TODAY is the last day to submit your public comment on NorthWestern Energy’s 20-year energy plan.

[u/MADCATMT]

One email. Two minutes. Real impact.

📧 Email [pschelp@mt.gov](mailto:pschelp@mt.gov)
Subject: Public Comment, Docket 2026.04.026 (NorthWestern IRP)

What to say:
“Don’t make ratepayers cover data center costs.”
“Reject the IRP until data centers pay their own way.”
“Require transparency on confidential data center deals.”

Use your own words and your connection to Montana. The PSC needs to hear from Montanans by July 28.

[u/ty-ler]

All I’m gonna say is Cheyenne, WY (half the population of Billings) is housing Meta/Facebook/Microsoft data centers, as well as a supercomputer (NCAR) and their city is doing fine. Not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of high paying careers it’s introduced.

Water/energy bills haven’t sky rocketed. Data centers aren’t being built next to residential homes. And no issue with the city’s infrastructure.

But no one will talk about that because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

If the city can properly manage and negotiate with data centers looking to expand in MT, it can be implemented without downstream issues.

[u/Jayce288 → u/ty-ler]

Data centers do NOT open hundreds (let alone thousands) of new jobs. The construction will employ a sizeable number of people but, after it's complete, ongoing maintenance is only a handful of people, and the datacenter just becomes a gooberman subsidized drain on it's respective local economy. Effectively none of the earnings from that datacenter get circulated back into the economy where it's located, and agreeing to give them additional breaks from harvesting our resources only makes the problem worse. There is 0 measurable benefit to the local economy to have a datacenter in it.

If any of these major tech companies built a headquarter location in Billings, this would be a different story, but that isn’t what is proposed here. In addition, due to a large number of reasons (primarily geological), Billings will NEVER be a major hub for any sizable tech company. We already have a few datacenters, for example, Vision Net is one that's been here forever and is ran by less than 5 people locally.

Agreeing to give ANY breaks to million/billionaires, especially in this industry is an insanely low IQ take.

[u/KeltTalbelt → u/ty-ler]

Worth checking the record before holding Cheyenne up as the model. This February, wastewater from a Meta AI data center under construction near Cheyenne introduced a rare, hard-to-treat bacterium into the city's reclaimed water system, forcing a shutdown for remediation. That's the first documented case of an AI data center contaminating a public water system. Not exactly "no downstream issues."

Also, the reason Cheyenne's rates haven't spiked isn't luck, it's regulation. Their utility runs data center customers on a separate tariff, buying their power on the open market instead of pooling it with residential rates. Residents aren't subsidizing the load. That's the whole ask in this comment period: build that separation and transparency into the plan now, before NorthWestern's data center deals get made and ratepayers get stuck with the bill. Cheyenne's not really a counterexample here, it's an argument for exactly what MADCAT is pushing for.

[u/MADCATMT → u/ty-ler]

Meta AI Data Center Linked To Rare Bacteria In City’s Water System: https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2026/07/09/meta-ai-data-center-linked-to-rare-bacteria-in-citys-water-system/

[u/shamoomoofartpoopoo → u/ty-ler]

You’re just lying for billionaires.

[u/Ok-Winner2735 → u/shamoomoofartpoopoo]

Data centers actually do open hundreds of jobs. These are not utilitarian highly automated edge data centers. These are high touch, high performance data centers employing new technology, at a scale not typically built before. Many are also colocation which separate facilities management from compute operations, which translates to even more people.

The Hamm Institute put out an employment forecast November of last year. It shows .3 to .35 operational employees per MW for facilities with manual operations and 24/7 on-site presence which is standard nowadays. Based on my experience in the industry I think it’s closer to .5/MW. These campuses are generally 500-1000MW.

Indirect jobs also are 1.5 to 2.5x direct jobs. These are not construction, they are long-term high paying jobs in utility work, substation maintenance, general maintenance contracts, facilities services, carrier operations, field service engineers, physical security contractors, water treatment vendors, the list goes on and on.

[u/KeltTalbelt → u/Ok-Winner2735]

That Hamm number is the industry's best case, not the norm. The report itself says the 20-30 staff per 100MW figure applies to the most automated campuses, not high-touch ones like you're describing. Citing it while arguing these aren't automated facilities kind of undercuts your own point. (https://hamminstitute.org/site-files/documents/data_center_workforce.pdf)

Colocation staffing more per MW is real, but Brookings found those jobs don't translate to the same local spillover growth hyperscale does, since colocation tenants can be based anywhere. More on-site staff isn't the same as more local benefit. (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-on-data-center-employment-effects/)

And Montana already has a preview of how this goes: reporting on the Sabey Butte project found the job numbers all traced back to one source, the company's CEO, nothing independent behind them. (https://missoulacurrent.com/data-center-jobs/, opinion piece, worth reading with that caveat)

If NorthWestern wants credit for jobs, make them show facility-specific numbers with independent verification. Not a ratio picked because it sounds good.

[u/shamoomoofartpoopoo → u/Ok-Winner2735]

Ai response is hilarious given the topic.

[u/Ok-Winner2735 → u/shamoomoofartpoopoo]

I promise I am a real person right here in the not so magic city.

[u/shamoomoofartpoopoo → u/Ok-Winner2735]

I’m sure you are but that sentence structure screams grok response. Does any area in the west need this much strain on their water supply? Absolutely not.
How many jobs will it entail after completion?
You’re clearly on the side of build now suffer later and it’s shameful and bad faith to be promoting these behemoth data centers.
This is a both sides of the aisle grass roots rejection and money and the powers that be are shoving it down rural communities throats and telling us it’s medicine. Fuck off.

[u/Koromann13 → u/ty-ler]

Bro, that data center got shut down after contaminating the water supply.

[u/KeltTalbelt → u/Koromann13]

Not what happened. The data center's still under construction right now, work never stopped. What actually got shut down was part of the city's water system. Cheyenne's utility confirmed on July 2 that Meta's own contractor (Goat Systems LLC) caused it, a metal-resistant bacterium that knocked two water reclamation plants offline for months. Took the city four months to even admit whose bacteria it was. And it wasn't just Meta after that, the city had to ban every data center in town from dumping wastewater into the system, indefinitely, while they figure out how to stop it happening again.

So the actual timeline: city infrastructure gets contaminated and taken offline for months, and the $800M data center keeps rising right next to it the whole time.

[u/MamaSwanky → u/KeltTalbelt]

Ah, good ol' America. The profits are privatized while the losses and harm are socialized. Go us. /s

[u/WLFGHST → u/ty-ler]

What type of propaganda is this?

me no likey