CAPITOL GAINS
	CONNECTION CONUNDRUM
	Editorial
	Wisconsin Favorites Doing the Monster Mash

   Capitol Gains
Legislative session puts energy policies on the right track

   Keeping the lights on hasn’t always been an activity requiring the steady attention of the Wisconsin Legislature, but that changed in the mid-1990s. The nationwide utility-restructuring craze collided head-on with the realization that Wisconsin was seriously short of electric infrastructure, and for policy wonks, perceptive lawmakers, and a whole new generation of lobbyists, a formerly sleepy industry suddenly emerged from decades of being taken for granted and turned into the exciting place to be.

   Practical demonstrations of the infrastructure’s shortcomings occurred in the form of repeated and costly service interruptions for customers of major utilities. These began in the summer of 1995, spiked in the summer of 1997 with both of the state’s nuclear power plants off-line, then mercifully faded away thanks to facilities being repaired, milder summers, and, ironically, a slower economy reducing electricity demand.

   Though to this day Wisconsin has never seen a “rolling blackout,” utility companies’ emergency planning made the term familiar here at least three years before Californians experienced the reality in their own energy crisis. But with or without that experience, the lesson was learned. Policies were examined and revised. Facilities were built and more are proposed. Much remains to be done, but energy legislation considered in the 2003–04 session suggests a major corner has been turned.

Return to Routine

   Electric reliability legislation enacted in the late 1990s did away with requiring regulated utilities to try to anticipate their capacity needs one and two decades in the future and pulled the planning horizon back to two years. Knowing that two consecutive 95-degree days could shut down major industries, no one focused much on what might happen in 2018.

   Each reliability initiative was scrutinized for the extent to which existing facilities might be turned loose from Wisconsin’s regulatory control—and whether back doors might be opened for large customers of small utilities to be “cherry-picked” by major marketers, inevitably raising costs for those left behind.

   Comparing this wary uncertainty of the late ’90s with the accomplishments of the 2003–04 session is instructive. If you ask the people who chair the Legislature’s two energy-related committees about their work during the past two years, they don’t speak of reshaping the utility industry’s job but rather of clearing the path for that job to be done.

   Senator Robert Cowles (R–Green Bay) admits to being “pretty proud of the things we got done this session.”

   At or near the top of the list would be enhanced financial incentives for municipalities that accept new power plants. After three years winding its way through the legislative process, the bill was finally enacted last summer. It allocates funds from the existing gross-receipts tax paid by utilities to boost state aid payments to host communities.

   Assembly Energy Chair Scott Jensen (R–Waukesha) started that ball rolling early in 2001 with the remark that it was time to give communities a reason to want generating facilities instead of litigating to keep them from being built.

   But Jensen now adds that they weren’t far into the 2003 session before he and Cowles realized Wisconsin’s weak transmission system presents an even bigger challenge than its fleet of power plants that can meet only about 80 percent of the state’s daily needs.

Streamlining, Protections

   Part of the problem—certainly not all of it—can be addressed by reducing delays in the regulatory review that decides whether to allow any given infrastructure project to be built. A measure aimed at doing that became law last December, barely six weeks after being introduced.

   The new law simply requires the Department of Natural Resources and Public Service Commission (PSC) to coordinate their activities and work together—not separately and one at a time as before—in reviewing generation and transmission proposals.

   “Our goal was to cut in half the amount of time it took to get state approval for a new power plant or transmission line,” Jensen says, adding, “We achieved that and maybe a little more.”

    Cowles points to the eight-state Eastern blackout last August as something that made the already critical legislative effort “even more compelling.”

   “We’re in far better shape to address deficiencies on the grid,” he says, acknowledging that he’s “still concerned about this summer and next summer, but in the absence of bad news like losing a plant or a lawsuit holding up projects, I think we’re on the right track.”

   He adds that another bill passed into law last summer provides a safety valve in case the state’s infrastructure can’t be strengthened fast enough or federal regulators won’t extend sufficient consideration to protect Wisconsin consumers from increased costs arising from mandated participation in a regional wholesale-power market the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) hopes to have running by the end of this year.

   State law initially required Wisconsin utilities to join MISO and put their transmission systems under its operational control; it now also allows them to withdraw from MISO if its costs become too burdensome.

A Tale of Two Cities

   Compare how energy issues have fared in the 108th Congress and in the 2003–04 session of the Wisconsin Legislature, and the difference is striking. In Washington, with the same party controlling both houses and the presidency, lawmakers have labored through both the 107th Congress and the 108th, trying and thus far failing to produce a wide-ranging energy bill that might—almost coincidentally—alter the way electric utilities operate across the United States. Meanwhile in Madison, two houses working with an administration of the opposite party have successfully and at times quickly advanced legislation facilitating improvement of the electric infrastructure, while taking unified stands on policy issues that could affect the cost and reliability of electricity in this state.

   Last August’s blackout was a motivating factor, according to Jensen, who said, “We took advantage of that and passed some things, and upon review, the governor agreed with most of it.”

   Cowles also credits cooperation with the Doyle administration through PSC Chair Burnie Bridge and staff. “It was good,” he says. “We had a lot of meetings and lots of back-and-forth refining bills and making them acceptable” instead of fighting things out in the newspapers.

   The recognition that Wisconsin’s energy challenges are serious also made a big difference. “I think we took a more pragmatic approach because we face a real problem,” Jensen says. “We’re going to be 6,700 megawatts short in the next decade if we don’t build anything, and our transmission is the most congested in the country.”

   He hastens to add that existing construction plans should meet most of the coming capacity needs, but the consequences of doing nothing couldn’t be more clear.

   The congressional process is inherently different, Jensen notes, in that the state “doesn’t subsidize like they do at the national level.”

   Cowles also says state lawmakers “took a different approach.” He and Jensen “decided how to keep the politics out of it and made a list of potential things to do and vetted it through the utilities and the PSC, kept the bills tight, and didn’t have those extraneous things.”

   Cowles adds, “We held hearings in public before drafting the bill and then held hearings after the drafting. We kept disputes in-house. We couldn’t afford not to do this. It had to get done.”

More to Come

   Much of this state’s electric infrastructure was built to serve a utility industry far different from today’s. We use close to three times as much electricity as we did in 1970, yet have not brought a new base-load power plant on line since that decade. That translates into a pressing need for more generation and especially for more transmission capacity. Even renewable-energy projects such as wind farms need transmission to move the power from where the wind is favorable to where the consumers are—often hundreds of miles.

   So a priority for the 2005–06 session is sure to be seeking ways people can be rewarded for accepting new transmission lines that cross their property. This spring, Jensen requested a study of potential ways to compensate affected landowners, saying that in the session just ended, lawmakers “were able to address compensation for communities with power plants, but a remaining challenge is how we get private property owners to welcome needed facilities.”

   He readily concedes it won’t be easy: “If you’ve taken your life savings to buy a pretty piece of property somewhere and they want to run a transmission line through it, I’m not sure there’s enough money to make anybody like that, but we have to do something to resolve as many of these conflicts as we can.”—Dave Hoopman

Connection Conundrum
Fast Internet More Common, More Necessary, But Search for Rural Access Goes On

   Internet technology, like electricity, has become a building block of healthy communities. Entrepreneurs, workers, citizens and shoppers increasingly rely not just on access to the Internet but on high-speed connections to communicate with others and to get things done.

   By the late 1990s dial-up Internet service was nearly universally available across the United States, but rural America’s access to high-speed Internet, also known as broadband, has lagged.

   The rich economic and intangible benefits of the Internet can really be discovered only with a high-speed connection, technology gurus contend.

   “Broadband is just a quicker way to get things done. It’s the way that business and personal lives are changing. It simply makes life a lot easier,” said Chris Martin, director of satellite broadband for the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. “The speed makes all the difference.”

   Studies are just now beginning to document the effect high-speed connections have on Internet usage. For example, an analysis by Scarborough Research, a New York-based firm that identifies shopping and media usage trends, found that American adults with at-home broadband connections accounted for nearly one-third of all consumer online spending in 2002, totaling $15 billion.

   The Scarborough report also found people change their reading habits with access to broadband. They are far more likely to go online to read newspapers and magazines and to visit television web sites frequently.

Need projected to Increase

   The need for broadband will only increase as businesses enhance their offerings on their web sites and as activities such as downloading music files increase. Nearly one-third of Internet users have downloaded a music file and 4 percent do so on an average day, according to the Pew Internet & American Live Survey taken in 2003.

   For those who can buy it, home and business owners’ appetite for fast Internet access continues to increase. Nearly four of every 10 home Internet subscribers connects using broadband, according to a January 2004 report by Nielsen//NetRatings.

   Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data are more conservative, but the agency also sees rapid growth, creating a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. The number of high-speed lines in homes and small offices increased by 45 percent from June 2002 to June 2003.

   “It may be almost a cliché to say you don’t want to spend 45 minutes downloading a file, but it does have an impact on how things get done,” says Martin. “Access to rich media content, streaming video, and certain file and data sharing simply cannot be done effectively through dial-up.”

   Marc Ryan, director of analysis for Nielsen NetRatings says, “Moving to a high-speed connection opens the door to a number of new content possibilities, driving further evolution of the Internet and facilitating bandwidth-intensive applications like digital music downloading.”

How High is High?

   The FCC defines high-speed lines as those that provide services at speeds exceeding 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction, which is about four times faster than a 56 kbps dial-up modem working at peak efficiency. Many broadband offerings, such as digital subscriber lines, offer much faster download speeds than upload speeds, allowing data to come in at the faster rate and go out at a slower speed.

   Populated areas are virtually blanketed with broadband. The FCC reported in December 2003 (based on June 2003 data) that 99 percent of the most densely populated ZIP codes have at least one high-speed Internet subscriber. That figure drops to 69 percent in the most remote ZIP codes, defined as those with fewer than six persons per square mile.

   The situation in rural areas may be improving, however. The previous year’s data found that only half of the most remote ZIP codes reported at least one high-speed subscriber. Less remote but still rural areas shows greater broadband use. For instance, more than 90 percent of ZIP codes with 25–41 persons per square mile report at least one subscriber.

   Still, the presence of one or a handful of subscribers is a lowest-common-denominator measurement of broadband access. It does not mean that people can easily obtain broadband service. Many rural areas most likely do not have effective service or have limited offerings.

Pricey Propagation

   The hurdle is the cost of deploying systems. The challenges of bringing high-speed Internet to rural America are akin to those faced by the people who formed the first electric cooperatives. How do you develop a technology network that can span many miles while serving relatively few customers? The two dominant technologies, cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL), are not economical in very rural locales.

   “Nobody’s against broadband,” said Ted Case, a lobbyist for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “The problem is that solutions proposed by Congress are expensive in an era of tight budgets.”

   Various federal lawmakers have tried to encourage the expansion of broadband to rural and underserved areas through the use of tax breaks and incentives. One such initiative was part of the U.S. Senate 2003 tax cut bill but the provision was removed from the final version of the bill before passage.

   Technology watchers may want to stay tuned to fast-paced developments in an emerging technology called broadband over power line, or BPL, that can send data at high speeds across electric power lines. Surfing the Web would be as simple as plugging a modem into an electric outlet.

   The appeal is apparent, but the technology needs time to grow and it may never be economical in rural areas, said Bob Gibson, who manages a BPL research project for the Cooperative Research Network, a research organization of 360 electric cooperatives.

   He said, “This will be a fascinating year to watch this technology, but chances are pretty slim that your aunt out on a farm in Iowa is going to get high-speed Internet through broadband power line any time soon.”

WildBlue, Yonder

   The answer may lie in new technology that works with minimal infrastructure. More than 200 electric and telephone cooperatives plan to offer consumers a new satellite service called WildBlue, being distributed by NRTC. Martin said that equipment and installation is estimated to be about $300 and monthly service at $50.

   “We literally can reach every area of the country that is currently unserved,” he said. “There is no expensive infrastructure to deploy. It is as simple as putting a satellite dish on the roof and a modem in the home.”

   Two other companies have announced a similar venture, but it appears that WildBlue will be first on the market. The initial satellite is scheduled to launch in mid-2004, and another is under construction. When both satellites are operational, the service would be capable of serving more than one million customers, according to Martin. It is expected to be available to the public in late 2004.—Robbin Christianson

Editorial
by Perry Baird

Tangible Tribute
by Perry Baird, Editor

Doing the Monster Mash

   Balmy summer nights just beg to be enjoyed, and record numbers of Wisconsinites are taking advantage of them by going outdoors for an evening of auto racing. One recommended site for such an outing is the Monster Hall Raceway near Unity, on Clark Electric Cooperative lines. There, race fans rev up their engines as they thrill to the speed, the fierce competition, the near-misses, and even the crashes that characterize the sport. For an extra fee, real motor-heads can visit the pit area, where they can look under the cars’ hoods and converse with drivers and their crews. Once the checkered flag comes down at the finish of the final race, exhausted fans can camp right beside the racetrack at the Monster World Campground.

   On a 1/3-mile high-banked clay oval, Monster Hall Raceway offers a full season of WISSOTA-sanctioned racing, scheduled each Friday evening May through August. Special dates this year include the Northern Wisconsin Tour on Wednesday, June 16; the WISSOTA Late Model Challenge Series on Thursday, July 1; and the season’s finale, the Monster Mash Invitational, held on Friday and Saturday evenings, September 10 and 11.

   On August 20, many representatives of Clark Electric Cooperative and Clark Electric Appliance and Satellite, Inc., will be in the audience to enjoy the action, featuring the Powder Puff Race. Each year, these organizations sponsor one race at Monster Hall Raceway, turning the event into an outing for their employees and board members.

   This year, according to raceway owner and promoter Randy Landwehr, each regular race program at Monster Hall Raceway features WISSOTA modifieds, super stocks, street stocks, Midwest modifieds, and 2-man cruisers. The latter class, designed as an entry-level class, is a favorite of the fans at the racecourse. The 2-man cruisers require exceptional teamwork, as two people are required to drive each machine: a “pilot” to operate the steering and brakes and a “co-pilot” to work the throttle. Needless to say, resulting races can be wild and unpredictable at best.

   In addition to Monster Hall Raceway, this year’s Wisconsin members of WISSOTA include tracks in Antigo, Arcadia, Ashland, Eagle River, Menomonie, New Richmond, Rice Lake, Three Rivers, Seymour, Shawano, St. Croix Falls, and Superior. The association also includes raceways in Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Montana, Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario.

   Monster Hall Raceway is located five miles east of Unity on Cty. Hwy. P, then 1/4 mile north on Cty. Hwy. F. Racing action begins at 7:30 p.m., with the pits and gates open at 5 p.m. and “hot laps” scheduled for 6:30. For further information, call 715/223-4336 or 223-3336, or visit www.racewissota.com/mhr.—Linda Hilton