what we can. Every single dollar we spend is a vote? When I first bought my very first EV 10 years ago, my wife and I actually had this discussion, but we decided that I wanted to see more electric cars being made. I wanted to see more electric cars being available. And I do know that as long as I keep buying gas cars, they're going to keep making gas cars. If they're buying electric cars, they'll be making electric cars. So that's how we vote with our wallet? There's an interesting number I came up with a couple of years ago that may help somewhat show you how this isn't as daunting as it seems. If you have a standard electric water heater, the one that most people have, 50-gallon electric water heater, and if you replace it with a heat pump water heater, it's going to save, the heat pump water heater uses about one-fourth the electricity of your standard electric water heater.

EVs, water heaters, and the 2026 rebates

MICHAEL BROWNEI've got a great story for you here in a second. Keep going, please.

AL BUSSOkay, so if you replace your standard electric water heater with a heat pump water heater, you save enough electricity every year to power an EV 10,000 miles. So think about it, if you drive 10,000 miles a year, that means swap out your water heater, swap out your car, your electric bill doesn't change, and now you are not spending a penny at the pump. So you really, your monthly bills haven't changed at all.

MICHAEL BROWNEThat's amazing. That's amazing. We just bought one of these things, the heat pump water heaters, and the label on the side set it all because we had a 50-gallon pure electric water heater, and I looked at that and it said just under $1,000 a year to heat this 50-gallon, and it's a family of five, so, that is going to run out pretty quick, especially if everybody needs to take a bath or a shower at the same time. And when that thing showed up, the label on the side said $160 per year, so 160 versus almost 1,000, and this other one was very inefficient and older, of course.

AL BUSSSure. That's great. I'm so glad you guys did that. Yeah. one of the things about the heat pump water heaters, that is one of the federal incentives that still exists, there's the IRA rebates, and being able to transition to a heat pump water heater was one of the rebates. If so, and that is targeted, if you're, to go to one of the big box stores and just purchase one outright, you can buy it, install it yourself, they're about $1,700 to buy one of those, which is more expensive than a standard electric. But if you're below 80% to area median income, the rebate will cover up to $1,750 [Editor’s note: verified. Focus on Energy lists up to $1,750 for an ENERGY STAR electric heat pump water heater, capped at $14,000 per household, and households above 150 percent of area median income are not eligible. As of September 1, 2026 the program no longer accepts retail post-purchase or instant-discount requests for equipment replacing a fossil fuel appliance. The 25C and 25D federal tax credits ended December 31, 2025.]. Oh, that's amazing, so you literally could buy this water heater, install it yourself, and if you're low income, have it for free.

MICHAEL BROWNEThat's amazing.

AL BUSSIf you're middle income, then it'll cover half of the cost, up to $750. So to upgrade your water heater, think about it. You do this upgrade after the rebate, your money ahead, either within the first year or maybe a little bit into the second year. And so then, this water heater's in your basement for 20 years. Every month after that is just more money you've got left over in your water.

MICHAEL BROWNEYou got to wonder, with all the incentives that get funneled out to the developers and the corporations behind the utilities, you got to wonder if we had redirected those funds towards making heat pump water heaters more accessible to everyone and not just based on your income. And what that would be doing for energy in Wisconsin.

AL BUSSOh, you bet. You bet. I'm going to have to get this study that you mentioned.

MICHAEL BROWNEI'm going to have to put that in the show notes from you, because the $14 billion leaving. I'm very interested to hear a little bit more on that. If we can revisit that real quick, I do have a couple more questions, but I want to hear the results of that study, $14 billion leaving, but what would it look like for Wisconsin to generate its own power?

MICHAEL BROWNESo what did that study say?

AL BUSSYeah, you're kind of getting into stuff I don't remember so well. We'd have to read it over a bit. And there again, this was done in 2017. That study was done. EVs were barely on the horizon at that point. They existed, but they, you could even buy a Tesla Model 3 yet then. The Nissan Leaf and was about the only other, mass produced EV at the time. So, EVs weren't weren't that significant. Solar panels were actually still fairly expensive. And homes, home batteries weren't readily available or very affordable. they were assembled with, people who put together a bunch of golf cart batteries and stuff like that to do their own, the off-grid folks. So the environment we're working within, what's available now just in the last nine years has really changed quite a bit. another big change that, it kind of comes back to that idea of the real time rates as well, and dealing with intermittency issues are most of the utilities now have smart meters. smart meters allow them to actually look at your power usage in 15-minute increments. So they can bill you one rate for five o'clock on an August hot day, and they can bill you a different rate at two in the morning on a different day. So smart meters allow them to do that. the old meters, they had once a month reading, here's how much you used in the last month.

MICHAEL BROWNEThey didn't necessarily know what time of day or when you used it.

AL BUSSSo it's a whole different world from when that study was made. So it's hard for me to say, what it looks like based on that study. I do know, I do have a much better idea of what it looks like based on the current technology. In 2022, we had gotten a grant from the Public Service Commission to develop a comprehensive energy plan for Vernon County. And what was really unique about our grant application when we asked for this money was we wanted to develop a comprehensive energy plan for the entire county. There were other grants like, okay, I'm going to work with the county government and help the county government become, energy, more energy savvy or help them save money. So it was always focused on entity. We said we want to do the entire county, all of the entities and all of the people that are in Vernon County, industry, that look like industry, residential, everything, all in. And we looked at electrifying all of our, gas powered vehicles, gas and diesel powered vehicles. And if we electrified all of those, which meant like how much diesel does it take to power a farm? We're talking combines, we're talking heavy machinery, farm implements. This is not a simple thing. This was a pretty. Okay. Keep going. I want to know where this goes. Yeah. So, electrifying all our engines, switching all our heat, heating needs to heat pumps, doing some insulation, adding insulation and air sealing. We had done a lot of home energy audits during that time. So we had about 40 homes. So we had a good cross section of what homes in our area look like from the energy efficiency viewpoint of things and all our current energy use. a lot of the information that we based it on was data that we were able to collect from the energy information agency, the US government. so there's the EIA website and you can collect a ton of information for Wisconsin and we can then extrapolate that to what our energy use looks like in Vernon County. So we made some, I can't tell you right to the kilowatt hour what it's going to take because. Yeah. But I can give you a pretty good idea. And so we looked at what would be the entire energy use for Vernon County if we were all in on renewables and then how many solar panels or how much solar capacity would it take to meet that need. The answer we came up with was about 3,000 acres of solar panels. Sounds like a huge number. I don't want to see a 3,000 acre solar array somewhere. That's just the amount of solar panels, amount it would take. But kind of work that backwards, that means for every 1,000 people, that's about 100 acres of solar panels.

The Vernon County comprehensive energy plan

MICHAEL BROWNEThat I can wrap my head around a little easier. Right.

AL BUSSSo what that means is so like the city of Viroqua, which has a population just under 5,000, it would take about 500 acres of solar panels. Okay, so let's say 100 of those fit in the city between rooftops, parking lots, who doesn't want to park their car under solar panels in the shade in the middle of summer, so there's good reasons to do this stuff. We don't sacrifice, we actually improve things. But so let's say you can get about 100 of those acres in the city itself. That means 400 acres need to be scattered around the area. So that's literally 10 40 acre parcels, which that's nothing. Yeah, I don't know.

MICHAEL BROWNEI don't know how many acres are in Vernon County overall, but it doesn't seem unreasonable. And I think what most people would, I know a lot of individuals who are coming to the table right now around this transmission line and talking about, the impact of a raise, taking valuable, productive farmland. And I agree, like we should not be, we should not be taking fertile soil and turning it into a foundation for something else. I do know there's, there are places to put these things, at least when it comes to transmission lines, we talk about corridors of highways, we talk about in cities, parking lots, rooftops of industrial buildings. There is a lot of opportunity out there.

AL BUSSRight. Yeah, even if you get to like, say, Dane County, kind of using the same similar numbers. Now it's about 50,000 acres of solar panels.

MICHAEL BROWNEWell, there's 800,000 acres in Dane County [Editor’s note: Dane County has about 766,000 acres of land and about 792,000 acres including water.].

AL BUSSSo I, kind of to the argument about fertile soil, there is lots of fringe land available that isn't that great for farming. There's also the argument to be made for how much of that fertile soil is actually growing food.

MICHAEL BROWNETrue.

AL BUSSA lot of that fertile soil is used to grow material that ends up turning into ethanol that powers cars. I would, I would argue we would likely have more land available for food production than we have now because we're not devoting all this land to growing fuel.

Climate, farm subsidies, land use, and how we live

MICHAEL BROWNEOne thing I love about this transmission line conversation is that it opens up so many other lines of discourse of important topics that need to be touched on. Everything from, the future of our climate stability, to farm subsidies, land use, impact on water, how we live. And so many of us, myself included, we have either internal reasoning or a conversation with somebody else and we take it so far and then it stops. And this is one conversation that just continues to drive at the heart of everything. What do you believe? How do you want to live? How do you want to work with your neighbors and what's the future you want to see? And I think that is one of the most powerful things, pun intended, about this transmission line conversation. And I just genuinely, Al, I genuinely appreciate the work you're doing, especially under the, under the banner of energy independence, because I think if there's anything we can look at right now of this transmission line conversation, it's that the development of these lines is not creating independence for individuals, it is creating dependence on a system that does not serve. And that is a, that's something that you've been leading the charge on for a number of years now. Al Buss, I do want to get one more, a technical question for you because I know you're watching dockets just like we are. And so the MariBell application is likely to be filed this fall. And there is a section in there where the developers must list the distributed alternatives that they studied and rejected, including reconductoring in battery storage and say why they were rejected. What are you looking for on that page when you review it?

When MariBell is filed: the section to read

AL BUSSSo sure. Yeah. I guess part of the, my answer to that is, I want to see, did they give it a serious look? they don't have the incentive, they really are not incentivized to propose those as solutions. so I guess that, so one, I'd be looking, did they seriously make a look at it? But I think the other thing, if we're going to actually put up a legitimate counter argument to those things, we need to do, we need to make the case that here's how these things can work. And I think the more we can actually make the argument of why reconductoring, why solar, why batteries, why local is a more reliable, more affordable and more predictable way of meeting our needs, we can make the case. I don't expect the developers are going to make the case for us.

MICHAEL BROWNERight. Well, you now have a study that you can lean on when you're looking at that docket and potentially filing to intervene, provide some facts or at least offer up that study to others who are doing that, doing that intervention. I really, yeah, go ahead.

AL BUSSThere's a lot of good information. Go to our website, vced.energy and then look on our reports in our Vernon County comprehensive energy plan. We did two of them. The first one was the one that I referred to earlier. The second one was just more enhanced follow up to it, but the first one's going to really get the nuts and bolts of what local energy independence looks like and how viable it really is.

MICHAEL BROWNEExcellent. Al, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've got 30 more questions I want to ask you, but we're not going to be able to fit it in right now. Hope to be speaking with you again soon.

AL BUSSThanks Michael. Happy to be here. Thanks for asking me.

MICHAEL BROWNEYeah. Thank you so much. That was Al Buss of the Vernon County Energy District. The county energy plan he described is at vced.energy under reports. Our page for Vernon County is at no765line.org/counties/vernon. When the MariBell application is filed, the section to read is the one where the developers list the alternatives they studied and rejected and why. This episode was recorded at WDRT, Driftless Community Radio, in Viroqua. The transcript and sources are at no765line.org/podcast. I'm Michael Browne, and this is Not a Done Deal.