Four perspectives on trends to watch on energy generation, transmission expansion and the rise of AI adoption
By Amanda Eggert MONTANA FREE PRESS
At an all-day summit last week co-hosted by Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and the Montana Chamber of Commerce, politicians and energy industry insiders described a fossil-fuel-heavy vision for the country where regulatory hurdles are few and permitting timelines are brisk.
Over 300 people from around the state and country gathered at the event Oct. 16, which was pitched as a forum for energy producers and consumers to discuss growth and innovation in the power sector. Top-dollar event sponsors included Google, Stockman Bank and Americans for Prosperity, a free-market think tank founded by oil and gas billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Below are four presenters’ takes on trends to watch as companies and government regulators face surging investment in energy-intensive data centers that are running headlong into electricity generation- and transmission-related bottlenecks.
NextEra Executive: Montana’s largest wind farm is slated to get a solar and battery upgrade
Florida-based energy behemoth NextEra is incorporating battery storage into “pretty much every new energy project” it builds now, according to Jim Shandalov, the company’s national vice president of power origination.
He told conference attendees that falling prices for utility-scale batteries, paired with innovations in efficiency and energy density, are making batteries more economically viable for the utilities NextEra sells power to, as well as the one it owns in Florida.
Shandalov said NextEra is “actively working” to add solar and wind storage to the Clearwater wind project, which turns eastern Montana wind in Rosebud, Custer and Garfield counties into 776 megawatts of power bound for Pacific Northwest utilities.
“All that energy flows [to Washington and Oregon],” he said. “However, the economic benefits of that project stay here, [including] $200 million of land payments to landowners over the life of the project.”
NextEra has another eastern Montana wind farm in the works, Shandalov added. An 800-megawatt project called Glendive Wind that’s in the planning phase could generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes, he said. Between its project in Glendive, the Clearwater project and its expansion, NextEra’s investment in eastern Montana energy projects is expected to top $3.5 billion in the coming years.
Yzaguirre, LLC: Market for AI, data centers is ‘durable’ but electricity is the bottleneck
Max Yzaguirre, an attorney who has held a variety of positions in the energy, telecommunications, real estate and investment sectors, said there is “durable” investment in AI, but there’s a mismatch between market growth and energy-development timelines.
“Personally, I think we’re in a global arms race,” Yzaguirre said of AI adoption, adding that it comes with tradeoffs.
“I think the demand is durable, and we need to figure out a way to supply it. These companies basically need two things: They need chips, and they need power. Without either of those, they’re out of business. At the moment, electric power is the bottleneck, and we’ve got to figure out a way to move faster.”
NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest utility, has entered into tentative contracts with at least two data centers. One project proposed by TAC Data Centers involves 600 megawatts for a project outside of Great Falls. Another agreement, announced with a recently formed company called Quantica Infrastructure, is for up to 1,000 megawatts of power to fuel a center that would be built in Yellowstone County. To meet that kind of demand, Quantica would have to use virtually every megawatt of electricity the power plants NorthWestern currently owns are capable of generating.
Quantica CEO John Chesser also attended the conference. On a panel hosted by Montana Department of Environmental Quality Director Sonja Nowakowski, Chesser urged the state to create an actionable policy “roadmap” so prospective customers and investors feel confident partnering with companies like Quantica. He said key components of that roadmap should include industry-friendly changes to electricity, transmission and telecommunications infrastructure.
Grid United CEO: Building more transmission can ease the power capacity crunch
Michael Skelly, the co-founder and CEO of transmission developer Grid United, said building transmission lines can help new power plants reach markets while also giving existing power generators the ability to serve regions with offset peaks in power usage.
“Capacity is the big topic in our sector right now: Where can we get electrons that we can rely on all the time? One of the ways to do that is obviously building new plants. Another way is by sharing resources,” he said. “In many, many cases, it’s much more cost-effective to come up with ways to share resources as opposed to building new ones, to say nothing of the time frames [to permit and build new plants].”
Skelly’s company is developing the North Plains Connector, a 525-kilovolt line proposed for eastern Montana and western North Dakota that would, if built, move 3,000 megawatts of power between the eastern and western grids.
Skelly said Grid United uses a “very intensive focus on stakeholders” to build projects like the North Plains Connector.
While Grid United has developed land-access agreements for about 95% of the transmission line’s 400-mile proposed route, it’s still waiting on a $700 million federal grant to come through.
In August of 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was awarding the grant to Montana to facilitate the construction of North Plains Connector, a $4.6 billion project. But that disbursement appears to be stalled, caught up in President Donald Trump’s reversal of climate-related grants and loans.
In June, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines urged Energy Secretary Chris Wright to keep the grant moving through the D.C. funding pipeline. Wright told Daines that the project was “very logical” and “very encouraging” before acknowledging that his agency was still reviewing it.
Energy industry insiders suggested that Wright may announce the release of the $700 million of funding at the summit, but no such announcement was made. Due to the federal government shutdown, Wright, who had been scheduled to speak in person, addressed attendees remotely.
In other grid-related news, Berkshire Hathaway Energy announced at the conference that its foundation is donating $1.4 million to fund the creation of a grid operator training program at the Great Falls College campus of Montana State University. Construction of the training center is slated to begin in 2026, with the inaugural class starting their studies in the fall.
Wyoming Governor: There’s a ‘bright’ future for coal in the West, but mining companies must submit workable leasing bids
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said he welcomes expanded access to federal coal leases under the Trump administration, but he argued that access is only part of the equation.
“We need to get coal leasing out there. And coal companies need to bid more than it costs for a new haul truck for those leases,” he said. “That future is really bright, and we need to make sure we have that.”
Despite efforts to expand access to federal coal ranging from reduced royalty payments to reopening the Powder River Basin to new coal mines, the Bureau of Land Management isn’t seeing a surge in coal demand.
Just one company bid on federal coal in southeastern Montana earlier this month, and its bid was so low that the BLM rejected it. The Navajo Transitional Energy Co., a company owned by the Navajo Tribe, bid $186,000 to lease 167 million tons of coal, which comes out to one-tenth of a penny per ton of coal.
According to reporting by the Associated Press, NTEC indicated in the run-up to the leasing sale that coal has little value due to declining demand.
WyoFile reported earlier this month that a coal lease sale scheduled in Wyoming for Oct. 8 was indefinitely postponed, apparently in response to Montana’s lackluster lease sale.
Still, several of the summit’s speakers, including NorthWestern Energy, remain bullish on coal’s prospects, arguing that electricity demand forecasts and the need for on-demand baseload power will keep it viable.
John Hines, NorthWestern Energy’s vice president of supply and Montana governmental affairs, said his company has 370 megawatts of capacity made possible by Colstrip power plant ownership-share transfers slated for Jan. 1.
“But with the size of some of these large loads that we’re talking about, that’s going to get consumed fairly quickly. We need to be able to quickly move to that infrastructure development [to meet] their needs,” he said.
The Montana Public Service Commission is engaging with the data center issue, too. In March the agency raised concerns about grid reliability and impacts to NorthWestern’s customers, who cannot shop for power elsewhere.
