I Thought They'd Be Glad to See the Stacks Come Down

For decades the Rock River Generating Station burned coal on a site in the town of Beloit, and for most of that time its stacks wore alternating bands of orange and white. The striping was a federal aviation requirement. The plant sits in the Rock River Valley a few miles south of the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport, and pilots on approach needed to pick those stacks out on a hazy afternoon.

Nobody around there called it aviation striping. They called them the candy canes.

The plant stopped generating in 2009 and was formally retired in 2012. A few years later I went to work on the project that would take it down entirely and build a natural gas plant on the site next door, and I assumed, without ever really examining the assumption, that demolishing a retired coal plant's smokestacks was going to be the easy part of my job. Who mourns a smokestack?

I found out I was wrong about that early, and it taught me more than anything else on the project.

My title was Director of Project Outreach at Alliant Energy, and the project was the expansion of the Riverside Energy Center in Rock County, filed with the Public Service Commission at roughly $700 million. I oversaw the local relationships. I built a community advisory group of residents and stakeholders that met monthly, ran listening sessions and open houses so people could put a question straight to an engineer instead of to me, and kept the elected officials informed. Inside the project team, my job was to be the community's voice in a room the community wasn't in.

That last part is the one that matters for the rest of this.

I started in the community in August of 2014. The company announced its intentions that November, and we filed the formal application (Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, or CPCN) the following May. The Commission voted to approve at the end of March 2016, and issued its written decision that May. The engagement work ran three months ahead of the announcement and nine months ahead of the filing, and after that the two calendars moved together the whole way.

I want to be honest about why. A rate-regulated project runs on a long clock because the process demands one, so the runway wasn't generosity. What was a choice was how we spent it, and using that time to get to know the people who would live next to the thing is the most consequential decision on that project that nobody had to fight about.

None of which made it a quiet process. Riverside drew real opposition from more than one direction, and the directions were not the same. The Citizens Utility Board and the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group intervened on ratepayer grounds. Clean Wisconsin pushed back on the project's reliance on natural gas. Those are serious organizations arguing statewide energy policy, and their arguments would have been the same wherever the plant went. Then there were neighbors who came to the Commission's hearings in Beloit to talk about air quality and about how close all of this sat to where their kids slept.

Those are two different oppositions that happen to show up on the same night, and communities routinely mistake one for the other. Policy opposition arrives with a position already formed and isn't really about you. Proximity opposition is about you entirely, and it is the one that can still be shaped by how the applicant behaves.

Which brings me back to the candy canes.

We heard it almost immediately once we started asking. Those stacks were how people gave directions. They were what told you that you were nearly home coming north out of Beloit. Sixty years of a landmark had accumulated on top of a piece of infrastructure nobody had ever been asked to have feelings about, and my clean assumption that the community would be glad to see them go was just wrong. Not wrong on the merits of demolition. Wrong about what the stacks were.

The new plant's stacks are much shorter, and no aviation rule required a thing to be painted on them. The company striped them orange and white anyway. That was a nod to the site's past, and it came entirely from the community.

The other one I think about is the cooling tower. The existing wet cooling tower at Riverside threw a heavy visible plume in cold weather, and local stakeholders told us what that actually meant on the ground: a vapor cloud sitting in the valley, fog and icing risk along a heavily traveled county highway, and visibility problems for people whose houses were right there. So while the expansion plans were still being drawn, Alliant went back and retrofit the existing tower with technology that heats and dries the air stream before it exits, which largely eliminated the visible plume. Then, when the formal application went in, plume-abated hybrid cooling was written into the baseline engineering specifications for the new unit. The Commission's own final decision ended up ordering the company to control cooling tower plumes, fog, and ice, which tells you the neighbors had identified a real problem and not a preference.

Neither of those was in the original plan. I'm not sure the company would have arrived at either one on its own.

That story tends to land as a nice anecdote about corporate goodwill, which is not what it is. It's an engineering change and a capital cost that a community talked its way into, a year before there was a hearing at which to raise it. That is a community getting something real out of an applicant. It just doesn't look that way, because it never had to become a fight.

So if you're on the community side and you want the one thing I took from the other side of the table, it's this. A project team wants a project that moves, and a community that feels truly heard can help move a project. That gives a prepared community far more room to ask for real value than it usually believes it has, and the room is widest early, before anyone is on the record and positions have hardened. Once everybody is testifying, the specifications are already drawn.

The part I'd never have predicted came at the hearing itself. One member of that advisory group was a young mother who lived close in, and she came into the process a skeptic with real concerns. Over the months, as she learned the project and watched her group's feedback actually change things, her position evolved. On the night of the public hearing she stood up and testified in support. What anyone would have likely penciled in as NIMBY opposition turned out to be the opposite, and her testimony carried because it was hers. It also never would have happened without months of proof points behind it.

Riverside was a natural gas plant, and I know many of the questions in Wisconsin right now are about data centers. What I took from it isn't about power plants, and it doesn't carry over because the facilities are alike. They aren't. It carries over because the moment is the same one. A large project arrives in a place that didn't ask for it, everyone forms a view faster than they get information, and the whole thing turns on what got built between the people involved before the record opened.

I've been on the applicant's side of that moment. It's most of why I do this work now, and it's most of what I bring to a room.

Building the Links That Matter.