Gov. Mike Braun has noted that Indiana’s supply of electricity is not sufficient for supporting a growing manufacturing sector.
“Right now, [Indiana has] all kinds of opportunities that straddle AI and technology,” Braun told an audience at the Indianapolis Investment Forum last month. “We’ve got the biggest two issues, probably in the state, that have come out of nowhere — the availability of water and electricity.”
Braun and other state officials are pushing for the production of small modular reactors, a form of nuclear reactor that can be produced in a factory.
The Indiana General Assembly sought to incentivize production of SMRs by passing House Bill 1007, which provides state tax credits for costs connected with SMR production. Braun signed the bill into law last month – to the dismay of environmental advocates. “Costs are going to be high for the next 10 to 20 years,” said Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council. “We don’t think that rate payers should pay for the permitting, the planning, the development costs associated with unproven technology.”
Carpenter noted that some states have abandoned their push for SMRs. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems abandoned its project in 2023 after costs ballooned to $9 billion.
Gov. Braun attributed some of the energy shortage to what he considers the “premature” shuttering of coal plants. Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, said the truth is exactly the opposite.
“If we go back in time to the late 2000s, early 2010s, Indiana spent billions retrofitting and refueling existing coal fleets when we should’ve been transitioning to clean energy,” he said. “We spent a lot of money on coal plants. That’s what drove up utility bills in the state of Indiana, not clean energy.” Olson said utility companies are phasing out coal plants due to rising costs, not government directives. “It’s just rhetoric,” he said.
SMR production, some experts believe, may lead to exploration of other alternative energy sources. One such source is biomass energy, a form of renewable energy derived from organic materials like plants, wood, and animal waste.
Biomass energy was a hot topic in the early 2010s; municipalities throughout the state were looking into it. Cities like Scottsburg and Jasper abandoned their pursuits due to widespread opposition and other issues.
Those issues included a perceived lack of demand for electricity, a decrease in the price of solar and wind energy, and an abundance of cheap natural gas reserves, according to a 2014 letter from Jay Catasein, the former CEO of Jasper Clean Energy.
Biomass is a broad term encompassing items ranging from animal manure to wood scraps. Those items can be put into an anaerobic digester and turned into electricity.
Waste can also be used to create vehicle fuel and other products.
Biomass energy makes up about 19% of Indiana’s renewable energy production, according to a 2024 study from Purdue University.
“We’re no fans of factory farms,” Olson said. “That said, we’ve got a lot of them.
“If we can take that waste, rather than storing that waste in lagoons or spreading that gross stuff on farm fields, let’s make some energy with it.”
Olson acknowledged that biomass energy production has its limits.
“There’s only so much electricity we will get from that, but there’s absolutely no reason that we shouldn’t take a waste stream and make a better use of it,” he said.
Still, Olson said he has reservations about biomass-produced electricity. His organization worries that incentivizing biomass energy production would lead to a proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations, which raise environmental and human health concerns. “They’re dirty operations,” he said. Those in proximity to factory farms or CAFOs could be at risk for certain diseases because waste like manure contains more than 150 pathogens, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Manure also contains nitrites which can contaminate nearby water supplies.
Carpenter, with the Hoosier Environmental Council, said the organization is also opposed to biomass energy and instead recommends that Indiana invest in solar and wind technology with battery storage.
“We should be incentivizing energy efficiency in our homes and our appliances,” Carpenter said. “The energy we don’t use is energy we don’t have to create.”
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