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Indianapolis Star
10-07-2025
- Business
- Indianapolis Star
Data centers are inevitable, but why should Indiana pay for their energy demand?
Indiana has given $168 million in subsidies for data centers, which are projected to more than double the state's electricity demand very quickly while only creating a few dozen jobs. As a result, despite its already tight fiscal budget, the state has started planning to massively expand its energy grid, even looking decades into the future to invest in an emerging small modular nuclear reactor industry. It is very problematic that large industries get these massive tax breaks while electricity costs soar for the average consumer in Indiana. Artificial intelligence, after all, is a vital national security asset, the federal government is responsible for regulating interstate commerce and we are competing with geopolitical enemies like China in an arms race to develop it. More: Indiana taxpayers shouldn't subsidize $168M in data center corporate welfare | Opinion If the federal government wants to win that race, it needs to step in and give regular consumers a way to escape energy market volatility or spread the cost of data centers' electricity demand across the nation. The 'Big, Beautiful Bill' phases out energy tax credits, making shielding consumers from energy market volatility much more difficult. This tax credit returned 30% of the cost of a consumer's investment in energy efficiency, including through a solar array for their homes. Such an array could shield consumers from rate increases while their utility companies invest in expanding grid capacity for data centers. The energy tax credits helped more consumers than they should have, to be sure, but could be brought back at a much lower cost if they were limited only to homeowners, rather than larger businesses, as homeowners would likely have a more difficult time obtaining the credit to invest in solar energy without them. In my case, the federal tax credit enabled me to obtain a solar energy loan that costs less per month than my electricity bill otherwise would have been. Another solution would involve a major federal investment in energy infrastructure, akin to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 that built up the interstate as we know it today. The main difficulty preventing the construction of a national interstate highway system was the apportionment of funding between the federal government and the states. The frustration of voters in certain states and localities bearing more of the cost of rapid increases in energy demand due to data center development is the major difficulty preventing the construction of nationwide artificial intelligence infrastructure today. More: Braun's smart IEDC picks must now tackle Indiana's development spending mess | Opinion President Dwight D. Eisenhower, recognizing that an interstate highway infrastructure was a national security issue, nationalized the cost so it would be spread out among all the beneficiaries of the system. The federal government could step in and do the same today to incentivize independent energy producers to fulfill data centers' energy demands rather than investor-owned utilities. This would shield regular consumers from the rapid spike in electricity costs. First, Indiana would have to deregulate their energy supply. Utility monopolies have had complete control over energy distribution in the state in their government-granted service territories since 1983. 'Utilities were fighting over customers and there was no real competition. There weren't independent energy producers or transmission owners… [but] what has happened in the last 20 years is we have had major reforms that have created a competitive wholesale market,' said Kristina Wheeler, former vice president and staff counsel for Indiana Municipal Power Agency and general counsel for the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. 'Anyone approved and qualified… [to] build generation or transmission can do so [but] they can't sell directly to any business or home, they have to go through the utilities that existed in 1983.' As such, utilities are able to keep a chokehold on their service territories. Takanock, Inc., for example, aims to develop data centers and provide 'reliable and resilient power solutions for those facilities.' They tried to purchase energy from producers independently from investor-owned utilities, to avoid passing on costs to consumers earlier this year. NIPSCO, however, denied their request, despite allowing many other large-load customers to do so. 'Takanock understands that cost-shifting to 9 other utility customers is a non-starter, and is willing to bear the reasonable costs to extend service to its future data center developments,' Kenneth Davies, founder and CEO of Takanock Inc., wrote in a petition to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. 'We also believe there are reasonable regulatory methods to protect consumers and balance the interests of the significant economic development these projects will bring to Indiana.' Georgia recently resolved this issue by forcing utility companies to allow large-load customers like data centers to buy energy from independent producers. 'Everybody should have an opportunity to serve and take on the associated risk, and my concern is what's been happening in Indiana is we're just being very protective of those legacy providers,' Wheeler added. Reliable Energy, Inc. is working toward leveling the playing field in Indiana for independent energy producers, and recently won a settlement requiring Duke Energy to study if their coal plants could be sold to a third party instead of being retired. If our energy supply were deregulated, and the federal government were able to invest in independent energy production facilities, they would likely focus on natural gas-fired power plants, since they are one of the cheapest to build. Just 10 new data centers proposed in the state will likely require 9,700 megawatts of energy. Building natural gas-fired power plants to fulfill this demand would likely cost around $7,954,000,000, or $820 per kilowatt of energy based on national average construction costs from 2022. However, natural gas plant construction by Indiana's legacy utilities routinely runs more than double that amount per kilowatt, likely due to the cost of aging infrastructure. Duke's Cayuga power plant and NIPSCO's R.M. Schahfer gas peaker plant are two such examples. For comparison, data centers built across the country in 2024 only added around 7,000 megawatts of demand to the energy grid. If nationwide trends continue, expanding the grid would only require a $5,740,000,000 yearly investment from the federal government. The federal government is one of the few entities capable of making such large investments, but could easily recoup the cost by requiring these energy producers to return a percentage of plant profits until the capital costs are paid off. The federal government already spends around $20 billion to subsidize the fossil fuel industry simply to lower energy costs, and does not get most of this money back. The Chips and Science Act involved a $52 billion investment in semiconductor manufacturing, so comparatively, it would be a small investment to prepare the energy grid to meet the demand of data centers. It has taken mass blackouts and electricity rationing for China to treat energy production like the national security issue it is. Hopefully, Indiana and the U.S. will take action before then, otherwise the utility monopolies' stranglehold on consumers will continue, and energy will become increasingly unaffordable.
Boston Globe
05-05-2025
- Boston Globe
The treasure of democracy that Madeleine L'Engle discovered in America's national parks
L'Engle's unaffected love of country might strike some as a relic of simpler times. In fact, it is not. The white middle-class 1950s family road trip was more than a vacation — it was an act of Cold War patriotism, a consumer choice, and an investment in national identity at a time when suburbanites were building bomb shelters in their backyards. 'In an era of anti-communism, the ability of American families to afford … a summer vacation demonstrated the superiority of the free enterprise system,' writes Susan Sessions Rugh in her 2008 book, 'Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations.' L'Engle's station wagon, packed with brand new camping equipment purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch, carried her through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park via the winding Skyline Drive, 'beautifully kept up' by government employees, she noted. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's a big country, and our history was made all over it,' the Ford Motor Company affirmed in an advertisement for its station wagon, 'America's schoolhouse on wheels,' the vehicle for navigating a 41,000-mile network of new roadways being constructed under President Eisenhower's National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. America's largest public works project facilitated 'speedy, safe transcontinental travel' for leisure as well as national security amidst threats of nuclear annihilation. Advertisement 'The only thing that makes us push along without taking our time is the camp-site situation,' L'Engle lamented outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Campgrounds reached 300 percent capacity at peak season and operated on a first come, first served basis. Late-day arrivals risked being shut out. As car ownership soared and roads facilitated access to remote grandeur, the National Park Service (NPS) hired more rangers, built more visitor centers, and cleared more campsites. Still, it could barely keep up with demand. The number of visitors to the national parks during the first three months of 1959 was up more than 24 percent over the same period the previous year. Advertisement The southwestern landscape around the Painted Desert National Monument, named a national park in 1962, reminded L'Engle of space age artist Chesley Bonestell's 'pictures of alien worlds.' Ekaterina Pokrovsky/Adobe It was amidst a southwest string of parks that landscape and democratic principles coalesced in L'Engle's imagination: Mesa Verde, the Painted Desert (its Petrified Forest National Monument would be designated a national park by Congress in 1962), the Grand Canyon, and Zion. L'Engle had previously published five novels, realism set in locations where she had lived: the genteel blocks of prewar buildings on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Switzerland's snow-crusted Alps, Florida's Atlantic coast. But here she encountered 'high mountainous cliffs with flat tops and eroded sides. And strange fairy tale rock formations appearing out of nowhere.' There were 'red, lava like cones and pyramids stretching out to the horizon on yellow desert. Purple and blue shadows … like the surface of another plant.' Advertisement In 'Wrinkle,' L'Engle's protagonist, Meg, travels through time to defeat an evil force and rescue her father from the planet Camozotz — a place of such strict conformity that children at play must bounce their balls in precise unison. But her first stop is Uriel, a peaceful planet covered in 'tiny, multicolored flowers' like the ones blanketing the Smoky Mountains in spring; elsewhere on Uriel, Meg travels across 'a great plateau of granite-like rock shaped into enormous monoliths…. They were like nothing Meg had ever seen before.' A view of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Don Mammoser/Adobe In Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, located just north of the New Mexico border, L'Engle and her family descended cliffs via 'precipitous steps cut in the rocks, and ladders' to tour a 'honeycomb' of 12th-century Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings built into alcoves in the canyon walls. All of it was — and continues to be — maintained by NPS employees. That evening they attended a ranger-led campfire lecture on 'how ruins and civilizations are dated.' Such fireside programming became a national parks staple in the 1920s, an opportunity for rangers to educate visitors about 'important natural and historical values of the area.' Afterward, Navajo park workers performed a traditional dance. At the campfire talk at the Grand Canyon, Hopi natives performed a 'spectacular' dance, and the ranger 'stepped very firmly on the toes of all who think Indians and everybody else in the world should be converted to Christianity.' Never had L'Engle encountered cultures so different from her own, even abroad. She was a blue-eyed WASP, her mother a member of the Society of Colonial Dames, an Episcopalian raised by Episcopalians and educated at elite girls' schools that demanded conformity to white, Western norms of the 'cultured class.' She liked the ranger's argument that 'to compare our civilization and religion with the Indian was stupid.' Why assume our way of life is better? There were other ways, and those ways did not have to be alike to be equal. Advertisement In a climactic scene on Camazotz, the evil 'IT' attempts to infiltrate and control Meg's mind. To break its hold, she wields the Declaration of Independence: ''We hold these truths to be self-evident!' she shouted, 'that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' ''But that's exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike.' For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. 'No!' she cried triumphantly. 'Like and equal are not the same thing at all!'' Last year, the NPS served a record 331.8 million visitors — 269 million more than in 1959. My family was among them. L'Engle's map and journal in hand, we retraced that pivotal portion of her trip. We climbed the same precipitous steps and ladders at Mesa Verde, where a young ranger taught us about the 27 pueblos and tribes associated with that land and helped my children (ages 7 and 9) identify native plants with magical names like rubber rabbit brush. The kids were participating in the NPS Junior Ranger program, begun in the 1960s to help children learn about the parks and to 'cultivat[e] future generations of park stewards.' Advertisement The author with her sons, Jasper, 9, (right) and Gideon, 7, at Mesa Verde National Park. Monica Housen When my kids completed their identification tasks, the ranger instructed them to raise their right hands and 'repeat after me': 'As a junior ranger I promise to protect Mesa Verde and all national parks. I will stay on the trails, be nice to plants and animals, and pick up trash. I also promise to respect other people and cultures who might be different from me.' The ranger high-fived my kids and said 'Awesome job! You are our newest junior rangers.' My own history with national pride is a study in pendulum swings. The Cold War ended when I was about the age my children are now; Reaganism and the 'moral majority' heightened ideological and economic division; the '90s passed in a haze of youthful apathy followed by the too-brief burst of unity after 9/11. Then came the whiplash of Obama-Trump. But in that moment, and many others along our trip, I felt something I hadn't in a long time — a welling of pride and hope in America, both for what it gives us and for what it invites our children to give back. America remains an ongoing project. Democracy, like national parks, cannot thrive without generous and imaginative investment. President Woodrow Wilson's Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service within the Interior Department and directed it to 'conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.' Last month, a few days before Earth Day, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order entrusting the health and legacy of our national parks to DOGE representative and former oil executive Tyler Hassen. The order gives Hassen control of Department of the Interior policy, management, and budget, and instructs him to 'create significant efficiencies' toward supporting DOGE's Workforce Optimization Initiative, created by the same Executive Order that led to the firing of approximately 1,000 National Park Service employees. Advertisement On Earth Day, the Interior Department responded to Trump's 'National Energy Emergency' — which experts say does not exist — by announcing it will expedite the mining of federal land for natural energy resources including crude oil, coal, and uranium. The national parks, in all their historical and natural grandeur, are bipartisan treasures, held in trust as living reminders that America's greatest strength lies in its capacity to contain multitudes. Stewarding this land is a commitment to the most democratic idea of all.
