Pike County

AES is putting about 1.1 billion dollars into Pike County. The plant's last two coal units are being converted to natural gas: Unit 3 went offline for its conversion in February 2026, Unit 4 was scheduled to follow in June 2026, and AES plans to end coal at Petersburg entirely in 2026, the first Indiana investor owned utility to do it. A 200 megawatt battery installation has been in service since March 2025, and the Petersburg Energy Center, 250 megawatts of solar with battery storage, entered service in February 2026.

The plant has long been the county's largest taxpayer, and the school district lost about $300,000 as assets shifted. Plant families, miners, and Pike Central parents live with this transition every day. I want to hear what you are seeing before I tell anyone what the state should do about it.

The ash ponds at Petersburg rank among the worst in the country for coal ash groundwater contamination, with cobalt and other metals far above protection standards. Converting the plant to gas does not clean up the ash that is already there. Protecting the river and the wells around it is not a partisan idea, and I will treat it as basic maintenance of the place we live.

Pike County households are served by three different utilities: CenterPoint across much of the county, Duke in Petersburg, and WIN Energy REMC in the countryside. CenterPoint customers absorbed the second phase of a roughly 20 percent increase in March 2026. Meanwhile the county hosts the plant, the batteries, and the solar farms. People who live next to the infrastructure should not be an afterthought on rates, and any data center that comes here should cover more than its full cost of power so your bill goes down, not up.

In January 2025 Winslow residents packed a town hall over a proposed 45 percent water rate increase. Small systems with old pipes and few customers face brutal math. The state has grant tools for exactly this, and towns like Winslow should be first in line for them, not last.

Acid drainage from old strip mines once killed everything in the 17 mile South Fork of the Patoka. Federal reclamation money has been repairing that damage for years, and the wildlife refuge is rebuilding the river corridor mile by mile. That work is worth defending, and it shows what patient public investment does for a place.

The state's property tax law caps local revenue at the exact moment the county's largest taxpayer is winding down its coal assets. Nobody in Indianapolis has published what that means for Pike County in dollars. I will, and once the numbers are out we can have an honest conversation about what the county can afford.