A massive new data center campus Amazon Web Services is building just outside of Northwest Indiana will be able to use as much electricity as 1.5 million households in Indiana or up to half the households in the state, according to the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. It’s part of a sharp spike in the demand for electricity that’s unlike anything Indiana has ever seen.
Amazon Web Services, which invested $87 million in a data center in the Port of AmeriPlex in Portage a few years ago, is building an $11 billion data center in New Carlisle, just east of LaPorte County. St. Joseph County Economic Development Director Bill Schalliol said the project, which is the largest private-sector investment in the state’s history, would support an estimated 3,000 jobs.
Seattle-based Amazon said the data center would have a 2,250-megawatt capacity and could have a 90% load factor in filings with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. Data centers operate around the clock to meet the growing demand for data, such as with the rising use of artificial intelligence.
The data center could end up using 17.7 megawatts a year, said Ben Inskeep, program director of the consumer and environmental advocacy group Citizens Action Coalition.
Indiana had 33.2 million megawatt hours of residential retail electric sales last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The average Indiana household uses about 12 megawatt hours per year or about 1,000 kilowatt hours per month, Inskeep said.
So the new data center in New Carlisle will end up consuming about the same amount of power as about half of Indiana’s 2.8 million households, Inskeep said.
“The potential electricity usage from data centers coming to Indiana, such as the Amazon data center in New Carlisle, is staggering and hard to comprehend,” he said.
Amazon Web Services said it was taking steps to reduce energy usage, such as with energy-efficient designs that would reduce mechanical energy consumption by 46% and reduce the embodied carbon in the concrete used in construction by 35%.
Data centers are by their nature large energy consumers, given that they run thousands of computers around the clock to store data. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates a data center consumes about 50 times as much power as the average office building of the same footprint.
Indiana and Michigan Power will serve the facility in New Carlisle. It expects new data centers will use twice as much electricity by 2030 as all its current customers combined.
“I&M’s new data centers will use more electricity by 2030 than all residential customers in the state of Indiana used in 2023,” Inskeep said. “The new Amazon data center campus in New Carlisle could use more electricity when completed than all of I&M’s existing residential, commercial and industrial customers combined.”
The Indianapolis-based Citizens Action Coalition said the number of data centers coming to Indiana has been exploding. It’s been tracking at least 25 large data center proposals across the Hoosier State.
The commercial real estate firm CBRE estimates data center construction grew by 69% year-over-year last year. Many developers have been feeling out or looking to get preliminary approval for future projects, as it is expected that utilities will need another few years to build the capacity.
“The environmental toll is equally staggering if these data centers are built and operate as anticipated. I&M and NIPSCO have proposed large additions of natural gas power plants to meet most of this data center electricity demand,” Inskeep said. “The governor is pushing to keep coal plants open, explicitly citing data centers as a reason. I&M has also proposed shifting the portion of Ohio Valley Electric Corporation coal plants currently paid for by Michigan ratepayers, as well as the capacity and energy provided by that share, onto its Indiana ratepayers, which it says it needs to do because of data center load growth in Indiana.”
I&M also is looking to buy a natural gas power plant in Ohio to meet the demand for new data centers.
“After years of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, I&M and NIPSCO are now proposing large increases in climate pollution — roughly 30% increase in emissions for NIPSCO and 48% for I&M by 2035 under their current plans relative to 2023,” Inskeep said. “The impact to ratepayers could be significant. So far, utilities are not outlining clear proposals on how much it will cost and how rates will be impacted because there is a high degree of uncertainty regarding how much data center load growth will actually materialize.”
The cost of supplying data centers has been climbing. Duke Energy in southern Indiana for instance is looking to invest $3.33 billion to build a new natural gas plant to generate more electricity.
“The cost of new generation has gone through the roof due to high data center demand for power, meaning building new resources to meet data center load growth could come at a premium that pushes rates higher for other customers,” Inskeep said. “The interconnection costs related to data centers can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but my understanding is that these costs are socialized onto all ratepayers rather than paid by the data center.”
Data centers will end up consuming even more power than steel mills, Inskeep said. A major concern is that ratepayers could end up footing the bill for all the new electric generation capacity, he said.
“Right now, there are few consumer protections in place to protect customers from bill increases associated with costs to serve new data centers,” Inskeep said. “This is an unprecedented risk for affordability because never before had we had customers this large, creating this amount of risk to the utility and its other customers. There are no comparable customers on the grid today or ever before — the size of data centers is uniquely large and unmatched by any industrial facility that I am aware of.”
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