Dec. 9, 2025 4p
(WGTD)---A company that wants to build a natural gas-fired power plant in Somers will be holding an open house Thursday.
It’ll be held at Somers Village Hall with the first two-hour-long session beginning at 1:30 and the second at 5:30.
The plant—proposed for a site just west of the interstate and north of State Highway 142—is being developed by a company called Invenergy, the same firm that built a huge solar farm in the Town of Paris.
In a presentation to the village board last week, company Development Director Daniel Birmingham laid out details of the proposed Red Oak Energy Center. The plant would run only intermittently during periods of high demand for electricity, and would be powered by “clean-burning” natural gas, he said.
While the process still results in harmful emissions, the quantity of the pollutants is far less than what a coal-fired power plant would produce.
Still, environmentalists are expected to mount a fight at the state Public Service Commission to block construction of the plant.
Climate change concerns weren’t part of last week’s 35-minute discussion on the matter. “From a village point of view, I’m extremely excited about this,” said Village President George Stoner. “I am not worried about the greenhouse gasses at all,” he said.
In a statement to WGTD, Birmingham defended the peaker plant proposal. “Providing reliable, affordable, cleaner energy to Wisconsin businesses and communities requires a mix of domestic energy sources, including natural gas,” he said. “Invenergy has developed solar and battery storage projects in Kenosha County and Red Oak Ridge will complement those to support the energy needs of today and tomorrow.”
The 35-acre site is in the vicinity of a proposed Microsoft data center.
While the village doesn’t have the power to block the plant, even if it wanted to, the village and Invenergy must negotiate a local development agreement. The village stands to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in impact fees that would be shared with the county and the nearby Town of Paris.
At last week’s meeting, Birmingham said a projected sharp increase in electric usage is driving the proposal. High energy-consuming data centers are part of the equation.
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