Indiana's HEA 1002 Ties Utility Profits to Performance, But Commercial Manufacturers Aren't the Priority

Governor Braun signed HEA 1002 into law this week, requiring three-year rate plans and tying utility profits to metrics including affordability and service restoration times. On paper, it's framed as a landmark affordability reform. Reading the actual text, the strongest protections target residential customers, the same pattern that has defined Indiana utility regulation for years.

Small and mid-size manufacturers in the commercial rate class don't have the privately funded consortiums and IURC representation that large industrial customers maintain. If history is a guide, commercial customers will continue to carry an outsized share of the bill, and any residential protections added over time tend to get backfilled into commercial and small industrial rates. The one real opening in HEA 1002 is the performance language itself: when utility profits are tied to service quality and restoration metrics, commercial customers who are organized and armed with hard outage and power quality data suddenly have leverage at the IURC they didn't have before. That leverage disappears if you don't have the data to use it.