Six years after Wisconsin regulators approved it, the Nemadji Trail Energy Center in Superior will not be built. Its owners, Dairyland Power Cooperative and South Shore Energy, a subsidiary of Minnesota Power's parent Allete, told the Public Service Commission in a letter filed on 28 October that they are abandoning the roughly $1 billion gas plant, and asked the commission to acknowledge that they give up all rights under its approvals.
Approved In 2020, Stuck Ever Since
The commission granted the certificates in 2020 for a plant of 550 to 625 MW on the Nemadji River, near Duluth. The utilities had proposed it as baseload capacity to replace retiring coal units while they invested in renewables. According to the letter, nothing has been built, neither the plant nor its generation tie line.
Opposition came from several sides. Indigenous and environmental groups challenged the approval for years; Clean Wisconsin and the Sierra Club asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take their case, and the court declined. The city of Superior refused local approvals, and residents raised emissions, noise and wetland concerns. The site lay near a cemetery where about 200 ancestors of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa are buried, Wisconsin Public Radio reports.
What finally sank it was the partner. Last December Minnesota Power ended its agreement to buy the plant's output, and its vice president of public policy, Jennifer Cady, told the commission that the air, wetland and construction permits had expired because of the delays. The October letter gives no reason of its own, and neither report says what the owners will build instead. Brett Korte of Clean Wisconsin called the decision great news.
Wisconsin Still Wants Gas
The state is not turning away from gas generation. WPR ties the current wave of projects to an expected 40 percent rise in Wisconsin's electricity demand by 2032, driven by data centers. POWER Magazine counts what is moving: regulators recently approved Invenergy's Red Oak Ridge station of nearly 1.2 GW and the 324 MW Foundry Ridge, both of which We Energies wants to buy. We Energies itself won approval in 2025 for 1,100 MW at Oak Creek and 128 MW at Paris and plans a 750 MW plant in Outagamie County, and Invenergy filed in August for two Calumet County stations of close to 2 GW together.
Permits Expire
The lesson for anyone who counts on a new plant, the utility's or their own, is that an approval is not a plant. Permits have a validity date, a city can still say no after the state has said yes, and one offtaker walking away can end a project that looked settled on paper. A data center developer waiting for utility capacity should ask which permits are in hand and who has signed for the output. With on-site engines or gensets the same holds on a smaller scale: the air permit often sets the schedule as much as the equipment delivery does. Our power plants page has more on such projects, and Wisconsin's statewide data center review is the other half of the same picture.
Sources: Wisconsin Public Radio, POWER Magazine
