[MCN] Wednesday night in Missoula: NorthWestern Energy's Public Mtg on Resource Planning--your voice is needed

[Derek Goldman]

Hi Missoula energy and climate advocates.  NorthWestern Energy will be hosting a public meeting in Missoula Wednesday night, to present and gather community feedback on its draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)<https://northwesternenergy.com/about-us/gas-electric/montana-electric-supply-planning>. This will be the only public meeting in Missoula, and it's your opportunity to tell NorthWestern to prioritize investments in CO2-reducing energy conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy in its multi-year planning cycle:

WHEN: 5:30pm to 7:30pm, Wednesday, Jan. 28th
WHERE: Missoula College, 1205 E. Broadway st.
WHAT: 20-30 minute presentation by NWE, followed by opportunities for questions and public comments.

Background:  Every three years, NorthWestern must produce an Integrated Resource Plan—a long term planning study that outlines different options for how the utility will meet its customers' power needs over the next 20 years. It includes the forecasting of future electricity demand as well as an evaluation of how it will use (or develop) energy resources to meet that demand.
This year, the planning process is particularly important due to three recent and potentially game-changing occurrences across Montana's electric service landscape:

  *
NWE's announced intent to provide 1,400 megawatts (MW) of power to new DATA CENTERS proposed in Montana. (That's nearly double NWE's entire average electric load across the state of 750 MW!);
  *
NWE's recent acquisition of more than 500 MW of Colstrip-- the aging and polluting coal-fired power plant in eastern Montana;
  *
NWE's announced merger with Black Hills Energy—a South Dakota-based, regional utility company.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the draft IRP has numerous deficiencies:

  *
It fails to take into account climate-altering greenhouse gas pollution;
  *
It overvalues the resource contribution of fossil fuel generation, while undervaluing low-cost renwables like wind, solar and battery storage;
  *
Its goals for achieving energy savings through conservation and energy efficiency programs are anemic, at best;
  *
It proposes extremely expensive nuclear power as the eventual replacement for Colstrip, while not accounting for the full cost of plant construction and its impact on customers.

Our friends at Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC) have put together a webpage with more detailed information and resources<https://meic.org/northwestern-energys-2026-integrated-resource-plan/> for commenting on the IRP.

It's important that Montana energy customers and stakeholders engage in the IRP process, and tell NorthWestern what is important for our clean & affordable energy future!

Please attend Wednesday evening to learn more about this process and to tell NorthWestern it must do better!

Derek Goldman
Policy Associate | NW Energy Coalition
Missoula, MT—the traditional homeland of the Séliš & Ql̓ispé people

The NW Energy Coalition advances clean, equitable, and affordable energy policies by leveraging our analytic expertise and convening a broad alliance of people and organizations.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20260127/127613ae/attachment.htm>