Manufacturing News
October 2, 2026
October 2, 2026 · Porter County · Story 3 of 3
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.
For your morning huddle
- Q
What should I ask NIPSCO before the next storm, not after?
Ask where your feeder sits in the restoration priority queue and whether your load qualifies for priority restoration. That answer tells you more about how long you'd be down than the size of the generator sitting outside your office.
Briefing note
A rare derecho with 100-110 mph straight-line winds and confirmed EF-1/EF-2 tornadoes tore through Northwest Indiana on August 11, 2026, knocking out power to more than 290,000 NIPSCO customers and leaving Konrady Plastics in Portage without shop-floor power. CEO Leah Konrady kept orders moving by routing work to 'friendly competitor' shops in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, and the company needed nearly a month of overtime, including weekends, to catch up once power returned.
- 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.
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
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