An undisclosed developer, working through Grant County's economic development office and drawn by the nearby Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line, scouted about 500 acres in the town of Cassville for a data center pitched at 1 to 2 billion dollars in investment and 50 permanent jobs. After months of public meetings and a rally that drew hundreds of opponents, the developers stopped responding to the county in mid April 2026, and the project was considered dead by late May 2026. Cassville voters separately authorized the town board to ban data centers through zoning for up to two years.
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Power bills in Grant County
Transmission upgrades like this are typically billed to every electric customer in the state through transmission charges, not just to the data center that made the new line necessary, which is why the cost allocation question matters for ordinary bills even outside the four counties involved.
American Transmission Company's roughly 1.3 to 1.7 billion dollar transmission project to serve the Vantage data center campus, whose tenants include OpenAI and Oracle, in Port Washington had been deemed a complete application on December 15, 2025. On August 6, 2026 the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin voted unanimously to revoke that completeness determination, the first time in the agency's 95 year history it has done so, citing 564 revised or refiled documents that made the record too murky to review. ATC refiled the application on September 14, 2026 under a new name, the Ozaukee County Distribution Interconnection Project; as of October 2026 a PSCW decision is anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2026, with construction possibly starting soon after and the line in service by late 2027, while broader regional upgrades tied to the project have pushed total contingency cost estimates as high as 2.5 to 2.7 billion dollars.
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