If passed into law, the Energy Inflation Act (House Bill 1007, and Senate Bills 423/424) could leave Hoosiers stuck with billions in electric rate increases for experiments with Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMR’s) and reverse our progress in transitioning away from coal towards renewable energy. At the center of it all are handouts to Big Tech and monopoly electric companies like Duke Energy.
While the Energy Inflation Act has been sailing through the statehouse, solutions like Community Solar didn't even receive a hearing in committee. We need our lawmakers to be focused on protecting our progress towards cleaner power, not bailing out coal or giving away billions of dollars to investor-owned electric companies for experiments.
The good news is that our voices are making a difference — already House Representatives adopted an amendment to House Bill 1007 which would require large users like Google to pay 80% (up from 75%) of the costs of adding new power resources to meet their data center needs. Now, Governor Braun has publicly stated that Hoosiers shouldn’t have to absorb all the financial risk for experiments with unproven SMR’s. What the Governor got wrong: Data centers are the overwhelming driver of concerns about increased energy demand — NOT the carefully planned transition of our energy system as outdated coal plants are phased out.
There is urgency for lawmakers to implement practical policy change — by 2030, just a handful of the proposed data centers could use more electricity than all 6.8 million residential electric customers in Indiana (Source: Citizens Action Coalition). But, the Energy Inflation Act isn’t the solution — even Representative Soliday who is sponsoring the bills has said that SMR’s are unlikely to be deployable for a decade. Instead lawmakers should focus on policies that protect Hoosiers and accelerate the deployment of cleaner and cheaper energy resources that are available to us now — including battery storage, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.
As we’ve seen: public pressure is working. If we can organize more of our friends and family to contact our lawmakers, we stand a chance of blunting these bad bills. Tell your legislators to vote no at: sc.org/nobailout.
You can find a sample script to invite your friends to take action, along with information about how to volunteer with Sierra Club at tinyurl.com/takeaction25.
Megan Anderson
Senior Organizer
Sierra Club