By David Erickson, Missoulian
Late Tuesday night, NorthWestern Energy announced it has signed a letter of intent to supply as much as 1,000 megawatts (one gigawatt) of electricity by the year 2030 to a proposed data center in Montana run by a Texas-based company called Quantica Infrastructure.
That is an enormous, mind-boggling amount of power. That 1,000 megawatts could power 800,000 homes for a year. Montana had 539,670 housing units in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Colstrip Generating Station in southeast Montana, the second-largest coal-fired power plant west of the Mississippi, has a combined maximum output of 1,480 megawatts.
