Business View Magazine | March 2019

214 together to provide incentives to get them here to construct an ethanol plant in our com- munity. They will be buying 500 million bush- els of corn a year, once they start this fall, and that would impact, hopefully, every farmer in the community. We have a belief that bio-tech- nology in fuels is very important and it gives a direct benefit to the local farming community.” In fact, Shelbyville will be the 28th biofuel plant in POET’s network and its fifth in Indiana. The company’s nearly $160 million capital investment will add 45 full-time jobs; make $110 million in annual corn purchases within a 30-mile radius of the city; and produce 80 million gallons of clean biofuel per year. “We’re going through the RFP process to look at some solar grids on city property to try and create more sustainable energy,” DeBaun adds. “We have put a microgrid, already, at our wa- ter resources recovery facility and we power all of our external lights out there off of the microgrid, and we converted them all to LED. We’re going through the LED conversion pro- cess in all of our facilities, citywide, including street lights. And our County Economic De- velopment group is working with a company called Ranger Power. They’re looking at about SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA