AES Indiana / IURC: Why September 17 Is the Date to Watch

TEG Daily has been tracking the AES Indiana rate case for thirty days across ten episodes. Here is what is new.

The IURC granted a rehearing request from the Citizens Action Coalition after it came to light that AES Indiana executed a service agreement with Google for its Monrovia data center: more than a week before filing rebuttal testimony in its own rate case, and nearly a month before the evidentiary hearing, without disclosing this to regulators. That omission from sworn regulatory proceedings is the specific conduct that triggered the commission's unusual decision to reopen an already-decided case.

The Office of Utility Consumer Counselor's petition, filed by Consumer Counselor Abby Gray, targets a 40-basis-point ROE reduction from 9.5% to 9.1%, elimination of $15 million in vacant-position payroll recovery, and reversal of the $3 million rate case expense pass-through. Those are real dollars for every Marion County manufacturer on the AES grid.

The September 17 hearing is not simply an affordability replay, however. Watch whether the commission narrows scope to those four OUCC objections, or expands to include the Google-Monrovia disclosure issue and the BlackRock acquisition. Expansion means a longer, more disruptive timeline before a final revised order lands.

Layered on top of this: U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz sent a letter to the Energy Secretary and Interior Secretary on September 9 requesting a federal review of LEAP in Lebanon and Indiana's broader data center buildout: Meta's $10 billion campus, Amazon's $11 billion project, Google's $2 billion Fort Wayne campus. The unresolved question is whether hyperscale data center load gets its own rate class with dedicated cost recovery, or continues to be allocated across existing industrial and commercial rate classes. That determination has not been made in AES's current tariff, and the IURC's affordability report indicates it may be revisited before AES's next infrastructure filing.

If you signed the October 2025 AES Indiana settlement alongside Walmart and the City of Indianapolis, get legal representation monitoring that September 17 docket directly. The concessions you negotiated could be on the table again.

For deeper context on how data center cost allocation flows through to your bill, see Utility Cost Allocation for Data Centers: How Indiana Manufacturers Avoid Paying for Grid Buildout They Didn't Cause.