Indiana’s coal plants aren’t the problem. Abandoning them would be.

Indiana’s coal plants aren’t the problem. Abandoning them would be.

By Savannah Kerstiens, Reliable Energy, Inc.

While states like New York and California blame data centers for skyrocketing electricity bills, Indiana is doing what they refuse to. Keeping reliable power online and protecting the people who depend on it.

Governor Braun issued executive directives instructing his cabinet to re-evaluate closures of coal-fired power plants, arguing that keeping operational coal generation online protects consumers from the enormous capital costs of building replacement capacity. He’s right. The order reflects a basic fact every serious grid operator already understands. Reliable electricity doesn’t come from wishful thinking. It comes from power plants that run when you need them, in the quantity you need them. And that reliability is the single biggest reason Indiana’s rates haven’t exploded the way they have in states that dismantled their baseload fleets.
America’s electricity crisis isn’t happening where states kept reliable plants running. It’s happening where they didn’t.

New York and California spent years closing coal and gas plants and replacing them with solar panels that go dark at night and wind turbines that stop in still air. The result is now visible to anyone willing to look. Their grids are buckling under ordinary demand, and customers are paying the price. New York’s grid operator recently admitted it quietly: “a lack of new supply to serve rising demand is impacting consumer costs.” That’s not a data-center problem. That’s a self-inflicted supply shortage, which is the direct consequence of abandoning reliable power.

Indiana has already lived a milder version of that experiment. For years, the state retired coal units and built replacements that didn’t fully restore the same firm capacity. Ratepayers were left to cover the cost of those transitions, which is one reason residential rates have climbed by roughly 30% since 2016. The arithmetic here is straightforward. Prematurely closing a still-operable plant and forcing utilities to construct replacement generation almost always passes higher costs straight to customers. That’s the cost of replacement, not the cost of keeping existing reliable plants running.

The gap between Indiana and states like California and New York isn’t an accident but a policy choice.

Hoosiers still pay roughly 10% below the national average. That advantage is the direct result of the baseload fleet that hasn’t yet been dismantled. California, by contrast, pays more than double Indiana’s rate. That difference is the measurable cost of eliminating reliable power, and it falls hardest on working families, seniors on fixed incomes, and small manufacturers who can’t absorb it. Nearly 25 million American households already skip meals or medicine to pay their energy bills. Deliberately raising electricity prices isn’t a climate strategy. It’s a hardship policy.

And the pollution argument against coal has aged poorly. Modern coal plants are not the plants of 1950. Scrubbers, ceramic filters, and chemical binding agents remove the vast majority of pollutants before they reach the air. National air pollution has fallen roughly 78% since 1970, even as energy use has grown. The technology has changed. The talking points against it haven’t.

Indiana doesn’t have to finish the experiment that has already led to higher bills in states that abandoned reliable power. Governor Braun’s decision is why Hoosiers are still protected from the rate spikes now punishing states like California and New York. That’s not nostalgia. That’s common sense, and it should be the model, not the exception.