Gary power outage underscores stakes of Solar for All cancellation

Stephen Mays was left without power for 12 days after violent storms and tornadoes struck northwest Indiana this month. Lori Latham for 13. Thousands of other residents of Gary, Indiana, where both Mays and Latham live and work, went without power for as long as two full weeks following the storms, in what has become one of the longest power outages in modern U.S. history.

Mays, an insurance agent and president of the NAACP chapter in Gary, scrambled to serve clients who had trees fall on their roofs or smashed-out windows. Latham, a member of the Gary City Council, also struggled to care for her constituents and her family — including her kids and 91-year-old father

“We were without refrigeration, without lights, leading a community that was suffering collectively,” Latham recalled. ​“Many of the homes were underinsured or uninsured, many people in the community had underlying health issues. Trying to get through that was extremely difficult.”

Mays and Latham agree that things could have been easier with a simple solution: solar panels and batteries spread throughout Gary, which could have allowed people to charge their phones and computers, chill their food and medicine, operate their medical devices, and simply turn on the lights while they dealt with all the other damage and turmoil.

Just last year, Mays and Latham were among a group of city officials and other community leaders working to bring that exact vision to life. They aimed to use federal funding to outfit Gary with hundreds of rooftop solar arrays, battery storage, community solar, and microgrids. Plans also called for at least one resiliency hub at a downtown community center, where people could come for power and support.

Indiana had been awarded a total of $117 million for solar, battery, and microgrid installations for marginalized communities under the program, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act. Tens of millions of those dollars had been earmarked to pay for the Gary projects, which would have also brought 100 jobs to the once-thriving industrial city now notorious for disinvestment.

The cancellation filled Latham with a deep sense of grief, one that had been building as she watched environmental justice and equity initiatives get eliminated one after another following the start of Trump’s second term.

The Solar for All funds granted to Indiana were administered by the nonprofit Indiana Community Action Association and doled out to seven subrecipients, including the cities of Gary, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis and multiple nonprofits.

Denise Abdul-Rahman, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Black Sun Light Sustainability, said the organization was awarded almost $30 million to deploy 200 residential solar plus storage systems, 50 resiliency hubs with energy storage, and five community solar arrays statewide.

One of the community solar projects and about a dozen residential systems were planned for Gary, where poverty, crumbling infrastructure, unstable housing stock, and high rates of health problems exacerbate the damage and danger caused by power outages.

“If they had received those resources, being a year later now, how much resiliency could have been deployed?” Abdul-Rahman asked. ​“Lives are at stake, people’s health is at stake. There could have been a lot of economic benefits and work created.”

The main focus of Indiana’s Solar for All funding was not just promoting resilience but bringing down energy costs — a particularly acute problem in Gary.