The plant's last two coal units are being converted to natural gas: Unit 3 went offline for conversion in February 2026 and Unit 4 was scheduled to follow in June 2026, with coal at Petersburg ending entirely in 2026. A 200 megawatt battery installation has been in service since March 2025, and the Petersburg Energy Center added 250 megawatts of solar with storage in February 2026. The school district has already lost about $300,000 as plant assets shifted.

Plant families, miners, and Pike Central parents live this transition every day. Tell me what you are seeing before I tell anyone what the state should do about it.

The ash ponds at the plant 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 in the ground. Protecting the White River and the wells around it is not a partisan idea. It is basic maintenance of the place we live, and I will treat it that way.

Duke serves Petersburg itself, CenterPoint serves much of the county, and WIN Energy REMC serves the countryside. CenterPoint customers absorbed the second phase of a roughly 20 percent increase in March 2026. The town that hosts the plant, the batteries, and the solar farms should not be an afterthought on rates. Any data center that comes here should cover more than its full cost of power, so bills around it go down, not up.