An intense Aug. 11 storm knocked out power for nearly 375,000 customers of Northern Indiana Public Service Co. and as of late afternoon Friday — 10 days later — more than 41,000 still were without service. NIPSCO projected that Portage and Gary wouldn’t be fully restored until Tuesday, a full two weeks after the storm.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun last Thursday described the situation as “unacceptable.”
We agree. Two weeks without electricity has major consequences.
It means refrigerators and freezers full of spoiled food, sweaty spaces, no hot water, no cooking fuel and over a long enough period of time transforms daily life into something approximating the medieval.
Residents soldiering on through the ordeal were quoted in various reports expressing frustration and exhaustion while some tried to be philosophical. There were questions from Gary residents about whether other parts of the region were being prioritized over their long-beleaguered city, which NIPSCO executives adamantly denied.
The same storm system battered the Chicago area, particularly the south suburbs, and Commonwealth Edison reported that it had restored service to 99% of the 410,000 customers who lost power by Aug. 15. Like all utilities, ComEd comes in for plenty of grousing as a matter of course, but would anyone in northern Illinois prefer that NIPSCO were their utility these past two weeks?
Nope.
Once the lights all are back on, NIPSCO and Indiana policymakers shouldn’t behave like it’s business as usual from here.
Storms as strong as the ones that pummeled the area look to be a regular feature of summertime in these parts. If NIPSCO’s painfully slow restoration pace is unacceptable, then the utility and the state must take steps to improve.
The awful reality in northwest Indiana reminds us of 15 years ago when a brutal spate of July storms in Chicagoland led to outages that went on for days on end, especially in the northern suburbs. A July 11, 2011, derecho caused 860,000 outages, and it took ComEd six days to restore all of its affected customers.
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The experience provoked so much outrage that the Illinois Commerce Commission ruled two years later that nearly 35,000 customers were eligible for monetary damages from ComEd, a decision that was upheld by the Illinois Appellate Court the following year over ComEd’s objections.
At the time, ComEd was pushing hard for state legislation authorizing a 10-year, $2.6 billion modernization program that included the installation of so-called smart meters in customers’ homes and businesses throughout the service territory and power-grid improvements that enabled the system to recover much faster from mass-outage events. The law eventually was enacted over then-Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto, and ComEd’s courting of then-House Speaker Michael Madigan infamously became a key part of the successful corruption prosecution of Madigan as well as executives and lobbyists for the utility.
There were aspects of the smart-grid law that were objectionable such as provisions that gave state utility regulators next to no say in the level of rate hikes ComEd demanded to make the work happen.
But the infrastructure investment did improve ComEd’s outage performance, as statistics have borne out. We haven’t seen anything as awful as that 2011 experience since then. And the contrast in 2026 between ComEd and NIPSCO is yet more evidence that the modernization paid off.
NIPSCO is in the middle of installing smart meters throughout its territory, a project it expects to complete next year. In addition to providing exact information on customer usage and eliminating the need for estimated billing, smart meters are helpful in outage response. Through the meters, the utility is informed immediately when the power goes out at a specific location.
But there’s more to grid modernization than smart meters. Of the $2.5 billion ComEd budgeted for the big grid upgrade in 2011, just $1.1 billion was for the meters. The rest went to installation of smart switches and various other improvements to the system designed to make it more resilient.
Acting meaningfully to improve NIPSCO’s outage-restoration performance will cost money and will hike utility bills that already are high. Is that a trade-off residents and businesses are willing to make?
It may or may not be, but the utility, state officials and northwest Indiana’s communities should begin an honest discussion about a cost-effective response.
Now.
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