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Some of the arguments will ring a bell to anyone who’s been following fights against renewables.
Indiana has power. Indiana has transmission. Indiana has a business-friendly Republican government. Indiana is close to Chicago but — crucially — not in Illinois. All of this has led to a huge surge of data center development in the “Crossroads of America.” It has also led to an upswell of local opposition.
There are almost 30 active data center proposals in Indiana, plus five that have already been rejected in the past year, according to data collected by the environmentalist group Citizens Action Coalition. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all announced projects in the state since the beginning of 2024.
Nipsco, one of the state’s utilities, has projected 2,600 megawatts worth of new load by the middle of the next decade as its base scenario, mostly attributable to “large economic development projects.” In a more aggressive scenario, it sees 3,200 megawatts of new load — that’s three large nuclear reactors’ worth — by 2028 and 8,600 megawatts by 2035. While short of, say, the almost 36,500 megawatts worth of load growth planned in Georgia for the next decade, it’s still a vast range of outcomes that requires some kind of advanced planning.
That new electricity consumption will likely be powered by fossil fuels. Projected load growth in the state has extended a lifeline to Indiana’s coal-fired power plants, with retirement dates for some of the fleet being pushed out to late in the 2030s. It’s also created a market for new natural gas-fired plants that utilities say are necessary to power the expected new load.
State and local political leaders have greeted these new data center projects with enthusiasm, Ben Inskeep, the program director at CAC, told me. “Economic development is king here,” he said. “That is what all the politicians and regulators say their number one concern is: attracting economic development.”
This can sometimes mean policies to support data center development that CAC describes as giveaways, such as utility customers having to cover the bill for transmission upgrades and a 50-year sales tax exemption specifically for data centers. It’s all in the name of economic development and job growth, but that comes at “the detriment of ratepayers and taxpayers,” Inskeep told me.
Take that sales tax exemption: A 1,000 megawatt data center might face $500 million in annual electricity costs, Inskeep told me. “If they’re not having to pay that 7% sales tax on half a billion dollars, times 50 years, we’re talking about $1.7 billion per data center in sales tax exemption, just on the electricity portion of their bill,” Inskeep said.
Even that $500 million is not guaranteed. The minimum payment for such a data center has to pay is $332 million — having been doubled from just $173 million after CAC petitioned for an increase. Ratepayer advocates celebrated the settlement because it guaranteed that large data centers would pay for some of the costs they impose on the whole electrical system, even if their actual consumption is not as high as forecast.
Indiana is “an ideal jurisdiction for data center siting given its physical advantages such as available land, access to grid transmission, water, fiber optic cables, proximity to population centers,” Mizuho Securities analyst Gabriel Moreen wrote in a note to clients. “The state has demonstrated a political and economic receptivity to data centers, such as tax incentives for building data centers and political support at local and state levels.”
But cracks in that edifice of political support may be beginning to show. While data center development has substantial support from the state government — a bill to speed up regulatory approvals for data centers and the generation to serve them is on Governor Mike Braun’s desk after a party-line statehouse vote — projects are also being withdrawn in the face of popular outrage.
Earlier this month, county commissioners in Kosciusko County rejected a rezoning proposition that would have been necessary for a data center project on rural land near Leesburg after a number of local residents spoke out against it. Before that, the city of Valparaiso rejected a data center project in March, following a city council meeting where residents complained about “ noise, power and water consumption and the impact on property values,” according to Lakeshore Public Media.
The objections in Kosciusko County and across the state will not be unfamiliar to anyone with experience in large scale development — residents don’t like noise; they worry that the projects will lead to higher electricity costs across the board; they’re skeptical of the job benefits; they think the developers are getting taxpayer giveaways; they don’t want to see agricultural land converted for the sake of industry.
“That’s a big red flag for a lot of local governments where they’re a bit more skeptical of those types of development,” Inskeep told me.
Of course, these objections will be familiar to anyone who follows local opposition to renewable power developments like wind and solar, which regularly draw on farm land, noise, and skepticism of promised economic benefits.
And just like with solar and wind, these local objections could be slowing a projected build out that many analysts simply assume will follow an exponential path — which would, ironically, put a dent in the demand growth that many energy developers, renewable or not, are hoping to ride to more profits.
But at the local level, for activists, the fight happens one project at a time, Inskeep told me.
“We’re building out tools to help local folks feel like they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to engage at these local levels. Because when we have several dozen data center proposals in the state of Indiana and more coming, a small organization like ours can’t be there for each individual fight,” Inskeep said.
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At Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert chart a path forward for the clean energy economy.
Tom Steyer is still riding the wave.
The climate investor and philanthropist told the audience at Heatmap House’s third session of the day, “Up Next in Climate Tech,” that he started his investment firm Galvanize in 2021 because “there’s a huge, powerful wave behind us.” And now, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Trump administration’s regulatory assault on renewables? “Does any of that change? No, it’s better,” Steyer said.
Steyer was skeptical that the oil and gas industry could ultimately compete with clear energy, even with the current administration’s support.
“For the people who never look at the numbers, for the people who don’t pay attention to actual investment decisions, costs, profit margins, you can say whatever you want. But I’ll tell you this: The rig count is down 10% to 20% in 2025 in America. That’s a statement about future profitability” of the oil industry Steyer said, pointing to declining domestic drilling.
For Steyer, the math is simple. A huge portion of demand for oil comes from the transportation sector, and the movement towards electric vehicles is “unstoppable.”
“We’re talking about a commodity with a worldwide price where we’re the biggest producers of oil in the world,” Steyer said. He noted that the U.S. is also the “high-cost producer” compared to countries like Saudi Arabia, which can produce oil more cheaply than in the U.S. shale patch.
So if there’s such a huge market opportunity for clean energy businesses, can they get funded? That’s the challenge fellow investor Dawn Lippert is trying to solve. Lippert is the founder and chief executive of Elemental, a non-profit climate investment firm. The trick she’s trying to perfect is to attract investors beyond the specialized, earlier stage investor group that typically seeds decarbonization, who can fund actual, steel-in-the-ground projects.
“We are trying to finance the energy transition with venture capital,” referring to the broader financing community. “It’s a total mistake.”
Venture capital has catalyzed “a huge wave of technology, invention, and technologies that are really working,” Lippert added. What’s happening now is that those companies are “trying to deploy, they’re trying to build their first plants, trying to build their second plants. It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out on the financial infrastructure side. They’re not ready for infrastructure investors. They’re definitely not ready for banks.”
This problem of “bankability,” or the “missing middle,” has bedeviled the climate tech sector for years, as technologically innovative energy projects struggle to get funding from infrastructure investors who want projects that can produce predictable cash flows, not risky venture-stage experiments.
Elemental developed an investment vehicle called a D-SAFE — a.k.a. a Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity — to help solve this problem. The D-SAFE is an investment agreement that can unlock future investment by pointing investment directly at development costs. “A development SAFE says, I’m going to give you dollars, and I’m going to get those dollars back when you hit specific milestones,” Lippert said.
So far, Elemental has done nine D-SAFEs. “We’re trying to create much simpler financial infrastructure so that financial innovation can catch up to where technology innovation is, and we can stop slowing things down,” Lippert said.
The challenge for American climate technology and infrastructure companies will be to compete with state-supported Chinese businesses, Lippert said. “China actually does have a very methodical way of putting a ton of state capital into these companies to get them all the way through. We don’t have that in this country, so we have to be much more creative and make sure that companies where technology is working are not falling into a scale gap just because we can’t get our act together.”
At Heatmap House’s second session, speakers including Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii looked overseas to spot the clean energy future.
None of the speakers at Heatmap House’s second session at New York Climate Week, “Built to Scale,” minced words when it came to describing the current U.S. policy environment. The global fight to decarbonize is still happening, our guests emphasized — but it might happen without the U.S.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii emphasized in his discussion with Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer that in previous years, he would assure his international colleagues that the U.S. was still fully invested in the climate fight. What about now? “I would say we will be back — but do not wait for us,” Schatz said.
Ricardo Falu, executive vice president and chief operating officer at AES corporation, touched on a similar point while speaking with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo. His company, which invests in clean energy projects in addition to natural gas at home and abroad, has found particular success in Chile, where the regulatory environment has proved especially fruitful for renewables. “In many other countries, you don't need incentives for renewables. They are competitive,” Falu pointed out. “You don’t need the government financing or the government to be involved.”
This isn’t to say that there’s no hope whatsoever for climate progress in the U.S., our speakers made sure to highlight. We might just have to refrain from calling it “climate progress.” Schatz pointed out that the language of affordability will come to define clean energy projects moving forward, echoing what Senator Chuck Schumer said earlier in the day. “Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap,” said Schatz. “We don't have to make a complicated argument.”
This framing from Schatz and Schumer makes perfect sense in the context of the new package of energy proposals from House Democrats announced this morning, fittingly called the Cheap Energy Act. As my colleague Robinson wrote today, “Democrats have reoriented to talking about energy chiefly as an affordability problem.” Schatz summed up the strategy thusly: “We have to just say, ‘See that spike in electricity prices? It’s their fault. Solar is cheap.’”
Data centers and the rapid growth of AI were also top of mind for panelists. The tension between AI growth objectives and renewables didn’t seem to be an issue, however. Rather, our speakers pointed out, data center growth could be an opportunity to invest in a stronger renewables rollout. Jake Oster, director of sustainability at Amazon, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that “the first thing we're focused on is energy efficiency in our facilities.”
Carla Peterman, executive vice president at PG&E, was even more unequivocal in her support. “We know that our communities, our society will benefit from having that load and having those data centers,” she remarked. “We don’t want to block bringing them on.”
The Senate Minority Leader addressed the crowd at New York Climate Week, talking about energy costs, extreme weather, and Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked off Heatmap House, a daylong series of panels and one-on-one conversations with investors, founders, and policymakers at New York Climate Week, with a rousing condemnation of the Trump administration’s climate policies and a call to action for climate advocates everywhere.
“Why, with AI creating a huge demand for energy, would we cut off the quickest and cleanest way to get new electrons on the grid — solar? It’s the quickest, it’s the cheapest. Why would we do that?,” Schumer asked at the start of our morning session, “The Big (Green) Apple: Building a Climate Ready NYC.” The senator (a born and raised Brooklynite, who has served as a senator from New York since 1998) was of course referring to Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which accelerated the sunsetting of wind and solar tax credits that were previously expanded and extended under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Schumer played a key role in the passage of the IRA, wrangling with former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia for months in the summer of 2022 to get the bill over the finish line. At Heatmap House, Schumer described the experience of watching what he deemed “The Big Ugly Bill” roll back many of his hard-fought wins.
“New York remains the climate leader, but Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth,” Schumer said. The administration’s actions are killing jobs, he asserted, while “making it harder and more costly for everyday Americans to live and breathe.”
One of the most tangible ways that Americans across the country are experiencing climate change is through more frequent and more severe extreme weather events such as fires, hurricanes, and floods. Last year, Schumer noted, was one of the costliest on record for natural disasters in the US, totaling about $182 billion of damage. The increasing frequency ing frequency of billion-dollar disasters is hitting ordinary Americans in the pocketbook. “Home insurance costs in a whole bunch of states are skyrocketing because of all of these disasters,” Schumer explained, adding that Americans are beginning to recognize how rising emissions are connected to their own rising costs.
But Schumer is no pessimist, and he charted a path forward for Democrats to take back the Senate and resurrect the clean energy policies in the IRA. “All of us must fight back, connecting the dots with the American people. When electricity goes up, it’s because of what Trump did. When your home insurance goes up, it’s because of what Trump did, when it’s going to be harder to make your house cheaper because it’ll consume less energy, it’s because of what Trump did.”
With the cost of living weighing heavily on many Americans, Schumer said now is the time to “harmonize the message” around prices and Trump’s energy policies. And he paired that call to action with a bold promise indeed. “If we take back the Senate, all the good things we’ve done in the IRA will be fully and completely restored, and we’ll go even further than that.”