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Cardinal–Hickory Creek project to begin
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PLATTEVILLE – The developers of the Cardinal–Hickory Creek power transmission line announced that work on the Wisconsin portion of the 102-mile project began Monday.

“To keep the Cardinal–Hickory Creek project on schedule with the in-service date of December 2023 and provide the transmission needed to support over 100 renewable generation projects in Wisconsin and the region, we are moving forward now as planned,” said ATC Senior Project Manager Jacob Valentine.

Work on the project is beginning this week while several lawsuits are pending in state and federal courts.

A joint news release from American Transmission Co., ITC Midwest and Dairyland Power Cooperative, the developers of the project, said the lawsuits “have not affected the advancement” of the project, and that all three have “the regulatory authorization to move forward with next steps.”

The lawsuits against the project include a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the Public Service Commission’s unanimous approval of the project two years ago over an accusation of a conflict of interest with then-PSC commissioner Michael Huebsch, who engaged in encrypted communications with employees of one of the developers. 

The latest court filing against the project was filed in U.S. District Court in Madison Oct. 8 seeking a preliminary injunction to stop work on the project. 

On Oct. 18, Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled that those seeking the injunction would be entitled have the injunction granted if they could post $32 million in two bonds — an amount equivalent to what stopping the project would cost the developers. 

Both sides of the project criticized Frost’s ruling. 

“It just is fundamentally unfair that the conservation groups and Dane County and Iowa County prevail on the merits, that the judge finds that we’ve met the legal standards to grant an injunction to stop a transmission line that was illegally approved, but unless we can post a $32 million bond, then the line goes forward anyway,” Howard Learner of the Environmental Law & Policy Center told Wisconsin Public Radio.

“If the bond requirement is met and the injunction becomes effective, this injunction will cause needless construction delays, postpone the delivery of essential project benefits to electric consumers, and add unnecessary costs to this essential capital project — costs which will ultimately be passed along to energy consumers,” the developers said in a joint news release Oct. 18. “The Cardinal–Hickory Creek project is needed more today than when initially approved by the PSCW in 2019. Currently there are 114 generation projects, including 108 with more than 17 gigawatts of renewable generation, dependent upon its construction — enough to power millions of homes with clean energy. This includes nearly 1.5 gigawatts of renewable generation from Wisconsin.”

The original lawsuit was filed in February by Driftless Area Land Conservancy, the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Refuge Association. The lawsuit contends that the project would harm the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, over which the power lines would cross, in addition to Southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. The request for a preliminary injunction was filed Oct. 8.

The environmental groups’ news release said that “Clear cutting of trees has already occurred on the Iowa side of the route up to the border of the Refuge, and now the companies plan to start clearing the right-of-way for their proposed route up to the border of the Refuge on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River. The apparent goal is to get as much of the line built as possible before the court can decide, so that any finding of illegality would be more difficult to enforce.”

A federal court lawsuit seeks to overturn the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s approval of the project’s going through the wildlife refuge.

Work on the Wisconsin side started with vegetation removal in Dane County Monday, with work on the project in Grant and Iowa counties scheduled to start in the next few weeks.

ATC is building the eastern part of the project from the Cardinal Substation in the Town of Middleton to the future Hill Valley Substation in Montfort. ITC Midwest will build the western half of the project from the Hill Valley Substation to the Nelson Dewey Substation north of Cassville. 

In Southwest Wisconsin, the project starts at the Nelson Dewey Substation near Cassville and goes near the U.S. 61/Wisconsin 81/Wisconsin 129 south intersection in Lancaster, heads northeast to the new substation in Montfort, then roughly follows U.S. 18 to Dodgeville and U.S. 18/151 around Mount Horeb before going northeast to the Cardinal substation. 

The project is expected to be online in December 2023.