Wisconsin Clean Energy Guide

Wisconsin spent two decades as a clean energy afterthought — its renewable portfolio standard topped out at 10% back in 2015 — and then became one of the Midwest's fastest-moving solar markets almost overnight. Utility-scale solar capacity jumped from 1,648 MW to 2,106 MW during 2024 alone, the state's first large-scale battery came online in June 2025, and the largest solar project in Wisconsin history, the 1,315.6 MW Vista Sands, is under construction in Portage County. The catalyst isn't policy. It's load.

A Policy Vacuum Filled by Utility Capital

On paper, Wisconsin has one of the weakest clean energy policy frameworks in the Midwest. In practice, its investor-owned utilities are executing one of the region's most aggressive solar buildouts anyway — because load growth and coal retirements demand it, not because Madison does. Understanding that gap is the key to reading this market.

The RPS That Froze in 2015

Wisconsin was a pioneer once: in 1999 it became the first state to enact a renewable portfolio standard without restructuring its utility industry. But the target — set at 10% of statewide retail sales by the end of 2015 under 2005's Act 141 — was cleared two years early, in 2013, and the statute has been frozen ever since. Providers today only have to maintain their 2015 renewable percentages, and no RPS increase has passed as of mid-2026. Governor Tony Evers' Executive Order 38, issued in 2019, set a goal of 100% carbon-free electricity consumption by 2050 and created the Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy, but it is a goal, not a binding statute.

The generation mix reflects that legacy. Renewables supplied about 12.3% of Wisconsin's utility-scale generation in 2024, per EIA data, and roughly 27.8% was carbon-free once you count the two reactors at Point Beach, the state's only nuclear plant at about 1,185 MW. Gas generated roughly 40% and coal roughly 32%. For a state whose average retail electricity price runs 12.72 cents/kWh, the decarbonization runway is long — and the RPS provides no schedule for it.

Net Metering Is Officially Up for Grabs

• Net metering: Available to customers of investor-owned and municipal utilities below utility-specific size thresholds, with standardized interconnection covering systems up to 15 MW. But the PSC opened a statewide investigation after MGE and Alliant proposed changes, and on July 24, 2025 the commission decided how the review would proceed — declining to order a Wisconsin-specific value-of-solar study. Compensation rules could change.
• Bidirectional metering: We Energies was ordered to implement bidirectional metering by June 1, 2025, ending a costly two-meter requirement for its solar customers.
• Property tax exemption: Wis. Stat. 70.111(18) exempts solar, wind, and biogas energy systems — plus associated storage and transfer equipment at the same site — from property taxation.

The Projects: One Developer's Fingerprints Everywhere

Wisconsin's utility-scale fleet has a distinctive shape: the state's investor-owned utilities — We Energies, Wisconsin Public Service, and Madison Gas and Electric — jointly own most of the big plants, and Invenergy developed a striking share of them. The exception, and the market's defining project, belongs to an independent.

• Vista Sands Solar (Portage County): 1,315.6 MWac of solar plus 300 MW of battery storage from Doral Renewables — the largest solar project in Wisconsin history, at roughly $2 billion. The PSC approved it unanimously in December 2024; construction runs from March 2025 through December 2028.
• Badger Hollow Solar Park (Iowa County): 300 MW, owned 100 MW each by We Energies, WPS, and MGE and developed by Invenergy. Phase 1 came online in December 2021 and phase 2 in December 2023; its 830,000 panels serve roughly 90,000 homes, making it the state's largest operating solar plant.
• Koshkonong Solar Energy Center (Dane County): 300 MW of solar plus a 165 MW battery, under construction with solar expected online in 2026 and storage in 2027.
• Paris Solar-Battery Park (Kenosha County): 200 MW of solar (online December 2024) plus a 110 MW, 4-hour battery that entered service in June 2025 — Wisconsin's first large-scale storage project, able to serve 130,000 homes.
• Darien Solar Energy Center (Rock/Walworth Counties): 250 MW across more than 600,000 panels on roughly 2,000 acres, fully online in March 2025 at a cost of about $474 million, with a 75 MW battery planned for 2026.
• Red Barn Wind Park (Grant County): 92 MW across 28 turbines, operating since April 2023 and powering more than 50,000 homes — the state's newest wind farm and the first project to go from proposal to operation under the PSC 128 wind siting rule.

Note the asymmetry: solar is sprinting while wind has flatlined at 826.2 MW of capacity, unchanged since Red Barn. Storage is the fastest mover in relative terms — the state had just 5.7 MW installed through 2024 before the Paris battery expanded the operating fleet roughly twenty-fold in a single stroke. And the pipeline keeps coming: Alliant placed eight utility-scale solar plants totaling 639 MW in service in 2023, and MGE's project pages list Sunnyside, Ursa, Saratoga, Good Oak, Gristmill, Emerald Bluffs, Akron, and Dawn Break targeting 2026-2030 in-service dates.

Siting: The 100 MW Line — and the Bill That Would Erase It

Wisconsin's siting regime splits cleanly by size. Projects of 100 MW or more need a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity from the Public Service Commission and do not need local approval; anything smaller goes through county and town permitting. Wind gets an extra layer of state protection through the PSC 128 siting rule, which caps how restrictive local wind ordinances can be. That structure is why developers supersize: clear 100 MW and the counties can't stop you.

SB 3 would blow that up. The bill from Senator Howard Marklein and Representative Travis Tranel would require wind and solar projects of 15 MW or more to win approval from every city, village, and town where they would be located before the PSC could act — municipalities get 90 days, with silence counting as approval. Sponsors say projects are tearing communities apart; the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, the Realtors, and the MacIver Institute back it, while utilities, trade unions, environmental groups, and the Conservative Energy Network line up against. It drew a public hearing on March 10, 2026 but had not been enacted as of that date. The tension is real either way: several towns have adopted restrictive ordinances, and a developer has sued two Marathon County towns over their wind rules.

The newest flashpoint is batteries. Kenosha County — home of the Paris battery — adopted Wisconsin's first county BESS ordinance in 2024, then imposed a 12-month moratorium on battery storage permits on May 19, 2026 after residents raised fire-safety, evacuation, and liability concerns; Pleasant Prairie and Bristol followed with local rules. Days after Robin Energy Storage filed a PSC application on June 18, 2026 for a battery facility on about 12 acres near an existing substation — with roughly $8 million in local payments offered over 20 years — the Town of Wheatland unanimously passed a resolution asking the Legislature to put clear limits on large-scale storage. Even Vista Sands took flak on its way through: opponents raised the threatened greater prairie chickens of the adjacent Buena Vista Grassland, and Doral committed to a 500-foot buffer around DNR-identified booming grounds before the PSC's unanimous approval. We track every active dispute on our Wisconsin opposition tracker.

Data Centers Just Rewrote the Load Forecast

Wisconsin's demand story changed faster than any state forecast anticipated. Microsoft is investing more than $20 billion in data centers at Mount Pleasant in Racine County, with 15 additional data centers planned across two new campuses — the village approved expansion site plans in January 2026. Up the lakeshore in Port Washington, Vantage Data Centers is building a $15 billion, 672-acre campus — the Lighthouse project with OpenAI and Oracle — with announced renewable commitments of 179 MW of wind, 1,266 MW of solar, and 505 MW of battery storage.

The utility response is enormous. We Energies is planning for a 3.9 GW increase in demand over the next five years from the Microsoft and Vantage projects alone, with potential for 4-5 additional GW behind them. Parent WEC Energy Group's five-year capital plan totals $37.5 billion, including $12.6 billion for renewables and $7.4 billion for gas plants and storage; pending PSC requests cover seven solar projects plus two gas plants worth $5.5 billion and roughly 3 GW. The Wisconsin Policy Forum expects statewide peak demand to hit 17.1 GW by 2030, up from 14.6 GW in 2024, with at least five major data centers planned statewide.

The Legislature has noticed — and deadlocked. Dueling January 2026 bills captured the fight: Republican AB 840 would bar utilities from passing data-center infrastructure costs to other customers but require any renewable energy serving data centers to be built on-site, while Democratic AB 722 would create a separate rate class for very large customers, require 70% renewable energy for tax-break eligibility, and mandate prevailing wages. Neither had passed as of late January 2026. Who pays for the data center grid — and how clean it must be — is now Wisconsin's central energy question.

Outlook: The Buildout Is Outrunning the Policy

Wisconsin is about to test whether a state can run a multi-gigawatt clean energy expansion on utility economics alone. The RPS is a dead letter, the 2050 carbon-free goal is aspirational, and the Legislature is fighting over local vetoes rather than targets. Yet the capacity numbers keep climbing: 3,658 MW of operating wind, solar, and storage, $7 billion invested, $28.9 million a year flowing to landowners in lease payments, and $25.5 million a year in state and local taxes.

The next three years will be decided at two pressure points. First, siting: if SB 3 or a successor hands 15 MW-and-up projects to municipal vetoes, the 100 MW CPCN strategy that produced Vista Sands and Koshkonong stops working, and the battery moratorium wave in Kenosha County suggests storage will face the same gauntlet. Second, the data center rate fight: a 2.5 GW jump in statewide peak demand by 2030 has to be paid for by someone, and whether the answer favors on-site renewables, a special rate class, or ratepayer-funded gas will shape every procurement decision WEC and its peers make. Watch the PSC docket — in Wisconsin, that's where the energy transition actually happens.

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