What about NWE’s net-zero by 2050 plan?
Isn’t that a good thing?
If you have seen the plan, it looks beautiful. Wind turbines grace both the front and back covers. But in between the covers it is a different story: There is no commitment to wind or solar, yet there are plans to build unnecessary methane plants through 2035 and allowances to sell us coal generated electricity indefinitely. The plan allows for an overall increase in carbon emissions for 15 years. NWE is selling the story in pictures that they know Montanans want - net-zero, more wind power and a healthy environment - but they have no plans to deliver this future to us.
Even more ironically, since creating this plan, they have decided to triple their use of coal! This moves us away from net zero as coal is the the most polluting form of electricity generation.
The science on climate change is clear, not only do we need to achieve net zero by 2050, we need to cut emissions by half by 2030 to avoid catastrophic, run away, changes. NWE’s net-zero plan has zero likelihood of meeting these goals.
NWE’s website and other marketing efforts contain other misleading information:
NWE claims to use more renewables than most utilities. Well, this is TRUE and worth celebrating! In 2023 54% of their energy came from renewables, which is better than average. But now they are planning on at least tripling their use of coal and adding more methane plants, which could change the portfolio balance to 36% renewables or worse. This is the wrong direction, and a different direction than the rest of the country. In 2023, 77% of South Dakota’s electricity came from renewable sources and they have very similar wind and solar potential as us. (SD also has 5 times the jobs in renewable energy that we do!)
Their website says they are expanding their use of the Colstrip plants at no cost. While it is true that they are getting these shares for free (because they are no longer cost effective to operate and the current owners do not want them anymore), current law will require NWE to invest around $2 billion in upgrades and NWE wants us to pay for it. Even if these laws are overturned or somehow skirted, NWE will either have to spend hundreds of millions of our money to install filtration for toxic airborne metals, or continue to operate a plant with the highest lead and arsenic emissions in the country.
They say they have invested 1 billion in renewable energy over the last decade, when in fact most of that money was spent purchasing hydro plants from which they were already getting power at quite competitive rates. This purchase did not change how much hydropower they use, but it has raised our rates and increased their profits.
NWE repeatedly claims renewables are unreliable. This just isn’t true anymore. Firstly, the most reliable part of their portfolio is renewable hydropower. Secondly, the coal plants they claim provide the backbone of reliable power are 40 years old and have frequently been offline for repairs during extreme weather. Additionally, while they frequently remind us of the obvious fact that sun and wind are intermittent, they skip over the fact that sun and wind are so much cheaper than coal and methane generation that they can affordably be paired with battery storage to provide power at any time. They neglect to say that fossil fuel prices will go up over time, but that wind and sunlight will not.
NWE has frequently used a graph to show how during a cold snap in December 2022 that the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun wasn’t shining and we had to buy power on a regional market at a premium price. They use this to justify investing in expensive fossil fuel plants. What they didn’t say was that at the time, less than 0.5% of their portfolio was solar, which makes their claims about the “sun wasn’t shining” as misleading. In fact, that cold snap was caused by a high pressure (sunny) system that sat on top of Montana for days. If they had had more solar at the time it would have saved us millions.
They say that fossil fuels are necessary to keep the lights on. Every power outage in Montana over the last decade has been caused by severe weather damaging power lines, not by an inability to generate power. Extreme weather will increase as climate change gets more severe -- that is the real threat to reliability.
For years NWE has done a good job of keeping the lights on. When they were unable to generate enough power, they purchased that power from other providers across the west. In fact, contrary to their spin, they have made more tens of millions more money every year selling in regional markets than they have spent, and passed this savings on to us. When a power plant is broken down, or the wind isn’t blowing, participation in regional markets has kept the lights on hundreds of times, and is an effective part of meeting reliability needs.