NIPSCO Schahfer Units 17 and 18: Offline, Costly, and Headed for a FERC Decision

Unit 18 at NIPSCO's RM Schahfer generating station has been on forced outage since the first DOE Section 202C emergency order in December 2025. Unit 17 is also down. Neither unit will produce a single megawatt-hour during the next 90-day order period expected to begin June 21, 2026.

NIPSCO previously estimated keeping Schahfer operational beyond 2025 would cost more than $1 billion. That didn't stop the utility from filing with FERC, Docket EL2636, seeking to recover Section 202C compliance costs through ratepayer rates. That recovery is not guaranteed. It is a contested FERC determination, and the outcome is what Indiana industrial and commercial operators need to be watching right now.

The compounding problem: NIPSCO's own filings put coal purchase costs at approximately $126 million annually, roughly $10 million per month. Every month of forced retention extends a cost line that NIPSCO's own Integrated Resource Plan assumed would be gone. The long-term savings that were supposed to produce rate relief for named parties in the rate case settlement, US Steel, NLMK Indiana, and Walmart, are being eroded in real time. At the same time, a subdocket created within that same settlement is restructuring the ratepayer base to accommodate new large data center loads. The pool absorbing Schahfer retention costs is also being reconfigured to help fund data center growth.