I'd like to call this city council workshop for uh tonight uh to order, please.

Uh can we have a roll call?

Uh Vice President Squire.

Here.

Councilmember Miller.

Here.

Councilmember Williams.

Here.

Councilmember Erdman.

Here.

Councilmember Nino.

Here.

Councilmember Cass.

Here.

President Burdick is running behind, so we do have a quorum.

So go ahead.

All right.

I'll turn this over to City Manager Laner to introduce our schedule and the people are going to be presenting.

So, Kevin.

Yeah, thank you very much.

So, this is the first of uh several workshops that we're gonna have as it relates to the subject of data centers.

Um I am very happy to have uh Becky Volk from Alliant Energy here.

Uh she is the president of their Wisconsin Energy Group.

Um, and this is the first of five to address uh various topics.

Uh one of the ones uh that has been a significant topic has been uh energy and uh the use of energy at a data center, and specifically uh how uh rates are established and how they relate to the average consumer here in the city in Jadinesville and in the surrounding region.

So the way the format's gonna work is we have a 30-minute uh presentation roughly and then uh 15 minutes uh for the city council to ask any questions of our folks from Alliance.

Um again, thank you for the attention and thank you for being here uh today.

So, with that, I'll have uh Becky come up, introduce herself.

Thank you very much.

Okay, thank you.

Can everybody hear me?

Okay, great.

Um, thank you for having me.

I am Becky Vaughn with Alliant Energy, um, and I'm really here to talk about energy, how it's generated, how it's transmitted, how it's delivered to our customers, and then how rates are set.

How rates are set first by the utility and then how that process works through the public service commission of Wisconsin.

So I really my interest here is to be available as a resource to answer any questions that you have.

Um, the rest of our team at Alliance stands ready to address any questions or concerns.

Um, and just I just want it to be very clear that we are agnostic when it comes to who our energy customers are, right?

So because we're a regulated monopoly, those that live in our service territory don't have a choice who they're provide who their provider is, right?

Similarly, we don't get to choose our customers.

So if a customer comes into our service territory and they call us and say, hello, Alliant, we need electricity at such and such an address, we have a legal obligation to serve that customer.

So I just want to make sure that we're all kind of working from the same set of data and that we're really clear and transparent about what we do.

We provide electricity and gas to our customers, nearly a million between Wisconsin and Iowa, electric customers, and about 450,000 gas customers also split between Wisconsin and Iowa.

And so once it's really important that we also understand kind of the basics, and I'm not gonna oversimplify it.

That's a big difference too when we're talking about energy markets and things that are happening happening across the country.

So when we read or hear some of the national narrative about where our electricity prices going, what about affordability for electricity?

It's really important that we all level set and understand how we operate in the state of Wisconsin.

So the way that it works in other states like California, like Virginia, like Washington DC, is going to be different than what works and how we operate here in Wisconsin.

And I think that's a really important thing for everybody to keep in mind that when you're talking about electricity, it's all very local.

It's all very dependent on what market you're sitting in.

So within Wisconsin, we are part of MISO, and that's what you see on the right hand side.

MISO controls, they're they're called a regional transmission operator.

And what they do is 15 states plus the Canadian province of Manitoba are a part of MISO.

It's not it stands for mid-continent independent system operator.

And the way that I've always thought about MISO as a regional transmission organization is MISO sort of sits as the air traffic controller.

If you think of all of the power plants that are located in the colored part of the map, right?

So all 15 states plus Manitoba.

Every single portion of that map has power plants sitting within its own state or province borders.

That can be solar facilities, it can be natural gas facilities, coal facilities, wind facilities, battery storage, all sitting within the each state within MISO.

MISO, think of those power plants as airplanes.