The Voice of Janesville and Rock County
PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY • CIVIC LITERACY • COMMON-SENSE CONVERSATIONS
Vol. 2, No. 44 — October 9, 2026 – 2182 Words – a nine-minute read.
Vol. 2, No. 44 — October 9, 2026 – 2182 Words – a nine-minute read.
A SERIES ON GM/JATCO — WHERE WE STAND — the Electrical Grid and More
Parts One and Two of this series have now circulated. Part Three is presented in this edition of Hypothetically Speaking. Three more installments will follow, including a concluding piece that draws the threads together — six installments in all, running through Election Day.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Each paper stands on its own. Together, they examine a deceptively simple question: What happens to the GM/JATCO site after November 3?
The referendum will settle a political question — whether voters approve or reject the proposed requirement for public approval of certain large-scale development or disposition of the property. But whichever way the vote goes, the harder questions remain:
What can this land support? At what cost? Under what rules? And who should establish those rules?
Those questions do not disappear when the ballots are counted. The site’s environmental conditions, infrastructure needs, financial realities, development standards, and long-term public interests will remain.
That is why this series looks beyond the referendum itself. Rules first. Second, negotiations and projects. Before the community can meaningfully evaluate any particular proposal, it needs to understand the ground on which that proposal would be built.
We also want to remind readers about the upcoming GM/JATCO Community Forum at Hedberg Public Library on October 15. Representatives of differing perspectives will discuss the site in one room, on the record.
The objective is the same as it is in these pages: facts over hype, evidence over volume, and questions before conclusions.
This is not a contest to see who can spend the most, make the biggest promise, or shout the loudest. It is an opportunity for the community to hear different perspectives side by side, ask questions, examine the facts, and make its own judgment.
Read Parts One, Two, and Three as they appear. Watch for the remaining installments. And, if you can, join us on October 15 at Hedberg.
The referendum may decide one question. It will not decide all of them.
— RH Gruber
Publisher/Editor
Part Three: WHAT THE GRID CAN ACTUALLY CARRY: THE INFRASTRUCTURE QUESTION NOBODY’S PRICED OUT LOUD
Every number attached to the GM/JATCO site so far has been about money. Eight billion in investment. Thirty million in cleanup. Four hundred fifty million as a referendum trigger.
Here’s a number that matters just as much and has gotten far less attention: twenty-five.
That’s the amount of power, in megawatts, that Alliant Energy’s existing distribution equipment on site can currently deliver, with upgrades, inside a twenty-four-month window. The site is served from a substation on Delevan Drive at 138 kilovolts, across three separate lines, and early studies suggest that voltage level could eventually support up to 200 megawatts or more. But “eventually” and “could” are doing a lot of work in that sentence. What’s actually available today, without a much larger transmission buildout, is 25 megawatts.
The first data center proposal on the table called for up to 800 megawatts, spread across eight to eleven buildings.
That’s not a rounding gap. That’s a thirty-two-fold difference between what the site can draw today and what the leading proposal says it needs.
WHAT HAPPENS BEYOND 25 MEGAWATTS
Getting past that ceiling doesn’t just mean waiting longer. It means a different scale of project, involving American Transmission Company, the regional operator responsible for the high-voltage lines that move power across Wisconsin, not just around Janesville.
Until recently, nobody had put a public number on that. Records obtained through an open records request now show that someone did, privately. On October 17, 2025, Coleman Peiffer, Alliant’s senior manager for data center services, emailed city contact Jimsi Kuborn with the high-level results of ATC’s indicative study of the GM site.
The study looked at two load scenarios:
- 250 megawatts: completion by 2029–2030, with an estimated $50 million to $140 million in “facilities” costs and $30 million to $90 million in “network” costs. Combined, that’s $80 million to $230 million.
- 450 to 800 megawatts: completion by 2030–2031, with $150 million to $440 million in facilities costs. Peiffer’s email lists the network costs as the “same as above,” which would put the combined estimate at $180 million to $530 million.
Peiffer was careful to say the figures are “very high level,” that they require more studies and modeling (hence the wide ranges), and that they include a significant contingency. They are not a quote or a commitment.
Even so, several things stand out:
- The cost range is wide. The top of the 800-megawatt estimate is three times the bottom, and both ends are a long way from the twenty-five megawatts available today.
- No one has said who pays. The email doesn’t say who bears these costs, whether Alliant, ATC, ratepayers, the city, or the developer. That may be the most consequential open question in the document.
- The timeline is long. Full 800-megawatt service is pegged at 2030–2031, years from now, and well after the 2028 modernization of Alliant’s Riverside Energy Center.
- The study has gaps. It addresses 250 megawatts and 450 to 800 megawatts but says nothing about loads in between. It also doesn’t say what “facilities” and “network” cover. Those labels commonly distinguish site-specific equipment from shared grid upgrades, but the email doesn’t define them, and the answer determines who ends up paying.
- It’s a year old. The estimate dates to October 2025, and Peiffer himself flagged that more modeling was needed. Whether a refined version exists is something the public should be told.
REALITY CHECK:
“Alliant Energy is prepared to serve this project” and “here is the specific transmission buildout, cost, and timeline required to serve this project” are two different claims. The city now holds a preliminary version of the second one, a range of $180 million to $530 million for the full-scale scenario, in an email exchange that residents saw only through a records request. A preliminary range is still not a public, reviewable study.
THE REGIONAL PICTURE IS BIGGER THAN ONE SITE
This isn’t just a Janesville problem, and that’s worth understanding rather than dismissing. Regional grid planners have started using language like “extreme demand shock” to describe what happens when hyperscale data center loads stack up faster than new generation can be built to serve them. Janesville’s proposed 800 megawatts would land on the same regional grid carrying Meta’s 400-megawatt data center in Beaver Dam, at a moment when Alliant’s own Riverside Energy Center near Beloit, with 603 megawatts of existing capacity, isn’t scheduled for modernization until 2028.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages transmission and wholesale power markets across fifteen states, says the regional system can absorb this kind of growth. That may well be true. But “the regional grid operator says it can handle it” is exactly the kind of claim that ought to be independently verifiable, not simply repeated, before a city commits to a project sized at this scale.
WATER AND NOISE: SMALL NUMBERS THAT DESERVE SCRUTINY, NOT DISMISSAL
The other infrastructure figures floating around this project cut the opposite direction: they sound too modest. City officials have described expected water use at around 80,000 gallons a day, comparing it to a mid-sized dairy farm or a craft brewery, and projected noise in the 50-to-70-decibel range, attributing both to modern, air-cooled server designs.
Those numbers may be entirely accurate. Air-cooled hyperscale designs genuinely use dramatically less water than the older cooling-tower systems that made early data center water use a national controversy. But “may be accurate” isn’t the same as “independently confirmed,” and residents who packed a city council meeting in October 2025 demanding full release of the proposal details were making exactly that point not that the numbers are wrong, but that nobody outside the negotiating table has had the chance to check them.
The power study makes that point concrete. The one infrastructure estimate that has surfaced in writing came with a cost range spanning hundreds of millions of dollars and a warning from its own author that it needs more work. A facility drawing hundreds of megawatts and occupying a quarter mile of the city’s largest redevelopment site isn’t the kind of thing where “trust the estimate” is a reasonable substitute for a published, third party-reviewable engineering study.
WHAT A DIFFERENT TENANT WOULD DEMAND INSTEAD
The infrastructure conversation didn’t disappear when the first data center proposal did. The two realistic buyer categories for this site are hyperscale data centers and advanced heavy manufacturing, like EV battery production. They stress different infrastructure in separate ways, but neither one is a light lift.
A data center’s infrastructure demand is dominated by electricity: an enormous, concentrated load with modest water use and traffic. A battery giga factory has a different profile, with heavy daily rail traffic for raw chemicals and finished packs, substantial industrial water and sewer needs for materials processing, and significant power demand—though far less than 800 megawatts. Either tenant could face major barriers before construction begins: a 25-megawatt distribution limit, an aging rail spur, or a water main designed for auto assembly rather than industrial-scale processing. The ATC study indicates that even a mid-sized 250-megawatt load could require tens of millions of dollars in upgrades and might not be ready until 2029–2030.
So, the study Janesville needs isn’t “can we serve a data center.” It’s “what does this site’s existing power, water, sewer, and rail infrastructure actually support, across the realistic range of buyers, and what does closing each gap cost.” That’s a broader, more useful study than anything tied to one company’s letter of intent, and its foundational work that should have been finished before any specific proposal reached a city council vote, not requested by residents afterward.
WHAT A REASONABLE STANDARD WOULD REQUIRE
Five things belong to that standard, regardless of which project or which outcome in November:
- A published, independently reviewed capacity study for power, water, and sewer, not a developer’s internal estimate relayed secondhand through city staff.
- Public release of the ATC indicative study itself, not just a summary email, along with definitions of its “facilities” and “network” cost categories and any updated modeling since October 2025.
- A specific accounting of who bears the cost of upgrades beyond the site itself, including transmission-level work, and on what timeline.
- Public release of the underlying assumptions behind headline figures like water use and noise levels, so residents can evaluate the estimate rather than simply the conclusion.
- A standard evaluation applied consistently to every serious proposal for this site, not negotiated case by case behind closed doors.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The referendum will decide whether voters get a say on projects above a certain dollar threshold. It won’t tell Janesville whether the grid can actually carry what’s being proposed, or what it costs to make that true. We now know a little more than we did: a preliminary study puts the upgrades for a full-scale project at somewhere between $180 million and $530 million, with service not arriving until 2030–2031 at the earliest. We still don’t know who pays, what the figures cover, or how firm they are. Twenty-five megawatts of available capacity and an 800-megawatt proposal are both real numbers, and the gap between them now has a price range attached. That range needs a public, verifiable answer whether this specific project closes, stalls, or gets replaced by something else entirely.
COMMUNITY FORUM PREVIEW: GM/JATCO REFERENDUM — HEDBERG PUBLIC LIBRARY OCTOBER 15
GM/JATCO: FACTS BEFORE THE VOTE
There will be plenty of opportunity between now and November 3 to tell Janesville voters what they should think about the GM/JATCO referendum.
On October 15, the Rock County Civics Academy is taking a different approach.
What if, instead of another political debate, we simply tried to understand the question?
That is the purpose of the GM/JATCO Community Forum: Facts Before the Vote, at Hedberg Public Library.
We searched for panelists armed with facts. Many were considered and only a few met that standard. The panel is now set:
- Gale Price, former City of Janesville Economic Development Director
- Cathy Erdman, SNOW Janesville
- Alyssa Capozziello, No Janesville Data Center
- Mandy Witt, Coldwell Banker Commercial, bringing a commercial real estate and development perspective
Four people. Four perspectives. One community.
And a complicated question that deserves more than a campaign slogan.
THIS ISN’T A DEBATE
Let’s be clear about what this forum is—and isn’t.
There are no candidates. No one is running for office. There will be no winner. There will be no endorsement of a “yes” or “no” vote.
Instead, this is an effort at fact-finding and civic education—giving voters an opportunity to examine the referendum and its potential implications through several different lenses.
The objective is pretty simple:
What do we know?
What don’t we know?
What does the evidence actually tell us?
What are we assuming?
And what could the consequences be?
Those questions don’t fit neatly into a campaign commercial. They shouldn’t.
BRING THE FACTS. LEAVE THE HYPE.
There is certainly no shortage of opinions about GM/JATCO.
There is advertising. There are competing political messages. There are predictions about economic development, environmental impacts, infrastructure, property values, jobs, and Janesville’s future.
But somewhere beneath all that noise is a very real piece of property—and a very real set of decisions that Janesville will have to make.
· What can approximately 250 acres of former industrial property realistically support?
· What will cleanup and redevelopment cost?
· Who pays?
· What infrastructure will be required?
· What environmental limitations exist?
· What rules should govern future development?
· What happens if the first proposal doesn’t work?
And the most important question: What happens after the election?
We deliberately assembled panelists with different experiences and perspectives:
· Municipal governance.
· Community/environmental concerns.
· Referendum/data center concerns.
· Commercial/Industrial real estate development.
Agreement isn’t the objective. Understanding is.
The test isn’t whether everyone reaches the same conclusion.
The test is whether the public has enough information to reach its own conclusion.
MONEY CAN BUY ATTENTION. IT CAN’T BUY FACTS.
The referendum has attracted money, organizations, and considerable political energy.
That’s part of democracy. Campaigns are entitled to make their case. But advertising can only tell us what someone wants us to believe. It doesn’t make the underlying claim true.
Facts don’t become more accurate because they are repeated more often—or because more money is spent repeating them.
That’s why this forum matters. Voters deserve the opportunity to examine the evidence behind the claims.
CLAIM. EVIDENCE. CONTEXT. CONSEQUENCES.
The October 15 discussion will be built around a simple discipline:
Claim. Evidence. Context. Consequences.
And, when appropriate:
What would change your mind?
That’s a question rarely heard in political advertising.
It should be heard more often in civic conversation.
There will be no “gotcha” questions designed to produce a viral clip. No scorekeeping. No expectation that anyone needs to “win.”
The goal is something more useful: Better information. Better questions. Better decisions.
And the decision belongs to the voters.
THE VOTE WON’T MAKE THE PROPERTY DISAPPEAR
Here’s something that shouldn’t get lost in the campaign: The referendum will answer one question. It will not answer all the questions that follow.
On November 4, regardless of the outcome, the GM/JATCO property will still be there. So will:
· the cleanup obligation.
· the infrastructure questions.
· the development opportunities and limitations.
· the need for zoning, planning, budgeting, negotiation, and public oversight.
The campaign signs will eventually come down. The weather will change. But the property won’t.
Janesville will still have to decide what to do with it—and how to do it responsibly.
That’s why we keep coming back to one principle:
Rules first. Second, negotiations and projects.
Before deciding what to build, we ought to know what we are prepared to permit.
Before negotiating the next deal, we ought to know the rules under which that deal will be considered.
And before asking voters to make a consequential decision, voters deserve the facts necessary to make it intelligently.
THIS IS WHAT CIVIC EDUCATION IS SUPPOSED TO DO
· You don’t have to be for the referendum.
· You don’t have to be against it.
· You don’t even have to have made up your mind.
· You just need to be willing to ask questions.
That’s the premise behind the Rock County Civics Academy.
Not telling people what to think. Helping people think more carefully.
On October 15, we invite Janesville and Rock County residents—yes, no, and undecided—to set aside the campaign rhetoric for an evening.
· Listen.
· Question.
· Examine the evidence.
· Consider the consequences.
· Then make your own decision.
GM/JATCO COMMUNITY FORUM
FACTS BEFORE THE VOTE
Thursday, October 15
5:30–7:00 p.m.
Hedberg Public Library — Public Meeting Room
Open admission
A moderated panel discussion will be followed by audience questions.
The program will be carried live and available for replay through JATV.
Before you decide how to vote, come hear the questions that deserve answers.
Bring your questions.
Bring an open mind.
Make your own decision.
This is a civic-education and fact-finding program—not a political candidate debate.
The moderated panel discussion will be followed by questions from the audience.
The program will also be carried live and made available for replay through JATV.
Before you decide how to vote, come hear the questions that deserve answers.
- Bring your questions.
- Bring an open mind.
- Make your own decision.
Share Hypothetically Speaking – The Voice of Janesville and Rock County Weekly on Substack.com or Subscribe for Free ROCK COUNTY CIVICS ACADEMY | Substack
Public Accountability • Civic Literacy • Common-Sense Conversations
“Democracy flourishes when citizens understand not only how government decides—but why.”
Community Spotlight: Havana Coffee
If you are looking for a place to reflect on your civic journey—or just fuel up before a council meeting—stop by Havana Coffee at 1250 Milton Avenue. It is a true Janesville gem, where espresso meets engagement.
With hearty food, warm service, and a strong commitment to local journalism, Havana Coffee proudly supports the Rock County Civics Academy and all who believe in informed participation.
We are grateful to Daniela and her team for creating a space where ideas percolate and conversations matter.
Nowlan Law Firm and Attorney Tim Lindau
We also extend our thanks to Attorney Tim Lindau and the Nowlan Law Firm for their support of civic education and democratic renewal. We value Tim’s encouragement—and his belief in the power of our mission.
We extend special thanks to the John and Lynn Westphal family and the Mark and Lori Warren family. Along with John and Lynn, Mark and Lori are deeply committed to this community and its future. Their support for the Rock County Civics Academy and our programs strengthens the outlook for a better Rock County community.
Together, with partners like Havana, Nowlan Law, the John and Lynn Westphal family, and the Mark and Lori Warren family, we are building a culture of engagement that honors both tradition and transformation.
Bill Sodemann and Phones Plus graciously provide in-kind support to RCCA, and we are grateful for their contribution.
HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING: Where ideas meet action—and citizens shape the future.
A CALL TO LEADERSHIP
Leadership isn’t about ego—it’s about service.
It’s showing up, listening deeply, and acting with purpose.
Three ways to begin:
• Volunteer with a civic group.
• Serve on a local board or commission.
• Run for public office and lead the change.
“If not you, who? If not now, when?” — Hillel the Elder
📚 SUBSCRIBE FOR INSIGHT
Your weekly dispatch from Wisconsin’s heartland to America’s horizon.
Every Friday, Hypothetically Speaking explores the intersection of policy, people, and possibility—inviting dialogue and celebrating civic courage.
Subscribe on Substack → Search Rock County Civics Academy
📰 substack.com | Keywords: Rock County Civics Academy
🌐 ENGAGED: Civic engagement is always within reach: 📍 rockcountycivicsacademy.org
📘 Facebook | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack.
FINAL THOUGHT: Democracy is a skill—one that strengthens with practice.
Stay curious. Stay engaged. Stay connected.
Because the next chapter of Rock County’s story is being written right now.
©2026 Hypothetically Speaking and Rock County Civics Academy. All rights reserved. Produced in partnership with the Rock County Civics Academy to promote open dialogue, ethical leadership, and civic participation across Wisconsin’s heartland. Publisher/Editor: RH Gruber, Correspondents: Paul Murphy, DuWayne Severson, All Illustrations by B. S. MacInkwell, unless otherwise noted. Published by CSI of Wisconsin, Inc. P. O. Box 8082, Janesville WI 53547-8082 (All Rights Reserved)
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
No responses yet