Indianapolis Power & Light Company, also known as IPL or IPALCO, is an American utility company providing electric service to the city ofIndianapolis. It is a subsidiary and largest utility of AES Corporation, which acquired it in 2000. IPL provides electric service to more than 470,000 customers in a service territory.
History
IPL was formed in October 1926 by the merger of the Indianapolis Light and Heat Company and the Merchant's Heat and Light Company. Those two companies had started providing electrical service in the 1880s. At the time of the merger, the company had 105,000 customers. In 1937, IPL began a rural electrification program, running power lines to many areas outside Marion County. The company moved into its present-day headquarters building on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis in 1935; the building, now known as the Electric Building, had been constructed in 1924 for the Continental Bank. The building was remodeled in 1968 to a design by Lennox, Matthews, Simmons & Ford, with the lighting design by Norman F. Schnitker. In the late 1980s, the Internal Revenue Service audited IPL and assessed a tax deficiency on deposits that IPL required of customers with poor credit histories. The ensuing court case, Commissioner v. Indianapolis Power & Light Co., resulted in a United States Supreme Court ruling in 1990 that such customer deposits to a public utility were not taxable income. In 2008, IPL integrated the world's first grid scale lithium ion batteryenergy storage system, with four megawatts of battery storage validated for frequency regulation.
Generating plants
The company owns and operates three coal-fired generating plants, a combustion turbine, and a wind farm, giving the company a total nameplate generating capacity of 3,513 MW of power.
Harding Street Generating Station formerly known as the Elmer W. Stout Generating Station is located on the southwest side of Indianapolis and has a production capacity of 1,196 MW of power.
Petersburg Generating Station is located near Petersburg, Indiana, and has a production capacity of 1,760 MW of power.
Georgetown combustion turbine is located on the northwest side of Indianapolis and has a production capacity of 158 MW of power.
