Intro to welcome back to chicago 2.0
Man plans.
God laughs.
Mother Nature says, “Hold my beer.”
A few months ago, we went down a completely unnecessary F’nAround rabbit hole asking whether Hammond, Indiana is quietly becoming Chicago 2.0.
The Bears.
A world-class stadium and mixed-use district.
Billions in AI/data-center investment.
Hundreds of megawatts of new demand.
New generation.
New development.
New infrastructure.
Basically: Look at the future we’re building.
Then Northwest Indiana got hammered by a storm and portions of the region spent more than a week waiting for the lights to come back on.
Well… shit.
Because now our original question has a Part II.
Generating thousands of additional megawatts is one problem.
Delivering it reliably and having the infrastructure, equipment, redundancy and manpower to repair the system quickly when it fails is another.
A hyperscale AI data center can’t exactly tell its customers:
“Sorry, NIPSCO says maybe next Tuesday.”
And a future Bears stadium surrounded by hotels, restaurants, transportation and tens of thousands of people can’t run on a really long extension cord from Chicago.
The storm doesn’t prove Hammond can’t become Chicago 2.0.
It does something much more useful:
It stress-tested the infrastructure baseline Chicago 2.0 would have to be built on.
So the first article asked:
Where the hell is all this future power going to?
Mother Nature apparently read it and gave us Part II:
Cool. Now can you keep it on, and when you can’t, how fast can you put it back together?
Welcome back to Chicago 2.0.
Please bring a generator.