Montana is being asked to power an industry roughly twice the size of the system we already have, under contracts the public is not allowed to read. I am not against data centers. I am against approving them before Montana has written the rules for who pays, who is protected, and what happens when one shuts down.
Everything NorthWestern Energy serves in Montana today runs about 750 average megawatts. Announced data center commitments total roughly 1,400 megawatts. A single proposed project near Broadview accounts for up to 1,000 of those. The utility has said it is in talks with eleven developers.
This is not an abstract statewide argument. Three of these sites are in the district you vote in, in counties people here drive through every week.
Status: moving forward. Just north of Billings, in Yellowstone County.
Status: under discussion. A community task force has formed to work through the question.
Status: operating. In Big Horn County, a coal plant now runs solely to power cryptocurrency mining.
Serving loads this large means building new generation and new transmission. Somebody pays for that. A large load tariff now before the commission would sort very large customers into two tiers.
Five year minimum contract.
Fifteen year minimum contract, with commission approval required.
Nine parties intervened in that docket, including the Montana Consumer Counsel, Missoula County, the City of Missoula, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, a coalition of environmental and citizen groups, and a former commissioner. The dispute is simple to state and expensive to get wrong: does the cost of new generation and transmission built to serve these customers stay with them, or does it land on everyone else's monthly bill?
A separate customer class for very large loads, with cost responsibility that stays where the cost is caused. Residential customers should not subsidize industrial growth, and the contract terms should be long enough that Montana is not left holding stranded infrastructure.
The commission has ruled that utility contracts with data centers do not have to be public. So Montanans are being asked to accept the rate impact of agreements they cannot read. That is the clearest link between this fight and the transparency problem at the commission, and it is the part I would change first.
Rate terms that affect captive customers belong on the public record. Genuine trade secrets can be handled narrowly, but the cost and the load are not trade secrets, and deliberations about them should happen in the open.
of water per kilowatt hour, by published figures for cooling.
for a 100 megawatt facility running continuously, concentrated in the summer months when Montana is most drought stressed.
Cooling systems also use chemical treatments, which raises contamination questions for the ground and surface water around a site. In farm and ranch country, and on tribal land where water rights were won slowly and at cost, water is not a secondary concern. It is the first question, and it deserves an answer before approval, not after.
The decision on the large load tariff may fall to the commission seated in 2027. Whoever holds this seat will be voting on who absorbs the cost of serving these loads.
A data center bill is heading to the 2027 Legislature that would give the commission authority over large loads, require a separate customer class, bar cost shifting onto residential customers, and require financial guarantees. The commission would write and enforce those rules.
That is the whole reason a utility race this far down the ballot matters in 2026. The rules for the next fifteen years of Montana energy contracts get written by the five people seated next January, and eastern Montana picks one of them on November 3.
District 1 is the largest Public Service Commission district in Montana by geography. Gas money and yard signs are most of the budget. Anything you can give goes straight into reaching voters who have never been asked about their power bill.
Tell us where you are and what you can do. Signs travel with volunteers, so a name in a small town is worth as much to us as an hour of phone calls.
Or reach the campaign directly: angelinecheek4psc1@gmail.com · 406-514-1786
