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Sounds worthwhile! Better now than after the data centers get built and operating.
Data centers are the problem, not the solution.
Hoosier customers are paying now to build out the utility infrastructure for all those data centers, which will bring minimal jobs compared to the massive tax breaks we are handling out. The only people who will benefit from data centers are utility companies, who will turn around and charge residential customers more for power and water because they can.
The push by legislators to land more data centers is yet another admission that they don’t see a future for Indiana worth investing in.
This will be interesting as the legislature last session gave the utilities an open invitation to charge any new technology and “experiments’ directly to the rate payers and not to the share holders. Every other company has to bear the cost of R & D until the product comes to market and then they can recoup their investment (think medications), however utilities can charge the rate payers (who have no say) the cost of any project they choose to persue. Let’s remember how many years Public Service Indiana customers paid for the Marble Hill Nuclear Plant which did not produce one watt of energy. Edwardsport, estimated cost was $1.9 billion, final cost was $3.5 billion. Again the rate payers were stuck paying for the debacle. Utilities have no real incentive to manage costs knowing they can just pass them on to their monopolized customers. At one time Indiana had some of the lowest rates in the country, not any more.
+1
+1
Local utilities are cash cows for the “parent”n companies that bought them up to such them dry for profits . IP&L sale was a bad deal for everybody but Mitch Daniel’s .
+1
In many respects, the damage has been done. The legislature has rubber-stamped every utilities’ backed bill to push costs to customers. The regulators’ tools are limited and their hands are tied by legislative actions.
^this. If the regulators have no discretion (taken away by the Indiana General Assembly) then they can only rubberstamp what the utilities have proposed. The issue is with IGA (who seem shocked that utility rates are increasing). Don’t they know the implications of the legislation they passed?
You’re all missing the real issue.
Indiana indeed used to have some of the lowest electric rates in the country – in some cases by a wide margin. That was when approximately 80% of the electricity generated in the state came from coal-fired power plants. Has anyone here paid attention to what has happened to the state’s coal-fired power plants? Federal and state laws and regulations first obligated the utilities to invest billions of dollars to removing sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury, among other pollutants, from their emissions (think: scrubbers and low NOx burners). Then, climate regulation began to push utilities to retire all their coal plants, including the ones in which they had already invested billions of dollars in environmental controls, in favor of new gas-fired plants and renewable energy sources. That has resulted in the investment of more billions.
Add to these already massive investments the construction of new electric transmission infrastructure to transport electricity from geographically disparate renewable energy resources so that utilities can achieve various renewable energy targets and mandates, and you have the recipe for big rate increases. A state dependent on coal-fired electricity transitioning to all gas and renewable cannot escape the rate increases that go along with that transition.
So the toxic metal poisoning and air pollution is an acceptable cost to dump on neighbors? Coal WAS so cheap because industry never had to deal with those costs. Ah let’s go back to good old days and MAGA.
If you encourage roof top solar the electricity gets consumed where it’s produced, but if your goal is to make industrial lobbyists richer, then by all means create giant solar and wind farms that need new transmission facilities, but ignore the AWS data center near New Carlisle that will use as much electricity as ALL of Indianapolis on an average day!
James, your first point is correct – IN no longer has cheap electricity because of federal emission regulations. The second point is also true, however, those costs are just beginning to increase as new electric transmission facilities are being built and the cost is socialized across a wider area, including Indiana. These costs are passed along to ratepayers thru trackers with little regulatory scrutiny.
With respect to rooftop solar, the IGA sided with utilities and removed the incentive known as net metering. Instead of meters simply spinning backwards, the utilities are required to pay a wholesale cost for the rooftop energy sold back to the grid. From a strict economic perspective, this makes sense. But it effectively guts the distributed solar industries.
Our Indiana General Assembly lawmakers have received millions of $ from utility lobbyists. In adddition, the same public utilities have made millions of $ of campaign contributions.
I used to work for IPL and they were always considered the cash cow for AES. Before they boughtb DPL, it was easy too see how much profit AES Indiana sent the corporate headquarters. It was close to $1 million a day!
If you remember the disastrous AES Indiana computer system upgrade, I was always told that it was estimated that it would cost about $10 million to replace the old mainframe based in house software. AES Indiana spent $40 million and “outsourced” the project to the IT department at AES Electropaulo. So basically they just “moved” the money within the corporation Worse yet, I think AES Indiana paid the full cost of a system that is going to be used in other AEs divisions, like AES Ohio.