Manufacturing News
October 2, 2026
October 2, 2026 · Porter County · Story 3 of 5
Derecho and NIPSCO Outage Cost Konrady Plastics a Month of Overtime
The August 11 derecho left more than 290,000 NIPSCO customers in Northwest Indiana without power and shut down Konrady Plastics' Portage shop floor, in Porter County, for weeks. CEO Leah Konrady told the National Association of Manufacturers that competitors in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati covered her orders with overtime and spare equipment time while the plant was dark. Catching up once power returned took nearly a month of overtime, including weekends. Konrady had a generator sized for the office, not the floor, which is a common way plants size backup power. Ask NIPSCO where your feeder sits in the restoration priority queue and whether your load qualifies for priority restoration. If NIPSCO has an open reliability proceeding at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, that's where manufacturers can put outage costs on the record.
- Impact
- Konrady's outage happened just four days after the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission unanimously rejected NIPSCO's $741 million gas infrastructure upgrade plan, and NIPSCO's own Schahfer coal backup units were offline for unplanned repairs on the exact day of the storm, meaning the severity of this outage is tangled up in an active regulatory fight over whether NIPSCO gets capital to harden its grid. Konrady's gap, an office generator but nothing sized for the shop floor, is likely representative of the broader small-to-mid plastics and machining tier across Porter and Lake counties that invests in CNC equipment but not standby power.
- Watch
- Watch for NIPSCO's next infrastructure-plan filing at the IURC and its pending FERC request for $38 million in forced coal-run cost recovery, both of which bear directly on future outage risk in the region.
- For the huddle
Do we have backup power sized for the actual shop floor (not just the office) and do we have mutual-aid relationships with regional competitors the way Konrady did, in case of a multi-week outage?
From the brief, October 2, 2026
- Indiana Industrial Assessed Value Surge Leaves a TIF Depreciation Gap
- Amazon's Greenwood Robotics Plant Will Recruit Your Welders and CNC Operators
- Derecho and NIPSCO Outage Cost Konrady Plastics a Month of Overtime
- SEL's $25M West Lafayette Expansion
- Meta and Be Pro Be Proud Bring Trades Simulators to Jeffersonville
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