A $1 billion gas plant planned for Superior, Wisconsin, has been abandoned

A natural gas plant planned for Superior, Wisconsin, with a price tag of about $1 billion, is dead. Dairyland Power Cooperative and South Shore Energy, a subsidiary of Allete, told Wisconsin regulators in an Oct. 28 letter that they will not build the Nemadji Trail Energy Center, and asked the commission to acknowledge that they are relinquishing the approvals.

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No construction ever began on the plant, which had been approved for 550 to 625 megawatts, or on the transmission line meant to carry its power. The end came after years of lawsuits, expired permits and a municipal rejection.

The Oct. 28 relinquishment letter to the Public Service Commission

POWER Magazine’s Darrell Proctor reported on Nov. 3 that the letter was filed by Daniel McCourtney, manager of strategic environmental initiatives at Allete. McCourtney wrote that no construction had occurred on the plant or on its generation tie line, and the owners asked the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to note the relinquishment of all rights tied to its approvals.

The owners had little left to hold. Jennifer Cady, vice president of public policy at Minnesota Power, told the commission in a December filing that the air, wetland and construction permits had lapsed because of delays, according to POWER. Minnesota Power also ended its agreement to buy output from the plant from South Shore Energy.

The utilities had pitched the project as firm baseload capacity to stand in for retiring coal units and to back up growing renewable investment. Supporters pointed to about 350 construction jobs, about two dozen permanent positions and roughly $1 million a year in tax revenue.

Nine years of fights from Duluth to the state Supreme Court

Minnesota Power and Dairyland announced the plant in June 2017. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approved it in October 2018, and Wisconsin’s commission followed with a 2020 approval, but a Minnesota court ruled in December 2019 that more environmental review was required, and the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin sued in February 2020 to stop construction, according to an earlier POWER report on the project’s mounting opposition.

A Wisconsin circuit court upheld the commission’s approval in May 2022, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service issued a finding of no significant impact in December 2023. Even then, local backing was eroding. The same report said at least four of Superior’s ten city council members opposed the plant, and Mayor Jim Paine, an earlier supporter, had turned against it.

The groups later asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to hear a lawsuit challenging the approval, and the court declined. The City of Superior denied its own approval over noise, pollution and impacts on wetlands near Lake Superior, concerns echoed by residents, regional tribes and environmental groups.

Allete had already begun backing away. The Oct. 28 letter came from an Allete manager, but the company had distanced itself from the project late the previous year, and Minnesota Power’s decision to end its purchase agreement removed the customer that was supposed to take much of the output.

The project’s backers were still rallying in early 2024. About 175 people attended a pro-project rally in Superior on Feb. 6 of that year, and POWER’s earlier report said construction was expected to start that spring with an in-service date of 2028. Instead, the permits expired and the schedule slipped past the point where the owners could revive it.

Fond du Lac Band burials and the gas projects still moving

The site sat near a Superior cemetery where about 200 ancestors of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa are buried, a point that sharpened tribal opposition. Honor the Earth, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the Union of Concerned Scientists also challenged the project.

Cancellation does not signal a retreat from gas in Wisconsin. POWER listed Invenergy’s Red Oak Ridge of nearly 1.2 gigawatts and 324-megawatt Foundry Ridge, approved by regulators with a Wisconsin utility planning to buy them, along with Invenergy plans filed in August for two Calumet County stations of nearly 2 gigawatts combined.

That utility has its own queue: Oak Creek at 1,100 megawatts and Paris at 128 megawatts, both approved in 2025, plus the 750-megawatt Fox North Energy Center in Outagamie County, and Forest Junction and Union Depot, at 1,200 and 750 megawatts, which the utility says could be online by December 2031.

For the owners, the consequences are mostly about what was never built. Dairyland, based in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and South Shore Energy, the subsidiary of Allete, spent years on permits and litigation for a site on Lake Superior’s western end near Duluth, Minnesota, with no steel in the ground to write off. The account of the cancellation rests on POWER’s reading of the letter, and neither utility’s own statement was available to read.

The record leaves one thing unsettled. Dairyland and South Shore have asked the commission to acknowledge relinquishment, and the order that formally closes the docket had not been reported as of Nov. 7.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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