Every three years, NorthWestern Energy prepares an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) detailing how it intends to supply electricity to Montanans over the coming 20 years. Engaging in the IRP public processes is incredibly important, as NorthWestern usually tailors these plans to support its intent to invest in the most expensive and polluting plants to increase profits on the backs of ratepayers.
NorthWestern has released its 2026 Draft IRP and will be holding public meetings across the state at the end of January and beginning of February.
NorthWestern Energy Public Meetings
Community | Date | Time | Location |
| Great Falls | 1/27/2026 | 5:30pm | Great Falls Public Library (301 2nd Av. N.) |
| Missoula | 1/28/2026 | 5:30pm | Missoula College |
| Helena | 2/3/2026 | 5:30 pm | Lewis & Clark Library, Large Community Room |
| Bozeman | 2/4/2026 | 5:30pm | Bozeman Library Community Room (626 E Main St) |
The PSC will host subsequent public meetings to solicit further feedback on the IRP.
Webinar: What's in the 2026 IRP?
In this webinar recorded on Jan. 22, MEIC’s Nick Fitzmaurice and Kyle Unruh of Renewable NW talk about NorthWestern’s draft IRP before community meetings begin on Jan. 27.
Links shared during this webinar:
– MEIC’s analysis is on our website: https://meic.org/northwestern-energys-2026-integrated-resource-plan/
– If you’re new to writing public comments or speaking up at meetings, we have a great page on our website with tips to get you started: https://meic.org/resources/
– You can send your comments directly to NorthWestern Energy on their website (0r in person at one of the meetings): https://northwesternenergy.com/about-us/gas-electric/montana-electric-supply-planning
– WRAP is the Western Resource Adequacy Program: https://www.westernpowerpool.org/about/programs/western-resource-adequacy-program
Read More:
As an investor-owned, monopoly utility that spends money to build and maintain power plants and supporting infrastructure, charges ratepayers for those expenses, and then profits with up to a 10% return on investment, NorthWestern faces a perverse incentive to plan for an energy system that will make it the most money, not one that will be most affordable for Montanans. As such, NorthWestern’s Draft IRP projects an energy system that prioritizes expensive and damaging coal and gas electricity generation plants, with extraordinarily expensive and unproven small modular nuclear reactors when the Colstrip plant retires in 2043, according to NorthWestern.
While several modeling scenarios explore earlier retirement of the Colstrip plant, the total costs of those scenarios are inflated through unreasonable modeling assumptions. NorthWestern arrives at its expensive and environmentally damaging conclusions through numerous shortcomings in its modeling, including the following:
(Click the + to expand each point.)
NorthWestern has almost completely excluded low-cost wind and solar from its 20-year planning scenarios through arbitrary inputs, assumptions, and constraints. NorthWestern undervalues the ability for wind and solar to supply electricity during NorthWestern’s peak electricity demand. NorthWestern exacerbates this undervaluation by ignoring solar and wind’s ability to provide reliable and complementary electricity when they are built together and combined with short- and long-duration energy storage. At the same time, NorthWestern drastically overestimates the reliability of its coal and gas resources, including the Colstrip power plant.
Despite these fossil fuel power plants’ demonstrated equipment failures and fuel supply shortages during extreme weather events, NorthWestern continues to falsely assert that its gas and coal resources are nearly 100% available year round. The truth is that the old and frequently broken Colstrip plant is available only 51% of the time that it’s needed most.
NorthWestern further undervalues wind and solar by tacking on exorbitant, unrealistic costs for connecting these resources to the grid, ignoring opportunities to take advantage of lower costs. The utility also ignores the ability to quickly develop these resources, with some utility-scale wind and solar projects going from construction to full commercial operation in under two years, compared to the five year minimum required to construct a gas plant.
Other model assumptions discount the value of wind and solar to the energy system even further, especially their ability to replace retiring power plants. In particular, NorthWestern artificially constrains the amount of short- and long-duration energy storage it could build, hamstringing the ability of energy storage to boost the reliability of renewables in NorthWestern’s portfolio.
NorthWestern’s IRP model is structured to design a future energy system that can supply enough electricity to meet peak electricity demand on the most extreme days of the year. However, there are a lot of ways NorthWestern can define that goal; from putting its thumb on the scale for how much electricity it projects it will need to supply (i.e. will peak demand in 2045 be 1200 MW or 2200 MW?), to what avenues are considered for meeting that demand, NorthWestern has a lot of leeway.
Many utilities reduce peak electricity demand through focused demand-side management measures that reduce or shift certain electricity use during periods of peak demand. Smart meters, such as those installed by NorthWestern, can theoretically help facilitate this. However, NorthWestern doesn’t take advantage of these tools, nor does it factor in the ability of interregional transmission to provide reliable access to electricity during peak events. Broader consideration of these factors would prevent NorthWestern from overbuilding its system just so it can have enough electricity for the couple of days a year when demand is highest. That strategy results in overbuilding expensive power plants that benefit its shareholders at the cost of Montana customers.
The IRP also fails to model the costs and benefits of NorthWestern’s participation in one of two competing energy markets for coordinating energy trades during these high demand periods. What’s more, NorthWestern has contracts with existing renewable energy resources in Montana but does not consider extending those contracts, instead planning to build expensive fossil and nuclear generation when those contracts expire.
And on top of everything, NorthWestern uses an outrageous “planning reserve margin” to say that it needs to build 21% more electricity capacity than it could ever need. And as NorthWestern kowtows to out-of-state data center developers, it sees an opportunity to inflate its energy needs even further.
Despite the increasingly apparent impacts of a changing climate on Montana’s energy system and NorthWestern’s constitutional obligation to maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment – including a stable climate – for present and future generations, no scenarios in the utility’s IRP modeling is in line with NorthWestern’s Net Zero by 2045 Vision. This “vision” was nothing more than a PR stunt.
NorthWestern also doesn’t break down its portfolio greenhouse gas emissions by generation facility and neglects to conduct a social cost of greenhouse gases analysis to examine the true costs of its fossil fuel-reliant portfolios. While planning to continue exacerbating the climate crisis, NorthWestern includes no climate resiliency and adaptation planning in its IRP.
Despite MEIC’s ongoing efforts to guard and expand transparency and public participation in the IRP process, NorthWestern continues to provide as little transparency and public participation as possible.
When required to make its electric technical advisory committee (ETAC) meetings open to the public, NorthWestern made a mockery of public participation. The utility gave the public view-only access to these meetings, publishing cursory agendas and meeting minutes, and making meeting materials available weeks or months after a meeting took place. When required to take public feedback on its IRP development, NorthWestern created a feedback portal on its website for which there is no traceable impact to the final IRP’s development.
Despite the implementation of ETAC and the Stakeholder Work Group, there is no evidence that these groups had any substantive influence over the development of a least-cost IRP resource portfolio. Instead, these were forums for NorthWestern’s planning team to relay what the company’s executives had already decided to do. As a result, the final IRP does not represent a least-cost resource planning exercise, but instead a fossil-fuel-guzzling cash-cow for NorthWestern’s executives and shareholders, backed by performative pre-baked modeling outcomes that ignore low-cost resources such as solar and wind at the expense of our climate and our wallets.
