NIPSCO Needs a Sunset Review

On August 11, 2026, I woke up to an emergency broadcast alarm on my phone declaring a tornado warning for Portage, Indiana and surrounding areas. I sat up and looked outside. It was dark, but it was quiet. There was no wind and nothing that I could see in the distance. No cause for panic - but just minutes later another one came through. This one was the same as the first, except this time it said "IMMINENT THREAT" at the top. Okay...now it was time to panic. But first I had to take a piss.

Standing in my bathroom, all seemed calm for the moment. Then the power flickered once. It was dead silent. Still nothing going on outside. The lights went off again for a couple seconds and then came back on - followed by no noise whatsoever.

Now my internal alarms were going off. I've had the power go off countless times in my 35 years, but never like that. Something was telling me that these weren't just flickers. They were the shockwaves of the grid failing miles away while something massive and dangerous was ripping through it at breakneck speed in our direction. 

My wife and I quickly got dressed and went out to our car. We needed to get down the road to somewhere safer than our small home. It had been not even 15 minutes since the first alarm woke me up, and when I exited my front door I couldn't believe what I was seeing above me. The sky was a deep green, like something out of a sci-fi movie, and the wind was just beginning to pick up. Never had I seen such a color in the atmosphere, let alone been under it.

We made it to the front of our neighborhood, so not even a minute from our house, before all hell broke loose.

The car in front of me was 10 yards away and I could barely see their taillights. The torrent of rain was so heavy that I may as well have been parked under Niagara Falls. There was nothing I could do. Again, for the first time in my life I was experiencing something. Genuine fear that this might be it. Because in my mind, if there was a tornado, it was literally right on top of us.

I quickly pulled off into a Dollar General parking lot and we waited in the car for a few minutes, shielded for the most part by the brick building - until the car's suspension started bobbing up and down. So we quickly headed in and waited out the next 20 minutes as we watched the storm from inside the dark store. Debris hurling through the air, trees falling over, the works.

It was something I'd never seen before and so was the aftermath.

Where Did All The Streetlights Go?

On that day, a "derecho" tore through the midwestern region of the United States with winds in excess of 99 miles per hour. Accompanied by tornados, it devastated cities within a matter of minutes as it roared through them.

I was personally inside Dollar General for 20-30 minutes before the calm came, and it was enough time for mother nature to eat everything she could in Portage. Like she'd be starving for half a century or more, based on the number of 50+ year old trees she brought down. They'd survived that long, but now so many were gone. They were on cars and houses; snapped in half like twigs or uprooted near a crater because all the dirt and grass went with the base.

In Portage, a house exploded and killed an elderly woman not long after the storm had come through.

Our streetlights weren't just out, they were missing altogether as we headed out of town to go find power and somewhere to spend the day.

People had died. The electricity was out. We had no idea it would be out for so long.

Who's In Charge of Keeping The Lights On?

The derecho hit on August 11th. Then over the next 48 hours, there were scattered thunderstorms that continued to break down the electricity grids within all surrounding towns under the service area of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company. When it was all said and done, somewhere in the ballpark of 375,000 customers were out of power.

By the time August 22nd rolled around, eleven days after the storm, 33,124 customers were still suffering outages. Then on the 23rd, it was 16,476 people. On the 24th, it was 5,105.

What was taking NIPSCO so long to respond? Where were the resources for the customers that are their responsibility?

While NIPSCO would probably argue that they were doing their best, breaking it down shows a different picture.

We NIPSCO ratepayers just experienced a 16.75% increase in our utility bills for "infrastructure improvements" that were part of a 5-year plan that totaled 26.7% increases total, which has been in place since 2022 and was supposed to conclude this year...and yet the grid was devastated in a manner that it has never been before, as far as anyone I've talked to remembers. Not only did these supposed "improvements", funded with $1.64 BILLION of ratepayer money, fail to weather the storm, but the response to the damage was disorganized and appeared incompetent overall.

In fact, it was such a lackluster performance by the corporation, that multiple lawsuits have been threatened and some have been filed. A 77-year-old woman from Valparaiso filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that NIPSCO's failure to maintain the vegetation and trim trees properly contributed to the widespread outages. She had to delay surgery for a fractured hip because power was not restored in an acceptable amount of time.

I wouldn't disagree with her. I wouldn't disagree with anyone that speculates any neglect by NIPSCO at this point until facts proved otherwise. Why? Because trimming trees and actually using the money from the budget approved by regulators for maintenance and improvements - that's not in the best interest of shareholders.

That's right. NIPSCO is not a publicly traded company anymore, but the company that spawned from NIPSCO and now owns them, NiSource Inc., definitely is.

Facts About NIPSCO and Recent Rate Increases

In 1926, a titan of the utility industry named Samuel Insull merged Northern Indiana Gas & Electric with Calumet Electric, creating the Northern Indiana Public Service Company as we know it today. NIPSCO has been serving this area for exactly a century this year. When you look through their history, you'll find unofficial slogans such as "The People's Company" and "Power to the People". Maybe those used to ring true, but not anymore. Not to me at least. Blackstone (Not BlackRock) owns 20% of NIPSCO. We don't own any of it and they're supposed to serve us.

In 1962, NIPSCO began trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange until 1987. That's when NIPSCO Industries, a holding company, was created by NIPSCO and reorganization happened. Now NIPSCO Industries was a publicly traded entity that could hold more than one corporation under its umbrella. In 1999, they rebranded to NiSource Inc. that we see on the NYSE today.

What this means is that in 1962 there was a fissure formed between the company keeping the lights on and the people it served. They were no longer a private business at the mercy of regulators and beholden to customers. Now they were beholden to their investors, their shareholders, first and foremost. Then, that fissure formed into a canyon with the restructuring. With the inception of what is now NiSource, not only is NIPSCO committed to shareholders, but it's run by a company that's focused on absorbing other utility companies and pushing profits to please Wall Street investors.

The gap between NIPSCO's priorities and its customers' best interests only gets wider with NiSource involved. A grandmother who relies on her pacemaker in Gary, Indiana now takes the backseat to someone from Rhode Island that owns shares. She sits in her house, in the dark, while NIPSCO scrambles to decide just how many resources they can deploy before it affects the bottom line too much.

It's not speculation, it's just how capitalism works when it comes to the stock market.

Speaking of Deploying Resources...

August 11, 2026 didn't just devastate northern Indiana. Other areas took a beating, too. Particularly northern Illinois, which is under the service area of a company known as Commonwealth Edison, otherwise known as ComEd. In fact, the damage in Illinois may very well have been worse, since it put a reported 410,000 customers out of power.

It took ComEd exactly one week, seven days, to get its customers back up and running with power. So let's take a look at ComEd really quickly before I continue to rip on NIPSCO, since ComEd is directly involved.

ComEd is also a public utility company that has been in business since 1907. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Exelon Corporation, which is a publicly traded company just like NiSource. With institutional investors including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street.

It's the exact same setup that NIPSCO has. Except it serves with a respect for ratepayer money, something NIPSCO is falling short of.

In October of 2011, ComEd was granted a $2.6 billion budget with the claim that they needed to harden their grid over the next 10 years. Smart meters, specialized switches, and other things. I'm not sure how it's all supposed to work, I'm not an electrician, but it seems to have worked based on their response time to the disaster. Even with outage numbers far greater than NIPSCO, they got it done in a week.

One could argue that ComEd had a 10-year head start on NIPSCO because their money, which was also more money, was approved in 2011. I would argue that they simply used the money for what they were supposed to. Let me enlighten.

NIPSCO's 2021 rate increase proposal of $1.64 billion included $525 MILLION worth of unfinished projects from their last round of rate increases that spanned from 2016-2021 with a budget of $1.25 billion.

So over the same length of a 10-year period, from 2016 through 2026, NIPSCO had been given a whopping $2.89 billion from ratepayers, came up short on the second one with $525 million being spent ineffectively, and still couldn't pull off an acceptable response to the 2026 derecho fiasco. They had almost $300 million more than ComEd's budget and still weren't even in the same league.

Why are we still giving them our money? Hell, at this point, I wouldn't even invest in NiSource if this is the way its subsidiaries blow through money. Unless of course their stock price is somehow rising and making shareholders money. Unless dividends are being paid while performance lags and customers are suffering. We paid that $525 million twice because it disappeared the first time without anything to show for it. Remember that.

Contractors Come To The Rescue

NIPSCO Takes Only So Much Help?

On August 11th, NIPSCO updated their website after the storms with the following information:

"All available NIPSCO linemen have been deployed to support restoration efforts, alongside more than 1200 contractor resources. Additional resources are being mobilized as part of what is expected to be an extensive restoration effort following widespread damage from winds of approximately 100 mph."

I thought that was great, especially because I left town right after the storm on that first day and drove to Michigan City. It's 40 minutes from my house and it took me nearly 3 hours to get back because of the blocked roads and traffic. The entire time I was making my way through Portage, I didn't see one intersection with traffic being directed other than the intersection of Willowcreek and Old Porter Road. I also didn't see one NIPSCO or contractor vehicle either.

I saw women in the streets trying to move branches out of the roads for cars and civilian men with chainsaws trying to clear the way. In fact, I never saw a single NIPSCO truck in Portage personally. I only ever saw contractor vehicles while driving through town over the past couple weeks. On the first day, I felt like we were alone, even though it was approaching evening and the storm had taken place hours before.

So 1200 contractor resources? Hell yeah, bring em on. Also, once they finished their exemplary work in Illinois, with 99% restoration by August 16th (5 days), ComEd connected NIPSCO with available contractors from its own network as well.

Progress in the initial phase was staggering with these contractors helping out. At first the number was reported to be about 374,500. I would wake up and see them banging out 30k-40k affected customers overnight on the NIPSCO app. By August 17th, it was around 125,000 people left. Down to 93,000 on the 18th.

And then, what happened? The website was edited around this time. It stopped mentioning contractors altogether and progress severely slowed down. From the 18th to the 19th, the number went from 93,000 customers affected to 87,745. I couldn't believe it, but at the same time it didn't surprise me when I stopped to think about it.

It obviously can't be verified, but I suspected that 1200 contractors working alongside your corporation in the wake of a disaster must cost a lot of money. A lot of potential profits. If I was thinking like a CEO, I'd probably say something like "Once we get it under a hundred thousand customers, cut the contractors, we can do it."

As it just so happens, NIPSCO President and COO, Vince Parisi did an interview on CBS News Chicago on August 18th or 19th, in which he stated:

"We have 2,000 people that we've really brought in, including our internal teams, to work on this storm. And we are really [at] a saturation point. If we add more, it would actually start to be more inefficient."

The slowdown happened right around the time the "saturation point" was mentioned and it didn't go unnoticed. On August 23rd, Governor Mike Braun tweeted:

"NIPSCO is a monopoly with a responsibility to ratepayers. Residents are forced to rely on them for safety and comfort, and they must get the power back on NOW. There is no excuse for these delays."

On August 24th, Governor Braun also formally directed the state consumer advocate to petition for an investigation into NIPSCO's operations and expenditures.

Somewhere around this time, litigation was threatened by Gary, Indiana's Mayor, Eddie Melton. With mounting public pressure, suddenly the "saturation point" wasn't such an issue because between August 23-24, the customers affected number dropped from 16,476 to 5,105 overnight, when it had reportedly been sitting around 20,000 on the 22nd.

On August 22, 2026, after fully completing work in Illinois, 60+ ComEd employees were dispatched to assist NIPSCO crews on the ground. It's no coincidence that the numbers started plummeting again after that. On behalf of every NIPSCO customer in Indiana, I'd like to say, "Thank you, ComEd."

Yesterday was the 25th of August, 14 days after the storm, and NIPSCO's app still said there were hundreds of outages. I'm glad this issue has reached eyes outside of northern Indiana. Since it has, I'd like to draw attention to a few other things.

Ed Soliday Threatens Portage Over Rate Increase Opposition

That's right, Ed. Your name is big and bold, just like you are, sir. I hope you're reading this.

Ed Soliday is an Indiana State Representative from Valparaiso. He is also the chairman of the Indiana House Utilities, Energy and Telecommunications Committee. He is one of the architects of the "Transmission, Distribution, and Storage System Improvement Charge" statute. The TDSIC. It's the very mechanism NIPSCO uses to collect rate increases. He helped design the system that allows utility companies to bill ratepayers for "infrastructure improvements".

When NIPSCO claims they need to increase rates, they use the TDSIC plan to bring their proposal before the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC).

In July of 2025, the Mayor of Portage, Austin Bonta, did what a good politician is supposed to do. He listened to the people that put him in office and decided to represent their interests. He took his constituents' concerns about NIPSCO rate increases to City Council and formally opposed the full increase in an address to the IURC. The response he got wasn't from the IURC itself, but from Ed Soliday.

Soliday sent Bonta a scathing, sarcastic text message that said:

"I want to thank you for your very enlightened comments on the IURC and rate increases!!! I am glad you took a stand against any future pay raises for NIPSCO linemen and other employees. I am additionally thankful that you took a position against meeting the inflationary costs of replacing our aging infrastructure.

I promise I will work hard to make certain your city never gets any revenue increases!!!"

It was an obvious financial threat to the city of Portage. Multiple outlets reported on this. No official investigation was launched.

Bonta responded by bringing it to the attention of City Council and later told WIBC:

"If it was a personal threat, like him saying he was going to run against me for mayor, I wouldn't have shared it. But this threatens the city's ability to bring in money, so I had to let people know. There's no other way to read 'I promise I will work hard to make certain your city never gets any revenue increases' except as a direct threat."

Portage was among the last communities restored after the derecho, alongside Gary, which is actually still being worked on as I write this. In fact, for days, Portage wasn't even mentioned by name in NIPSCO's restoration schedule. That could be a coincidence. It could also be a consequence. The facts of what transpired already are damning enough.

Ed Soliday, chairman of the mechanism NIPSCO is required to use to get rate increases approved, gets extremely upset and spits threats in the direction of those that oppose those increases. That in itself should have warranted an investigation before disaster ever struck. Soliday needs a political holiday. He's not fit to serve the people he's supposed to be protecting, in my humble opinion.

Past Rate Increase Disputes

The last time NIPSCO needed to raise rates back in 2021, the IURC approved it, even though The NIPSCO Industrial Group (a coalition of six major industrial customers including U.S. Steel, NLMK, Walmart) argued that NIPSCO "failed to provide specific justification" for its spending and that the commission didn't provide "specific approval" for some of the increases.

The Office of Utility Consumer Counselor (OUCC) argued as well. Saying the IURC didn't follow the TDSIC statue by not determining whether the costs of individual improvements were even justified. NIPSCO failed to present a quantitative cost-benefit analysis for projects they proposed - but the Indiana Court of Appeals rejected the OUCC argument and affirmed the approval.

The Citizens Action Coalition was more direct:

"By requiring approval of a TDSIC tracker, even if the utility has little to no idea what their plan is and how they will spend customer money, the State of Indiana has given the utilities a blank check and has rendered the IURC... virtually powerless to do anything about it."

So even when the people are displeased and organizations speak out, NIPSCO gets the money it wants from the politicians in charge of the regulatory structure.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, corruption.

The Solution I Propose Re-Examining

The corporation was not always a permanent structure in America. Before 1795, when North Carolina passed the first general incorporation law, legislative chartering was required for incorporating a company. By the 1870s it was phased out in favor of the perpetual model we see now, where corporations can chase unlimited profits, but here's what it looked like before:

A person, or group of people, would apply for a charter with a direct mission and timeline. A lot of times this was a community in need of infrastructure. So the mission would be "we need a bridge" and the timeline would be 20 or 30 years, for example. Then what?

The corporate entity was formed and investors would pool their money in order to claim their share of the corporation and reduce liability. If the corporation failed their mission, they would lose their money, but not their personal assets. Basic business protection stuff.

So the chartered corporation would build the bridge, then it would charge tolls to cross that bridge. It had permission to charge them for the timeline of the charter. So if that was 20 years, then the company would make money from the tolls and pay dividends to investors for those 20 years. It was a corporation that charged the public, made money, and then (my favorite part) was dissolved after a sunset review so the infrastructure could be turned over to the public. They now had a bridge they could maintain through taxes, or some other means, and cross for free.

In return for their services, the corporation was usually granted monopoly protections. Meaning someone else couldn't build another bridge cheaper and let people cross for free. After profits were made, the final product was returned to the people, to run at cost and benefit from without having to perpetually pay for it.

NIPSCO's electrical grid has been in operation and growing for 100 years at this point, and we are all still paying for what has already been built. There is a charge on our bills whether we use our natural gas or not. It's called a "gas delivery fee" and that says, "We (NIPSCO) own these pipes, not you, not the state. So we will charge you just for making sure the gas is ready to use."

How many times are we going to pay for what is already built? How many generations will pay for what has already been funded? Just for it to get torn down by mother nature because funds were misappropriated and shareholders took priority over modernization? These are things we now need to consider since investigations are open and questions are being asked.

NIPSCO operates without an expiration date, no clear mission constraints, and no sunset reviews. They have been in business for a century and have long broken the chains of any mechanism that forces them to prove that they still serve the public interest.

If a team of engineers and scientists walked into Mike Braun's office today with a chartered proposal for a nuclear energy company to build a small modular reactor with a timeline of 30-years to dissolution, I hope he'd explore that avenue. Northwest Indiana is the steelmaking capital of the United States. I'd proudly sign up to be a nuclear pioneer as well.

NIPSCO has monopoly privilege because they lobby for it. Even if no one is willing to consider the charter model moving forward, at the very least I think it's time we start demanding that we get to choose our provider. Without competition comes corruption and abuse.

My disclaimer here is I'm not an expert, just a Hoosier with ideas. ComEd is utilizing the current model to the advantage of the public, and the chartered model was not without its flaws as well. It was also prone to corruption and clearly wouldn't work in the modern era for corporations like Amazon or Microsoft. But public infrastructure and utilities? Those aren't things that should be in the hands of a perpetual profit-chasing machine forever. Somehow they will always have to justify raising prices in the name of next quarter's earnings report.

It will not stop.

If NIPSCO can't justify higher rates based on innovation and upgrades, I believe they will rig the system. The derecho didn't just expose how vulnerable our electricity grid is, it also ripped the roof right off NIPSCO's next scheme for rate increases, and revealed where some of those misappropriated funds might have gone.

NIPSCO's Data Center Agreements

In 2025, NIPSCO announced an agreement with Amazon Data Services (AWS) to supply up to 2.4 GW of power to data centers by the end of 2032. Service begins on January 1, 2027. That's too soon after all of these red flags, in my humble opinion. I have a lot of humble opinions, by the way.

NIPSCO Generation LLC, otherwise known as GenCo, was established by NIPSCO in 2025 as well - and it's already got about $7 billion committed to power generation and transmission assets when it comes to data centers in Indiana. They will need more infrastructure for this, as they plan to construct 5.6 GW of gas-fired generation by 2030 alone.

What's alarming is that it is the end of 2026, and the 2.4 GW deal with AWS alone represents nearly double NIPSCO's current system demand, and it's right around the corner. So to get to 5.6 GW by 2030? I wonder who is going to be footing that bill.

The controversies surrounding these data centers include the fact that recent reports show NIPSCO rates being about 30% higher than other Indiana utilities. In fact, we're actually paying some of the highest rates in the nation, not just in our state. Allegations against this fact are that the gap is because of data center infrastructure investments specifically. Some people have accused NIPSCO of overcharging Gary residents to subsidize the Indiana data center revolution that seems to be taking place regardless of whether the citizens want it or not.

There are videos surfacing weekly online showing community meetings and forums addressing Indiana residents' data center expansion concerns. Those concerns are mainly environmental and how it will impact communities. Well, I can tell you right now, evaporative cooling is the most cost-efficient cooling option available right now, and it's the one that needs a constant stream of water. Closed-loop systems are viable, but energy intensive. If we want a more water-friendly option, which is the obvious and sustainable choice, we're gonna need more infrastructure.

NIPSCO is going into business with the very industry that guarantees it will need more infrastructure quickly. Those data centers will produce potential water shortages, and if we don't want them to, they will have to run on closed-loop cooling systems that require more energy from NIPSCO. It's a lose, lose situation for NIPSCO customers. Demand for energy and/or water is about to go up, and when demand rises, so do prices. That is exactly what they want.

It might be worth mentioning here that data centers could also be considered a public utility. They are built on our land and utilize our infrastructure to collect our data. Maybe a 20-30 year charter for their construction and operation would be beneficial, since companies will be renting that server space, and that money can finally be returned to us in the future.

The Hope

It seems our governor is a decent man. Mike Braun's investigation into NIPSCO is not only addressing the handling of hazardous line conditions, but also the potential use of ratepayer money to fund the data center power projects. They potentially ignored public requests for safety inspections while expanding infrastructure for big tech and the future shareholder profits those projects would yield.

I'm a writer, an organizer of thoughts. My hope is that if you're reading this, that you are loud, in a position of power, or an organizer of people. At the very least, I hope these ideas make it into your next conversation.

The Knife's Edge

I am not an expert, as I've said. This was a fun project for me. I will leave my sources below. If I've misstated any statistics, I apologize in advance (there were a lot of them).

We in northwest Indiana find ourselves on a knife's edge. We are at the tipping point between being in control of the cities we live in and being damn near financially enslaved, especially in the winter, to our power company and big tech data.

Ironically, we have the derecho to thank. All eyes are on us now and people are starting to talk. Investigations are being launched. Lawsuits are being filed.

Now is the time to make a stand. We have a government of the people, by the people, that's supposed to be for the people - but it's failed us time and time again at the behest of corporations like NIPSCO. Maybe it's time we start turning our attention to the corporate permanence structure when it comes to utilities.

I think it's time we start talking about corporations of the people, by the people, for the people. Charters might literally bring back power to the people in more ways than one.

Image Source: Rewired Iowa

Sources

"375,000 NIPSCO customers without power after August 11, 2026 derecho" | https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/08/24/editorial-nipsco-commonwealth-edison-electricity-outages-storms

"375,000 residents (~80% of NIPSCO's customers) lost power from August 11, 2026 derecho" | https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/power-fully-restored-in-nw-indiana-2-weeks-after-derecho-nipsco/3980300

"16.75% residential rate increase approved for NIPSCO (average $23/month increase)" | https://dailyenergyinsider.com/policy/48783-indiana-regulators-approve-nipsco-electricity-rate-increase

"$1.64 billion NIPSCO electric infrastructure plan approved December 28, 2021 (Case No. 45557) through TDSIC" | https://www.in.gov/oucc/electric/key-cases-by-utility/nipsco-electric-infrastructure-plan

"NIPSCO Industrial Group includes U.S. Steel, NLMK (Indiana), and Walmart as principal members" | https://caselaw.findlaw.com/in-court-of-appeals/1857293.html

"Citizens Action Coalition: TDSIC tracker gives utilities 'blank check' and renders IURC 'virtually powerless'" | https://www.citact.org/tdsic

"$525 million in unfinished projects from 2016-2021 TDSIC cycle carried forward" | https://www.parrlaw.com/blog/2018/09/nipsco-industrial-group-v-northern-indiana-public-service-co-100-n-e-3d-234-ind-2018/

"ComEd restored 410,000 customers in roughly seven days after August 2026 severe weather" | https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/comed-sending-more-60-employees-203000205.html

"ComEd sending 60+ employees to assist NIPSCO on August 22, 2026" | https://abc7chicago.com/post/chicago-area-storm-recovery-comed-sending-crews-illinois-assist-nipsco-nw-indiana-power-restoration/19719373

"NIPSCO rates ~30% higher than national average ($0.234/kWh vs. $0.18/national)" | https://www.citact.org/nipsco-electric-rate-hike-2024

"NIPSCO highest average residential electric bill among Indiana utilities under IURC jurisdiction" | https://www.in.gov/oucc/electric/key-cases-by-utility/nipsco-electric-rates

"ComEd $2.6 billion grid hardening budget approved by ICC (2011), reduced ~$100M/year when formula rejected" | https://www.utilitydive.com/news/the-numbers-behind-comeds-troubled-26b-smart-grid-project/116817

"Vince Parisi CBS Chicago interview (August 18-19, 2026): 'saturation point' with 2,000 workers, adding more would be 'more inefficient'" | https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/video/nipsco-president-vince-parisi-answers-questions-about-power-restoration-efforts

"Governor Mike Braun tweet/statement August 23, 2026: 'NIPSCO is a monopoly with a responsibility to ratepayers...must get the power back on NOW'" | https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/gov-mike-braun-calls-nipsco-monopoly-demands-they-turn-power-back-on-for-those-in-northwest-indiana-gary/531-6e417ac8-bf64-4fab-ad66-295bf460e89b

"Governor Mike Braun directed OUCC to file complaint/IURC investigation August 24, 2026" | https://events.in.gov/event/gov-braun-calls-for-investigation-into-nipsco-following-widespread-prolonged-power-outages

"Mayor Eddie Melton of Gary threatened litigation against NIPSCO (late August 2026)" | https://www.facebook.com/samantha.chatman/posts/new-a-class-action-lawsuit-has-been-filed-against-nipsco-over-the-widespread-pow/1639055977580895

"Margaret Shragal (77, Valparaiso) filed class-action lawsuit mid-August 2026, hip surgery delayed due to outages" | https://www.inkfreenews.com/2026/08/19/lawsuit-alleges-nipsco-failures-worsened-widespread-outages

"Ed Soliday text to Mayor Austin Bonta (July 28, 2025): 'I promise I will work hard to make certain your city never gets any revenue increases!!!" | https://wibc.com/700785/portage-mayor-calls-out-state-reps-text-threatening-city

"Austin Bonta WIBC quote on Soliday text: 'There's no other way to read...except as a direct threat'" | https://wibc.com/700785/portage-mayor-calls-out-state-reps-text-threatening-city

"2021 NIPSCO Industrial Group/OUCC argued NIPSCO 'failed to provide specific justification' for spending; IURC approved anyway" | https://www.21alivenews.com/2026/05/22/nipsco-industrial-customers-split-inflation-cost-recovery-before-indiana-supreme-court

"NIPSCO/AWS 2.4 GW data center deal announced 2025, service begins January 1, 2027" | https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-15-billion-indiana-data-centers

"GenCo (NIPSCO Generation LLC) $7 billion committed for 3 GW generation + battery storage" | https://www.nipsco.com/our-company/news-room/news-article/powering-indiana-s-future--how-nipsco--genco--and-amazon-keep-energy-reliable-and-affordable

"BlackRock owns ~10-11% of NiSource Inc. (NYSE: NI) — not BlackStone's NIPSCO stake" | https://fintel.io/so/us/ni/blackrock

"BlackStone Infrastructure Partners acquires 19.9% equity interest in NIPSCO for $2.150B (June 2023)" | https://investors.nisource.com/financial-news/news-details/2023/NiSource-announces-agreement-to-sell-minority-equity-interest-in-NIPSCO-to-strengthen-financial-foundation-and-support-sustainable-long-term-growth/default.aspx