Manufacturing News
August 24, 2026
August 24, 2026 · Statewide · Story 1 of 4
NIPSCO Leaves 30,000 Customers Dark for 12 Days, Including 17,000 in Gary
As of Sunday, August 23, NIPSCO was still working to restore power to roughly 30,000 customers, with nearly 17,000 of them in Gary alone, twelve days after the August 11 derecho struck with 99 mph straight-line wind gusts and killed seven people. NIPSCO set a restoration target of end of day Tuesday, August 25 for Gary. That deadline had already slipped once before that date.
The slow restoration matters operationally: a 12-day outage is not a weather event anymore. It is a reliability failure. Governor Braun activated the National Guard, requested an expedited FEMA disaster declaration covering 54 counties, and told NIPSCO publicly to put every available resource in the field and get creative.
Why the restoration dragged: the NIPSCO outage Gary operators experienced is not just a function of storm severity. It reflects what happens when vegetation management is deferred and grid hardening is blocked, which brings us directly to the regulatory layer.
For your morning huddle
- Q
If my facility is in Lake or Porter County and served by NIPSCO, what do I need to check today?
Audit your backup generator autonomy in hours, not in fuel tank capacity alone, but in runtime against your actual critical load. The August 11 outage ran 12 days. If your generator is sized for a shift-length event, it was not sized for this. Get a quote this quarter on either a second NIPSCO feed from a separate substation or on-site natural gas generation sized to critical loads; both options carry 12-to-18-month lead times, so the decision window is now.
From the brief, August 24, 2026
- NIPSCO Leaves 30,000 Customers Dark for 12 Days, Including 17,000 in Gary
- The IURC Contradiction: Denied the Investment, Owns the Oversight
- The NiSource Share Sale: Governance Story, Not an Operational Budget Story
- The AES Indiana Story: Settlement Clears the Path to a September 8 Rate Decision
TEG Daily, before your morning huddle
A short Indiana energy and manufacturing scan, delivered before the workday starts.
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