Appeal of Indiana's Data-Center-Only Utility Reopens the NIPSCO Rate Increase Question

The IURC approved GenCo, a NIPSCO subsidiary supplying electricity exclusively to hyperscale data centers in Northwest Indiana. Amazon Web Services anchors it with an $11 billion, 2.4-gigawatt campus in New Carlisle; Blackstone Infrastructure Partners holds a 19.9% stake acquired for $1.5 billion; a second agreement with Alphabet is confirmed, and GenCo is in discussions to supply up to 3 additional gigawatts.

What did not make the headline: the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana and Indiana's own Office of Utility Consumer Counselor have both filed notices of intent to appeal the September 2025 approval. If the appeal succeeds, Amazon's January 1, 2027 contractual power delivery date carries real financing and construction delay exposure. Amazon also holds an opt-out allowing it to cut 1,200 megawatts as late as March 2029, which conflicts with a February 2025 IURC tariff order requiring data centers to give five years' notice before reducing demand more than 20%. That gap has not been publicly reconciled.

Meanwhile NIPSCO's 500,000 residential customers have absorbed $77 per month in increases since July 2023, and the Citizens Action Coalition projects average single-family bills going from $136.53 to $171.27 by March 2026, a 25.45% increase before new gas generation comes online. Watch the Indiana Court of Appeals docket. The first substantive hearing date sets the timeline for everything downstream, including how much of the interconnection and generation cost base eventually lands in C&I rate design.