The Industry's Own Watchdog Says the Numbers Don't Add Up
When utility companies propose a billion-dollar transmission line, they don't just ask regulators to take their word for it. They submit detailed cost-benefit analyses — projections showing that the benefits of the project will far outweigh the costs, and that the electricity demand it's meant to serve is real and growing.
What's unusual about the Gopher to Badger / MariBell project is that the person whose job it is to independently verify those numbers — MISO's own market monitor — has been raising red flags for years.
Dr. David Patton is the president of Potomac Economics, the independent firm hired by MISO to serve as its Independent Market Monitor. His job is to act as a watchdog over the grid operator's markets and planning processes — to make sure the numbers are honest and that ratepayers aren't being asked to fund projects they don't actually need. He is not an activist. He is an economist with a PhD who has spent his career in energy markets, including serving as an economist for the U.S. Department of Energy.
And he has repeatedly challenged the assumptions behind the Tranche 2.1 transmission portfolio — the planning package that includes the Gopher to Badger line.
According to local reporting from SW News, Patton's analysis found that MISO's estimated benefits for the project are 257% larger than his own independent calculations — meaning MISO may be overstating the value of the project by more than two and a half times. The report notes that Patton "has been consistently raising these concerns over the past two years and MISO has not addressed them."
The dispute escalated in 2025, when MISO took the extraordinary step of asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to effectively bar Patton from weighing in on transmission planning at all — arguing it was outside the scope of his duties. FERC rejected that request in July 2025, finding that MISO's own rules "unambiguously" authorize the market monitor to review actions that affect the economic efficiency of its markets. FERC Chairman Mark Christie noted pointedly that electric bills have surged in recent years, with millions of people struggling to pay them.
Separately, Patton warned FERC that MISO's planning process lacks sufficient independent oversight and that there are "enormous economic incentives for certain segments of MISO's participants to over-build transmission, at the expense of its transmission customers."
To translate that out of economist language: the companies that build and own transmission lines make money by building transmission lines. The bigger the project, the bigger the guaranteed return on their investment. An independent watchdog raising concerns about whether all that building is actually necessary is not a welcome presence.
This is not a fringe argument being made by upset landowners. It is a documented, technical dispute at the highest levels of energy regulation — one that goes directly to the heart of whether the MariBell line is genuinely needed, or whether ratepayers and landowners across Southeast Minnesota are being asked to bear enormous costs for a project whose benefits have been significantly overstated.
The regulatory proceedings before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission are where these questions will ultimately be answered. We intend to make sure they are asked.
