NorthWestern Energy vice president quizzed about Colstrip facility, hydro, climate change

NorthWestern Energy has said it had to charge customers an extra $40 million when a plant at Colstrip went down right before a cold snap in 2024 — but its leaders also argue the coal-fired facility is critical to reliability.

Lawyer Jenny Harbine, representing a group of organizations that are questioning the monopoly’s ability to responsibly plan for the future and manage costs, argued she should be able to ask a NorthWestern vice president questions about the apparent contradiction.

“If we’re not able to probe the veracity of those twin assertions, then our advocacy is significantly hampered with respect to issues that NorthWestern has placed before this commission,” Harbine said.

Tuesday was the second day of a hearing on a major rate case filed by NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest public utility. The Montana Public Service Commission continued to hear testimony from witnesses for the utility, including Vice President of Supply John Hines.

Harbine represents a group of organizations that argue NorthWestern is demonstrating “ignorance of climate-related costs and risks” in the decisions it makes — to the detriment of customers — including the cost to keep coal-fired units running at Colstrip.

A lawyer for NorthWestern Energy objected to some of Harbine’s questions about the plant and climate change.

However, in the case of the extra costs and outage in January 2024, Montana Public Service Commission President Brad Molnar allowed her to ask her question given the expertise of the witness.

Hines said he wasn’t aware of the $40 million number in connection with the cold stretch and pointed to another witness as better suited to address some of Harbine’s questions.

A company memo NorthWestern discussed in March 2024 estimated the cost of market purchases at nearly $40 million.

In response to a question from Harbine, however, Hines agreed market purchases would have cost less if the Colstrip unit had stayed online and hadn’t broken down.

But Hines also said the plant was up and running again before the worst of the cold spell, and he said any type of facility will have ups and downs. Also, he said, wind and solar at times don’t produce either.

“That’s why we have a diversified portfolio that encompasses all different types of generation,” Hines said.

Also in response to questions from Harbine, Hines agreed regular “overhauls” are performed on the Colstrip units, previously every four years, and more recently every three years.

He said those overhauls involve a lot of scoping, with 280 miles of pipe within one unit — “It’s an incredible engineering feat.” He compared the work to regular maintenance on a car every 20,000 miles.

Hines said the work is intended to be preventative, but Harbine asked if the plant would still break down, and Hines agreed it would, as it did in 2024.

The current rate case before the commission involves a proposed partial settlement on electric costs among NorthWestern and other parties. However, the group of organizations Harbine represents wants the Public Service Commission to reject it as too risky and costly for customers.

NorthWestern Energy also has hydro power generation, and Harbine asked if the utility had assessed how climate change might affect, for instance, river flow.

Hines said he hadn’t seen any significant deviation “other than normal variation.”

Harbine wanted to know if he had reviewed modeling of future snowpack, but Hines said he was more interested in current snowpack than future predictions.

Harbine, though, pressed Hines on whether NorthWestern had enlisted expertise to assess how changes to snowpack might affect the productivity of NorthWestern’s hydro assets.

Hines stressed NorthWestern evaluates existing conditions, “but as far as hiring a climate scientist to opine about local impacts from a global phenomenon, I’m not even aware of any accurate models that do that.”

He said global warming shows “overall trends,” and it’s possible to do some “geographical narrowing,” but he wasn’t aware of modeling specific to a watershed.

“Have you inquired?” Harbine asked.

“I haven’t inquired specifically, no,” Hines said.

In response to a question about whether he disputes the science of climate change, Hines said it’s “an interesting question.”

Hines said he’s “a bit of a history buff,” and he knows the biggest fire in Montana was in 1910, and a fire in 1988 burned one million acres in Yellowstone National Park.

“So relating events to global changes, I am somewhat cynical about,” Hines said.

In response to Commissioner Annie Bukacek, Hines agreed he was frustrated to see people connect specific incidents to human-caused climate change.

“There’s a lot of pretty significant events that are being (attributed) to climate change, such as fires these days, that were ongoing well before the Industrial Revolution, if you will,” Hines said.

The group Harbine represents is comprised of the Montana Environmental Information Center, the Human Resource Council District XI, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the NW Energy Coalition.

The hearing will continue at 9 a.m. Wednesday.