Tommy J. Housman | Gaslit: The Power of Story — Season Two, Episode One

When I sat down with Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, I expected a conversation about electricity: megawatts, transmission lines, power plants, utility markets, and the infrastructure required to support Indiana’s rapidly expanding data-center industry.

What emerged was a much larger question about public consent.

Indiana is not simply deciding whether to welcome a new category of industrial development. Communities are being asked to commit land, water, electricity, tax revenue, and public infrastructure to facilities whose owners, customers, purposes, and long-term effects are often concealed from the people expected to host them.

In Southern Indiana, that question has become impossible to ignore.

CenterPoint Energy’s most recent planning documents report a summer peak demand of approximately 1,083 megawatts across its Southern Indiana system. Meanwhile, public documents from MISO—the organization responsible for coordinating much of the regional electric grid—describe Project Raider, an unidentified customer requesting 600 megawatts along the Posey–Gibson transmission line.

Project Raider has not been publicly confirmed as a data center. The customer has not been identified, and the available record does not establish the project’s exact location or purpose. That distinction matters. Suspicion is not evidence, and responsible reporting cannot turn an inference into a fact.

But the scale is a fact.

Six hundred megawatts would represent more than half of CenterPoint’s current summer peak demand. That is not ordinary economic growth. It is a fundamental change in the size and operation of the regional electric system.

As Olson explained, utilities ordinarily need years to plan, approve, finance, and construct major generating facilities and transmission infrastructure. Technology companies, however, may seek enormous amounts of electricity within two or three years. If local generation cannot be built quickly enough, utilities can purchase energy and capacity through regional markets, acquire existing power plants, extend the life of aging facilities, or construct new natural-gas generation.

None of those options is free.

That brings us to the central issue of this episode: who pays?

Data-center developers and utility representatives frequently say these facilities will pay for the infrastructure constructed specifically to serve them. We are told that large customers may even lower residential bills by spreading a utility’s fixed costs across more electricity sales.

Those outcomes are possible. But possibility is not protection.

Olson explained that Indiana law does not simply require data centers to pay 100 percent of every cost their arrival creates. House Enrolled Act 1007 established an 80–20 cost-sharing mechanism for certain large-load investments, but participation is voluntary, and Olson said no Indiana utility has used it.

Even then, the word “cost” requires scrutiny. Does it include only the substation connecting the facility? Does it include new power plants, regional transmission, wholesale energy, fuel contracts, environmental compliance, backup capacity, and equipment that may serve both the data center and the public?

And what happens if the project changes?

Artificial-intelligence hardware is becoming more efficient. A facility projected to consume one gigawatt today may require substantially less power in the future. A company may delay construction, reduce its planned demand, sell the facility, declare bankruptcy, or leave before the infrastructure is paid for.

The transmission lines and power plants do not disappear with it. The debt remains.

Without firm contracts, minimum billing requirements, collateral, and meaningful exit fees, families and small businesses could inherit infrastructure built for a private customer that no longer needs it. That is the stranded-cost risk, and it cannot be answered with a press release.

The same principle applies to environmental promises.

Developers may promise closed-loop cooling, minimal water consumption, renewable energy, or on-site generation. But “closed loop” does not tell the public where the initial water will come from, how often it must be replaced, what chemicals it may contain, or whether evaporative cooling will be used during extreme heat. “Self-powered” does not tell us whether a facility will burn natural gas, rely on diesel generators, produce local air pollution, or expect the regional grid to provide backup power.

If those protections are real, they can be written into law and into the conditions of approval. They can be independently monitored, publicly reported, and enforced for the life of the facility.

If they remain voluntary, they remain promises.

The secrecy surrounding these projects makes that distinction even more important. Across Indiana, developers have operated through code names, limited-liability companies, and nondisclosure agreements. In Posey County, elected officials acknowledged signing an NDA with a development company even though no complete public proposal had been filed.

Olson expressed some understanding of why confidentiality agreements exist. Citizens Action Coalition sometimes enters them during regulatory proceedings to gain access to information needed to represent ratepayers. But elected officials deciding whether to provide tax incentives, approve land use, or commit public resources occupy a different position.

If a developer wants the public’s land, infrastructure, tax treatment, or utility system, the public should not be treated as an outsider to the decision.

That transparency must also extend to the committees studying these projects. Vanderburgh County has created a thirteen-member committee with expertise in electricity, water, construction, planning, transportation, agriculture, environmental science, technology, and noise. That knowledge is valuable. But expertise is not the same as independence.

When committee members have current or former connections to utilities, construction interests, organized labor, or economic-development organizations, those relationships should be disclosed. They do not automatically disqualify anyone, but the public should never have to guess who at the table may institutionally or financially benefit from the recommendations being written.

And then there is the question beneath all the others: What are these facilities actually being built to power?

The industry often discusses data centers as though they are all interchangeable pieces of the internet. But the current expansion is being driven in significant part by artificial intelligence—systems capable of generating media, analyzing enormous collections of information, controlling automated processes, operating software, expanding surveillance, and reducing the amount of human labor required to complete complex tasks.

That does not mean every data center serves the same purpose. It means communities deserve to know whether they are providing resources for cloud storage, entertainment, military systems, government surveillance, artificial-intelligence development, or something else entirely.

A building may create construction work and a smaller number of permanent positions. But the technology housed inside it may transform employment far beyond its walls. Any honest economic analysis must consider both sides of that equation.

Olson ended our conversation by returning to the power the public still possesses: the right to petition government, attend meetings, examine public records, organize, protest, vote, and refuse to allow private decisions to remain private when the public is expected to carry the consequences.

Communities throughout Indiana have already demonstrated that this power is real. Residents have delayed projects, stopped rezonings, demanded moratoriums, forced public discussions, and made elected officials answer questions that might otherwise have remained hidden behind code names and confidentiality agreements.

That is where Season Two of Gaslit: The Power of Story begins.

Before Indiana powers artificial intelligence, Hoosiers deserve to know what they are being asked to build, what it will consume, what it will produce, who will profit, and who will remain responsible if the promises fail.

Because a promise is not a protection.

And the public should never be required to pay for a future it was not allowed to understand.