NiSource is trying to turn a six-state regulated franchise into a large-load power platform without putting that plant into the retail rate base. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved the Amazon special contract and the related generation package in June, then approved the Alphabet agreement in July. Those orders matter because they convert a commercial pipeline into a construction calendar. The equity case now turns on whether GenCo, the generation subsidiary designed so data-center customers fund their own plant, actually lifts consolidated earnings faster than the slower gas-and-electric base.
The second-quarter print showed the cost of that transition before the revenue arrives. Adjusted earnings per share fell to $0.16 from $0.22 a year earlier. First-half adjusted earnings still edged up to $1.22. Storm restoration and a lockout of about sixteen hundred United Steelworkers members at NIPSCO produced a workplace-continuity charge of $21 million. Interest expense rose to $199 million as the company pre-funds generation and grid work. NIPSCO carried operating growth while Columbia was essentially flat. The quarter is a shoulder period for a winter-peaking gas utility, but the interest line is not seasonal.
Management kept full-year consolidated adjusted earnings guidance in the low two range and kept the longer growth claim in the high-single-digit to low-double-digit band. The next evidence is operational, not rhetorical. Alphabet energization sits on the summer calendar, the Amazon four-hundred-megawatt amendment sits in front of the commission, and Indiana opened an affordability review that could reshape tracker recovery. The shares already trade as if the overlay works. The open question is whether the construction and rate path stay intact once the first megawatts actually flow.