# N05_E18 Energy and Utility Crosswalk: 1910 Municipal Infrastructure to 2023 Plant Records **Research date:** 2026-08-08 **Sector:** `N05_E18` — canonical 24 × 24 grid cell, 37.5–45.0° N and 75–90° W **Time bands:** 1800–1950 industrial transition; 1950–2000 bridge context; 2000–present modern baseline **Status:** bounded research result; no sector score or `provisional_quadrant` assigned ## Scope and selection rationale The previous N05_E18 note identified two unresolved paths: quantify the early municipal utility record rather than relying only on descriptive passages, and add a machine-readable contemporary energy record that can be spatially checked against the fixed cell. This run selected those paths and did not expand beyond the Great Lakes pilot. The historical source is the official 1910 City of Gary annual report already identified in the prior utility/activity-lineage note. The new work page-checks its condensed statistics, public-utility franchise passage, fiscal lines, and civil-engineer's report. The modern end uses EPA's downloadable eGRID2023 plant/generator workbook and EIA's 2024 Indiana electricity profile. These footprints are not interchangeable: the historical source describes Gary municipal and industrial infrastructure, eGRID identifies point plants and generation attributes, and EIA's state profile is a state-wide context series. ## Search envelope - **Modern names:** Merrillville, Gary, Hammond, Lake County, Grand Calumet, Indiana Harbor, Gary Works. - **Historical names and institutions:** City of Gary; Gary Heat, Light and Water Company; United States Steel Corporation; Gary & Interurban Railway Company; Indiana Harbor. - **Target variables:** energy generation and capacity; industrial self-generation/combined heat and power; public water, sewer, lighting, and street/interurban connectivity; population/settlement context. - **Neighbor context:** Lake Michigan and the Calumet corridor, with cross-boundary transport and utility systems. - **Historical source family:** municipal annual report and civil-engineering record, Internet Archive. - **Modern source families:** EPA eGRID plant/generator data and EIA state electricity tables. ## Raw observations ### A. City of Gary, 1910: municipal and settlement statistics The report's mayoral introduction says Gary had grown from fewer than 200 people five years earlier to more than 20,000, and another condensed-history passage describes approximately 25,000 people. Both statements are retained because they occur in the same source and are not silently reconciled here. The same report's condensed statistics state: - 36 miles of paved streets; - 19 miles of macadamized streets; - 41 miles of cement sidewalks; - 25 miles of sewers; - 25 miles of street-car and interurban lines; - 9 steam-railway passenger stations; - 10 railway stations in a separate condensed-statistics list; - 151 miles of total streets, with 54 miles of roads and pavements described as improved or macadamized in the civil-engineer's section. **Source:** City of Gary, *Annual Report of the Heads of Municipal Departments of the City of Gary, Indiana 1910*, Internet Archive identifier `annual-report-of-the-city-of-gary-indiana-1910-images`, PDF `AnnualReportOfTheCityOfGaryIndiana1910_images.pdf`. The first infrastructure passage is PDF p. 7; the condensed statistics are PDF p. 13; the civil-engineer's mileage passage is PDF p. 73. OCR was used for discovery and the cited passages were checked against the PDF text/layout. **Item URL:** **Observation type:** reported municipal and institutional statistic; some figures are descriptive/promotional rather than independently audited in this note. **Source footprint:** Gary municipality and named local transport system, not the fixed cell. **Confidence:** medium-high for the text as a contemporaneous official report; medium for cross-source comparability and promotional claims. ### B. 1910 utility franchise, water tunnel, and public lighting The report states that the Gary Heat, Light and Water Company, described as a United States Steel subsidiary, received the franchise for gas, electric lights, and water. It reports that the company spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars constructing a Lake Michigan water tunnel, and that it constructed gas works and a lighting plant. The report's fiscal section lists 1910 municipal expenditures of `$6,077.51` for water rent and `$11,688.35` for public lighting. These are municipal expenditure lines, not total regional energy use or household access. **Source location:** same Internet Archive item, PDF p. 24 for the franchise and water-tunnel passage; PDF p. 62 for the fiscal lines. **Observation type:** reported institutional infrastructure and municipal expenditure. **Units:** dollars as printed in the 1910 report; the source does not provide a price-year conversion here. **Source footprint:** Gary municipal system and a company-linked utility franchise; not cell-wide. **Confidence:** high for the reported wording and amounts; medium for interpreting company ownership, service coverage, and real purchasing power. ### C. 1910 industrial energy and capacity claims The report's condensed statistics state: - Gary coke ovens: `5,000 tons daily` capacity; - Universal Cement Company at Gary: `25,000 barrels a day` capacity; - Gary steel mills: `165,000 tons per month` capacity; - waterworks “sufficient for city of 250,000 people.” A later industrial passage reports that the steel plant's power house contained 17 gas engines producing about `51,000 horsepower`, with a new power station expected to add `20,000 horsepower`. The report also describes by-product gas from coke ovens being used by local plants. These are capacity claims in a civic/industrial report, not observed annual output. The 51,000 and 20,000 horsepower figures are preserved as source-reported mechanical/electrical capacity language; no conversion to MW is made in this note. **Source locations:** same item, PDF p. 13 for the condensed statistics; PDF pp. 39–40 for the power-house and by-product-gas passage. **Observation type:** reported capacity and planned/additional capacity. **Uncertainty:** the report's language mixes operating, planned, and promotional claims; the exact boundary between completed and prospective works requires engineering-record verification. ### D. EPA eGRID2023: point plants inside the fixed cell EPA's downloadable eGRID2023 workbook identifies three relevant Lake County industrial plants whose reported coordinates fall inside the N05_E18 rectangle. The workbook is a 2023 plant/generator dataset; values below are preserved as reported. | Plant | ORIS code | Latitude | Longitude | Plant sector | Primary fuel/category | Nameplate capacity | Annual net generation | Annual CO2 reported | |---|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---:|---:|---:| | Indiana Harbor E 5 AC Station | 54995 | 41.6844 | -87.4214 | Industrial CHP | BFG / other fossil | 90 MW | 663,048 MWh | 1,062,571.361 tons | | Indiana Harbor West | 10397 | 41.663765 | -87.452325 | Industrial CHP | NG / natural gas | 152 MW | 229,324 MWh | 74,290.555 tons | | US Steel Corp — Gary Works | 50733 | 41.622426 | -87.328936 | Industrial CHP | PRG / other fossil | 161 MW | 1,217,968 MWh | 0 tons reported in the eGRID field | The three plant rows sum to `403 MW` of nameplate capacity and `2,110,340 MWh` of annual net generation. This is a transparent arithmetic sum of three point-plant records, not a cell-wide generation estimate. The eGRID `0` CO2 field for Gary Works is retained as a reported value and is not interpreted as zero physical emissions; source semantics and process-gas accounting require separate verification. **Source:** U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, *eGRID2023 Data, revision 2*, workbook `egrid2023_data_rev2.xlsx`, published June 12, 2025. Relevant sheets: `GEN23` and `PLNT23`; plant records selected by plant name and ORIS code. **Download URL:** **Dataset page:** **Aggregation rule:** select named plants with coordinates inside `N05_E18` bounds; sum nameplate capacity and annual net generation. No area weighting is applied because these are point facilities. **Spatial resolution:** plant point / facility record. **Measurement status:** reported/model-integrated power-sector records in an EPA dataset; not a direct measurement of all energy flows in the cell. **Confidence:** high for the returned workbook fields and coordinate test; medium for treating selected industrial plants as a representative sector energy profile. ### E. EIA 2024 Indiana electricity profile: state context only EIA's 2024 Indiana electricity profile reports `27,837 MW` of net summer capacity, `97,012,880 MWh` of net generation, `99,219,607 MWh` of total retail sales, `7,221,008 MWh` of direct use, and an average retail price of `11.38 cents/kWh`. These are state-level context values. They are not assigned to N05_E18, and no state-to-cell allocation is derived. **Source:** U.S. Energy Information Administration, *Indiana Electricity Profile 2024* and associated state electricity tables. **Profile URL:** **Machine-readable state-table URL:** **Spatial resolution:** Indiana statewide. **Confidence:** high for the official profile values; not comparable to the point-plant sum without a documented spatial allocation method. ## Source interpretation The 1910 report documents a tightly coupled municipal-industrial system: a young city, a rapidly expanding street and sewer network, Lake Michigan water infrastructure, utility franchising linked to United States Steel, and large steel/coke/cement capacities. The report also contains internal scale differences and promotional framing: population is described as both more than 20,000 and approximately 25,000; railway counts differ by passage; and planned or projected works appear alongside completed works. Those tensions are evidence about the source record, not errors to be silently averaged away. The modern eGRID record independently confirms that industrial CHP and process-fuel generation remain spatially present in the same fixed cell in 2023. It does not prove continuity from 1910, because the facility names, ownership, fuels, reporting systems, and industrial processes differ. The defensible bridge is narrower: both endpoints document an industrial-utility configuration at named facilities inside or associated with the N05_E18 working area, while the historical and modern measures remain related rather than directly equivalent. ## Derived observations (not scores) ### D1 — 1910 reported infrastructure bundle The 1910 source reports at least 25 miles of sewers and 25 miles of street-car/interurban lines, alongside a Lake Michigan water tunnel, gas works, and lighting plant. This establishes a dated infrastructure bundle for Gary, not a fixed-cell connectivity index. ### D2 — 2023 selected industrial generation sum For the three selected eGRID plant records: ```text nameplate capacity = 90 + 152 + 161 = 403 MW annual net generation = 663,048 + 229,324 + 1,217,968 = 2,110,340 MWh ``` The result is a facility-selection sum. It excludes plants not selected by this named-plant query and does not represent all electricity consumed, imported, exported, or generated in the cell. ### D3 — Historical-to-modern comparability | Historical measure | Modern measure | Status | |---|---|---| | Gary water tunnel and utility franchise | eGRID industrial plant records | Related, not equivalent: public utility infrastructure versus facility-level generation records | | 1910 reported gas-engine horsepower | 2023 nameplate MW and MWh | Related, not equivalent: different units, technologies, reporting regimes, and dates | | 1910 steel/coke capacity | 2023 plant generation | Related, not equivalent: production capacity is not electric output | | 1910 municipal water/public-lighting expenditures | 2024 EIA retail sales and price | Not directly comparable without price-year, boundary, and service-coverage work | | 1910 Gary street/interurban mileage | modern connectivity layers | Not yet comparable; no fixed-cell network extraction performed | No normalization, quadrant score, or causal estimate is calculated. ## Model classification ```yaml sector_id: N05_E18 periods_touched: [1800-1950, 1950-2000, 2000-present] provisional_quadrant: unresolved reason: mixed-scale historical and modern facility observations establish an energy-utility bridge but do not provide a complete fixed-cell variable table or frozen pilot formula ``` `provisional_quadrant` is a model output, not an archival fact. This run assigns none. ## Confidence and missingness - **Historical text confidence:** medium-high for page-checked reported figures; medium for claims presented as civic promotion or future capacity. - **Modern dataset confidence:** high for eGRID and EIA fields as records of what the agencies publish; medium for sector interpretation because plant points do not equal cell averages. - **Geographic confidence:** high that the three eGRID coordinates lie within the canonical N05_E18 bounds; low-to-medium for extending Gary municipal records to the full mixed land/water cell. - **Comparability confidence:** medium for the existence of an industrial-utility bridge; low for any direct trend or continuity claim. Missingness and limits: - `not_observed`: no complete cell-wide 1910 or 2023 energy balance was extracted. - `not_comparable`: historical capacity, horsepower, public expenditure, and mileage were not converted into modern scores. - `partial_coverage`: eGRID selection contains named facilities, not every facility or every energy flow in the cell. - `source_internal_variation`: population and railway counts differ across passages in the 1910 report. - `unresolved_lineage`: the prior WQP/NWIS 674 mg/L oxygen discrepancy remains unresolved and is not changed by this energy run. - `not_applicable`: derived constraints, adaptive-capacity score, and quadrant remain unassigned. Archival or dataset silence is not converted into zero. The reported zero CO2 field for Gary Works is preserved as a source value with a semantics warning, not used as a physical zero. ## Unresolved gaps and next search path 1. Obtain EIA-923 or plant-specific historical generation/fuel records for a 1950–2000 bridge; eGRID2023 alone does not establish continuity. 2. Trace the 1910 report's city-engineer, water, sewer, and utility tables to separate completed works from planned or promotional capacity claims. 3. Locate primary Gary Heat, Light and Water Company, United States Steel, and railroad records for service coverage, ownership, and operating boundaries. 4. Add a reproducible fixed-cell facility-selection table with all relevant plants, coordinates, inclusion rules, and exclusions; do not rely on three named facilities as a complete inventory. 5. Crosswalk modern generation to demand, transmission, industrial process heat, and public utility service without treating generation as access. 6. Continue the nine-sector Great Lakes pilot with the same raw-observation schema before deriving any score or assigning a quadrant. ## Provenance register 1. **City of Gary annual report, 1910.** Internet Archive identifier `annual-report-of-the-city-of-gary-indiana-1910-images`; PDF `AnnualReportOfTheCityOfGaryIndiana1910_images.pdf`; page references p. 7, p. 13, p. 24, p. 39–40, p. 62, and p. 73. Item: . 2. **EPA eGRID2023 Data, revision 2.** Workbook `egrid2023_data_rev2.xlsx`; sheets `GEN23` and `PLNT23`; published 2025-06-12. Download: . Documentation: . 3. **EIA Indiana Electricity Profile 2024.** Official state profile: . State tables workbook: . 4. **Fixed grid and sector record.** Canonical bounds and anchor cross-reference: `ghojualamanchu/sectors/N05_E18_MERRILLVILLE.json`; project SOP: `08-research-sop.md`. ## Record limits This is a bounded N05_E18 research result. It adds page-checked numerical utility, infrastructure, and industrial-capacity observations for 1910 and a reproducible selection/sum of three EPA eGRID2023 plant records inside the canonical cell, with EIA state context. It does not produce a cell-wide energy balance, a historical continuity claim, a derived score, a causal test, or a `provisional_quadrant`. No private data or secrets are included.