Power plants and the grid in Montana
Montana has 73 power plants with 7.3 GW of capacity, hydro the largest share at 2.8 GW. The map shows 7 data centers in Montana. Its interconnection queue holds 45 active requests for 11.3 GW.
Capacity by fuel
73 power plants with 7.3 GW of capacity, planned generators left out.
- Hydro: 2.8 GW from 23 plants (39%)
- Wind: 2 GW from 23 plants (27%)
- Coal: 1.6 GW from 4 plants (22%)
- Natural gas: 561 MW from 9 plants (8%)
- Solar: 181 MW from 9 plants (2%)
- Oil: 52 MW from 1 plant (1%)
- Other: 40 MW from 2 plants (1%)
- Biomass: 6 MW from 2 plants (under 1%)
Largest plants
- Colstrip: Coal, 1.5 GW
- Noxon Rapids: Hydro, 581 MW
- Libby: Hydro, 525 MW
- Hungry Horse: Hydro, 428 MW
- Clearwater Wind I: Wind, 366 MW
- Yellowtail: Hydro, 288 MW
- Pryor Mountain Wind: Wind, 240 MW
- Selis Ksanka Qlispe: Hydro, 228 MW
- Fort Peck: Hydro, 218 MW
- Clearwater Wind East: Wind, 208 MW
Planned and under construction
5 generators planned, under construction or testing, 1.2 GW in all, not counted above.
- Wind: 710 MW
- Solar: 400 MW
- Battery storage: 50 MW
- Hydro: 7 MW
Grid operators
- MISO (ISO or RTO): 4 plants
- SPP (ISO or RTO): 3 plants
- Northwestern Energy (Nwmt) (NWMT): 50 plants
- Bonneville Power Administration (BPAT): 4 plants
- WAUW: 4 plants
- Avista Corporation (AVA): 2 plants
- GWA: 2 plants
- PacifiCorp East (PACE): 2 plants
- Puget Sound Energy (PSEI): 1 plant
- WWA: 1 plant
Data centers
7 data center sites on the map.
- Yellowstone County: 4 sites
- Operators with the most sites: iConnect Montana (1), Parsec Data Management (1), Quantica Infrastructure (1), Sabey (1), State of Montana (1), Unite Private Networks (1)
Interconnection queue
45 active requests to connect 11.3 GW of new generation and storage, and 17 suspended requests, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up data.
- Wind: 7.6 GW in 19 requests
- Solar: 2.4 GW in 14 requests
- Hydro: 737 MW in 5 requests
- Natural gas: 487 MW in 4 requests
- Battery storage: 100 MW in 2 requests
- Other: 2 MW in 1 request
Sources
Power plants: EIA-860M (US); NRCan NACEI (Canada, Mexico); WRI GPPD (Mexico); OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik (Canada, Mexico gap fill); USGS USWTDB/USPVDB; EPA eGRID; Natural Earth admin-1; HIFLD control areas; location attributes from WorldPop (R2025A), Global Solar Atlas PVOUT, Global Wind Atlas 4, USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential, the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model and the previous publish's lines and substations; water distances from OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik; gas distances and county queue from the previous publish's EIA gas pipelines and LBNL Queued Up requests; nearest city from Natural Earth populated places; cooling degree days from NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals; elevation and slope from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (ESA, via AWS Open Data); water stress from WRI Aqueduct 4.0; ozone nonattainment from the EPA Green Book; drought from the U.S. Drought Monitor; tribal land from US Census TIGER/Line. License: ODbL (derivative database; EIA content is public domain, NRCan OGL-Canada, WRI GPPD CC BY 4.0; location attributes from WorldPop, Global Solar Atlas, Global Wind Atlas, LBNL Queued Up and WRI Aqueduct CC BY 4.0, USFS, USGS, EIA, NOAA, EPA, US Census and Natural Earth public domain, Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR e.V. and Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, the U.S. Drought Monitor courtesy of NDMC)
Data centers: Epoch AI (CC BY); OpenStreetMap via the public Overpass API (ODbL, © OpenStreetMap contributors); Ringmast4r Global-Data-Center-Map (custom permissive license, attribution required); location attributes from WorldPop (R2025A), Global Solar Atlas PVOUT, Global Wind Atlas 4, USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential, the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model and the previous publish's lines and substations; gas distances and county queue from the previous publish's EIA gas pipelines and LBNL Queued Up requests; nearest city from Natural Earth populated places; generation within 20 km from the previous publish's plants; cooling degree days from NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals; elevation and slope from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (ESA, via AWS Open Data); water stress from WRI Aqueduct 4.0; ozone nonattainment from the EPA Green Book; drought from the U.S. Drought Monitor; tribal land from US Census TIGER/Line. License: CC BY; ODbL; custom permissive; WRI Aqueduct CC BY 4.0; USFS, USGS, EIA, NOAA, EPA, US Census and Natural Earth public domain; Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR e.V. and Airbus Defence and Space GmbH; the U.S. Drought Monitor courtesy of NDMC
Interconnection queue requests: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and GridTracker, "Queued Up". License: CC BY 4.0
States and provinces (simplified polygons): Natural Earth 10m admin-1. License: Public domain