Defense and Aerospace Site Selection Turns to Power Capacity, With a Question for Indiana's Grid

Daniel BurkePublished every day

Area Development's Q3 2026 feature by Vista Site Selection's Janie Hanna argues that record defense spending, a $1 trillion fiscal 2026 budget with a $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 request, and a record $49.1 billion in 2025 defense-tech venture funding, are pushing site selection toward workforce-depth analytics and power capacity instead of the industry's traditional clusters. Indiana already has real wins to point to: the ACMI National Security Industrial Hub near Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane has grown past 1,500 acres with tenants including iRocket and Limitless Aeronautics, Rolls-Royce completed a $1 billion decade-long Indianapolis build-out, and L3Harris tripled its Fort Wayne footprint with a $125 million expansion. But MISO's own 2026/2027 planning shows a 5 gigawatt regional capacity deficit that could widen to 14 gigawatts by 2029/2030, and a site without a confirmed dual-feed industrial substation can get screened out of a national defense search before a visit is ever scheduled. Manufacturers already competing with data center load growth for the same regional capacity should read our breakdown of utility cost allocation for data centers and Indiana manufacturers.

Impact: Indiana is already winning pieces of this buildout: ACMI's National Security Industrial Hub near Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane expanded to over 1,500 acres this year with tenants like iRocket and Limitless Aeronautics, Rolls-Royce completed a $1 billion decade-long Indianapolis build-out now producing more of its defense engines than any site worldwide, and L3Harris tripled its Fort Wayne footprint with a $125 million expansion. But MISO's own 2026/2027 planning shows a 5 GW regional capacity deficit that could widen to 14 GW by 2029/2030, meaning the power headroom Indiana is pitching to defense prospects may be thinner than published numbers suggest, and sites without confirmed dual-feed industrial substations risk getting screened out before a site visit is ever scheduled.
Watch: Watch MISO's 2026 Transmission Expansion Plan rollout and whether Indiana utilities disclose dual-feed capacity data for industrial sites competing for defense-manufacturing relocations.
For the huddle: Do we know whether our own facility sits on a confirmed dual-feed industrial substation, given that MISO's modeling shows a growing regional capacity deficit that could disqualify Indiana sites from national defense-manufacturing searches before anyone even visits?

Sources

How Aerospace and Defense Site Selection Criteria Are Evolving · areadevelopment.com

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