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On the Scent

"Eminent Domain Is Supposed to Be for Projects That Benefit the Public Interest." Five States Just Tested That.

FREEDOM BEAGLE STAFF · AUGUST 8, 2026

“Eminent domain is supposed to be for projects that benefit the public interest,” Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition, said of AES Indiana’s Morgan County transmission plan. “They’re not supposed to be for projects that are benefiting the private interest of a $1 trillion company at the expense of the general public.”

That is the question this series has been circling for five entries, said out loud by a ratepayer advocate. It is worth being precise about its status: it is an argument, not a holding. In every state we’ve examined, the law almost certainly permits what is being done. That is the finding, and it is more unsettling than a scandal would be.

By the numbers

  • ~10 miles — length of the proposed AES Indiana transmission line
  • 345 kV — voltage class
  • 115–195 feet — height range of the steel poles
  • 200 feet — width of the right-of-way easement
  • Antioch → Blue Bluff — the substations the line would connect, near Monrovia
  • ~800,000 homes — the load the line’s capacity is comparable to
  • 1 — customers it is being built to serve
  • 390 MW — first-phase load of the Google data center it supports
  • 1,200 MW — the eventual full size AES filings indicate the data center could reach
  • $1 billion — reported cost of the data center project east of Monrovia
  • July 2026 — when the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved the related project
  • 30 days — the minimum notice a condemnor must give by offering to purchase, before filing a condemnation complaint, under Ind. Code § 32-24-1

Sources: AES Indiana, Indiana Public Media, Daily Journal

That 800,000-homes figure deserves a sentence of its own. It is a capacity comparison, not a customer count. No one is claiming 800,000 Indiana households will be served by this line. The number is useful precisely because of the gap it exposes: infrastructure sized like a small city’s supply, built to terminate at a single industrial customer.

Where the project stands

AES Indiana has proposed roughly ten miles of 345 kV line in Morgan County connecting the Antioch substation, near Monrovia, to the Blue Bluff substation. The utility has narrowed but not finalized the route — as of its IURC filings, no final path has been selected, which means no landowner yet knows with certainty whether they are in it.

The load is a Google data center east of Monrovia, reported at roughly $1 billion. Inskeep’s point about scale is worth quoting in full because it is a factual claim about sequencing, not rhetoric: “This is only for the first phase of the Google data center. It’s only for 390 megawatts, whereas some other filings we’ve seen by AES Indiana indicate the eventual full size of the data center could be much larger at 1,200 megawatts.” AES Indiana has separately planned a 1,200-megawatt substation for the project.

The IURC approved a related project in July 2026. Neither AES Indiana nor Invenergy — parent of a 130-megawatt battery storage facility in Pike County that also supports the Monrovia load — responded to requests for comment from Indiana Public Media.

Indiana’s architecture will be familiar to anyone who has read the last four entries. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission grants a certificate; the certificate confers the rights of a public utility, including eminent domain. Condemnation procedure then runs through Ind. Code § 32-24-1 and, for utilities specifically, § 32-24-4.

Indiana does carry one procedural protection worth naming: under § 32-24-1, a condemnor must, at least thirty days before filing a condemnation complaint, make an offer to purchase the property. That is a real requirement and a real window. It is also, candidly, a notice-and-offer rule rather than a veto — it governs how a taking proceeds, not whether it may.

What five states actually showed

This series set out to find whether the pattern in Georgia repeated. It does, and the repetition is structural rather than coincidental. Every state examined uses the same three-step architecture:

  1. A commission determines the project is necessary or proper.
  2. A certificate issues.
  3. Condemnation authority attaches to that certificate.

Georgia: O.C.G.A. § 22-3-20, with the PSC certifying ~10,000 MW of which roughly 80% is contracted to data centers. Virginia: Va. Code § 56-265.2, where the SCC approved a route it called “by every objective measure … clearly inferior” because the better one crossed school property a school board could block. Pennsylvania: 15 Pa.C.S. § 1511, which puts a hard 100-meter buffer around a dwelling house and none at all around cropland. Maryland: Md. Code, Pub. Util. § 7-207, where a project with no condemnation authority has held federal court orders to enter 90 properties since June 2025. Indiana: Ind. Code § 32-24-1, with a thirty-day offer requirement and a $1 billion single customer at the end of the wire.

Five states, five statutes, one design. And in all five, the demand driving the certificate comes from one class of private commercial customer.

Two things showed up that we did not expect. The first is the word “extension cord” — used independently by farmers in Pennsylvania and Maryland, who have not met, about different lines built by different utilities in different states. When people that far apart reach for the identical metaphor, they are describing something real about how the burden and the benefit are distributed.

The second is that the protections that do exist protect structures, not land use. Pennsylvania shields a house by 100 meters and a working field by nothing. Virginia shields a dwelling by 60 feet, and a court can waive even that. The statutes were written to keep towers away from where people sleep. They were not written to address what happens to the acreage that pays for the mortgage.

What we’re not saying

Nothing in this series has alleged that any utility, commission, or company broke the law. Not Georgia Power, not Dominion, not PPL, not PSEG, not AES Indiana, not PNK Group or Google. We found no illegality because we do not believe there is any to find — that is the honest result, and reporting it as anything else would have been a lie that flattered the premise.

We also take no position on whether these lines should be built. Grid reliability is a genuine public interest. Data centers are lawful businesses. Several of these projects may be entirely sound on the merits, and at least one — Maryland’s — has two state-level institutions in flat disagreement about whether it is needed at all.

The finding is narrower and, we think, sturdier: the legal machinery that lets a regulated utility take private land was built when “the public” and “the customer” were roughly the same population. It is now being used at scale for a customer class that is neither the public nor especially numerous, and no state we examined has revisited the statute to account for that. Whether that is a problem is a legislative question. Whether it is happening is not — it is happening, in five states, right now, and the landowners noticed before the statutes did.

Where this goes next

AES Indiana has not finalized its route, which means Morgan County landowners are still waiting to learn whether the corridor crosses them. The Maryland PSC is not expected to rule before February 2027. Pennsylvania’s PUC has PPL’s application pending. The Loudoun County school board’s Virginia appeal is live. Georgia’s construction is proceeding.

We will keep tracking all five, and any state legislature that takes up the question these cases raise. If you own land in one of these corridors and have documents — offer letters, survey notices, easement drafts — we would like to see them.

The Grid Grab is a continuing investigation. Entries: Georgia · Virginia · Pennsylvania · Maryland · Indiana.

Sources: