Indiana's New Data-Center Cost Law Just Passed Its First Test. The State's Largest Utility Still Gets to Bill Everyone Else for $74 Million of It.

Teresa Moore and Susan Kessler don't live next to a substation yet, but they've spent a year and a half fighting about how close one is about to get to their town. The two Monrovia, Indiana residents sued in March 2025 over the rezoning that cleared the way for a data center campus — while the project was still only known to the public as "Woodland Caribou LLC." Google didn't confirm its own name until seven months later. On September 24th of this year, with site work already underway, Moore and Kessler filed a motion asking a judge to rule in their favor without a trial. Their case is still open. The power plan built to serve the project got its answer first.

A shell company's name, then Google's

Morgan County's rezoning for the site went through under that placeholder, and every county commissioner signed a non-disclosure agreement barring them from saying whose project it actually was. Moore and Kessler's lawsuit argues the rezoning ignored the county's comprehensive plan and went forward without the public ever getting to weigh in on the real company behind it, not a placeholder. None of that history shows up in this month's regulatory decision. It's the reason anyone in Morgan County was paying close enough attention to catch it.

What the state actually approved

On October 7th, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission unanimously approved AES Indiana's plan to build the power infrastructure for Google's 390-megawatt data center in Monrovia: two standalone battery storage systems (200 MW and 130 MW), a 130-MW solar array paired with its own 130-MW battery, and a 10-mile, 345-kilovolt transmission line running to a new on-site substation. AES puts the full infrastructure investment at $1.3 billion; the commission's own order sets the project's cost at $737.3 million. Both figures describe the same build — they just draw the line differently around what counts as part of it.

The part that's a genuine first

This is the first data center case decided under House Enrolled Act 1007, the large-load law Indiana passed in 2025 specifically so a project like this one doesn't become a hidden cost on everyone else's bill. The law requires big electricity users to cover at least 80% of the costs a utility can reasonably assign to them. At the hearing, IURC Commissioner Joby Jerrells noted that AES Indiana's own testimony had Google paying at least 100% of what the law requires — well past the statutory floor. The contract runs at least 15 years, and Google has agreed to an 80% minimum demand obligation: it pays for that share of its contracted capacity whether it ends up using all of it or not, the same minimum-bill structure that protects a utility, and its other customers, whenever a large load shows up smaller or later than planned. If a law written to keep data centers from quietly taxing every other ratepayer is going to work anywhere, a unanimous vote with terms like these is what it looks like working.

Except for the part that didn't go Google's way

Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition, pushed the commission to go further. His objection was about one specific slice of the build: roughly $74 million in network upgrades that AES says it needs to make because this customer is being added to the grid. Inskeep wanted Google billed for all of it directly. The commission disagreed, finding the upgrades become part of AES's broader transmission system and will benefit other customers too. So Google pays $32.3 million for the facilities that connect it directly to the grid, and the remaining $73.8 million goes into AES's transmission rate base — recoverable from everyone's future bills, not Google's alone.

The concern is this $74 million set of transmission upgrades that AES Indiana identified it has to make specifically because this data center is being added to the grid.Ben Inskeep, program director, Citizens Action Coalition

I think both things the commission said are true, and that's exactly why this case is worth reading closely instead of taking the headline at face value. Google's direct-connection payment really does clear the 80% floor by a wide margin. The $73.8 million really does become general infrastructure once it's built, serving load beyond Google's own meter. "Google pays at least 100%" and "existing customers get assigned a share of the upgrade cost" aren't a contradiction — they're two different accounting lines, and a utility has every incentive to let the first one do the talking in a press release.

None of this resolves what Moore and Kessler are still arguing in court: whether the public ever got an honest look at who was buying the land before the county signed off on rezoning it. A regulatory order on cost allocation is about as solid as evidence gets — a unanimous vote, a docket number, a dollar figure assigned in writing. It still can't answer a question about process that was settled, or not settled, a year and a half before this rate case ever closed.