by Nick Fitzmaurice
The 2023 IRP meeting in Missoula. Photo by Katy Spence.
NorthWestern Energy is currently developing its 2026 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). Under Montana law, regulated monopoly utilities such as NorthWestern Energy must prepare and submit to the Public Service Commission (PSC) an IRP every three years. These plans detail how utilities plan to supply reliable and affordable electricity to their customers over the next 20 years. NorthWestern’s IRP receives extensive public scrutiny because these plans lay the groundwork for future resource acquisition, such as the utility’s decision to build the Yellowstone County Generating Station, its pursuit to increase its ownership in the Colstrip plant, and its plan to eventually replace that plant with the most expensive form of power available — nuclear.
Montana’s IRP requirements are created by the Montana legislature and fleshed out through rulemaking at the PSC. The 2019 Legislature updated this process, but it took the PSC until 2023 to adopt rules for implementing the legislation. In the 2025 Legislative Session, before those rules were ever implemented for the development of an IRP, Rep. Gary Parry (R-Colstrip) proposed HB 55. As introduced, the bill was atrocious. Fortunately, MEIC was able to secure numerous amendments on the bill to maintain and strengthen transparency and public participation — two aspects that were severely lacking in NorthWestern’s previous IRP process.
Unfortunately, NorthWestern has a long history of hiding its analyses and methodologies from public scrutiny. But transparency and public participation are crucially important. After NorthWestern submitted its 2023 IRP, nearly 500 people from across Montana showed up at the PSC’s public meetings decrying the plan’s extensive deficiencies. PSC staffers referenced these comments extensively in their review of NorthWestern’s IRP. They explained that many of the deficiencies could have been avoided through robust engagement with stakeholders. At the urging of the public, PSC staff found “the 2023 Plan less transparent, accessible, and analytically rigorous than Montana’s planning statutes and the Commission’s 2023 planning rules require.” Unfortunately, the PSC severely watered down staff’s recommendations in their final IRP comments submitted to NorthWestern, but many shortcomings identified by commenters were still included.
The opportunity for robust public engagement is rapidly approaching. NorthWestern’s Electric Technical Advisory Committee (ETAC) has been meeting for more than a year without any public participation, and the utility recently launched an IRP Stakeholder group, in which I represent MEIC. A draft IRP may be available to ETAC and the stakeholder group as early as this month, and the final draft is supposed to be released to the public in December, prior to NorthWestern’s plan to file the plan with the PSC in March 2026. However, NorthWestern’s recently announced merger with Black Hills Corporation may delay this process and will almost certainly require changes in the draft plan. As NorthWestern pulls together its draft plan, it will host public meetings and/ or webinars sometime this fall or winter, followed by public meetings at the PSC likely next spring once NorthWestern has filed its draft plan there.
In the current era of frenzied data center demand projections driven by artificial intelligence (see article on pg. 17), engagement in these meetings will be essential to ensure that NorthWestern’s 2026 IRP does not set the utility on the trajectory of building more gas plants and running the Colstrip plant for decades. MEIC will be calling on the public to attend these meetings and voice the need for a clean and affordable energy future.
This article was published in the September 2025 issue of Down To Earth.
