By Amanda Durish Cook
MISO is reviewing an expedited project request from American Transmission Co. to connect a massive Foxconn manufacturing plant that would be Wisconsin’s largest power user.
ATC’s proposed $140 million Mount Pleasant Tech Interconnection Project is one of the first two expedited review requests for MISO’s 2018 Transmission Expansion Plan. Along with a small substation upgrade in Minnesota that the RTO has approved, the project was presented to stakeholders at Tuesday’s Planning Advisory Committee conference call, days after MISO’s Board of Directors approved MTEP 17.
ATC has proposed a new 345/138-kV substation, 14 miles of new 345-kV line and four short 138-kV underground lines to connect a southwestern Wisconsin manufacturing plant proposed by Foxconn to We Energies supply.
Foxconn, headquartered in Taiwan, is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, responsible for building Apple mobile devices, Amazon Kindles and video game consoles.
Its factory will be similarly outsized. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has framed the $10 billion plant, which is expected to create as many as 13,000 jobs, as a “once-in-a-century opportunity” and called for it to be operating by 2020. ATC has said the plant will require up to six times as much power as the next-largest manufacturing facility in Wisconsin.
ATC hopes to get the $10 billion plant connected to the grid by the end of 2019 and plans on ordering some long-lead time equipment beginning in February. It said MTEP 18 approval would arrive too late for its planned construction timeline.
The company said it received the load interconnection request from WE on Oct. 12. MISO posted ATC’s expedited request on its website Dec. 6, although it is not clear when the RTO received it.
MISO is still studying the implications of the request and will convene a Technical Study Task Force meeting in January to go over study results with stakeholders, according to Lynn Hecker, manager of expansion planning.
ATC plans to seek project approval with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission in February, with hope for approval in August.
In addition to the new substation, ATC plans to string a new 12-mile, 345-kV circuit from Pleasant Prairie to Mount Pleasant, Wis., and create two 1.2-mile, 345-kV loops into the new substation on existing transmission structures. The project also includes the construction of four new 138-kV underground lines at less than a mile apiece connecting the Mount Pleasant substation to the manufacturing plant.
Minn. Capacitor Bank
Meanwhile, MISO has already studied and approved a much smaller substation upgrade in Minnesota, making it the first expedited project approval in the 2018 package.
The project — a $500,000, 14.4-MVAR capacitor bank addition to a substation in southern Minnesota — is expected to be in service by the end of January, according to developer Great River Energy. Capacitor banks counteract a power factor lag or phase shift in a power supply.
MISO recommended the project be granted expedited status in MTEP 18 as a baseline reliability project because the substation is currently susceptible to low voltages when a generator outage is followed by a line outage, a NERC-defined contingency. The project will also improve local area voltage performance in general, Hecker said.
