Washington State utility Puget Sound Energy announces major contract with Montana wind farm

A Washington utility announced Tuesday that it is accelerating its investment in Montana wind energy as Washington state climate laws require it to replace coal power.

The company, Puget Sound Energy, has agreed to buy power from the Haymaker Wind Farm, a 315-megawatt wind project under development near Two Dot. 

The wind farm developer is the Clearway Energy Group, which bills itself as the fifth largest owner of renewable energy in the United States.

Announcing the 25-year purchase power agreement in a press release, Ron Roberts, PSE’s senior vice president of energy resources called the agreement “another milestone in our continued investment in the state’s energy economy.” The purchases are slated to begin in 2028.

The Seattle-area utility, which has 1.2 million metered electric customers, is the largest and oldest owner of Colstrip Power Plant. A coal-power phase out in Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act requires Puget to remove the southeast Montana power plant from customer rates by the end of 2025.

Haymaker is Puget’s second investment in commercial-scale Montana wind in the last seven months and pushes the utility’s Montana renewable portfolio to 1 gigawatt of nameplate capacity. 

This spring, Puget started construction on the 248-megawatt Beaver Creek wind farm near Rapelje. The utility also has 350 MW of capacity under contract from NextEra’s 775-MW Clearwater Wind project near Miles City and 40 MW of hydropower under contract with Energy Keepers, the Selis Ksanka Qlispe Dam operator owned by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

In late June, Puget announced that it was accepting bids for more than three GW of capacity from fossil-fuel-free resources, including 1.6 GW of generation that peaks in the wintertime, which is when Montana wind generation is typically greatest. The capacity sought by Puget would double Montana’s current wind exports.

Puget, as well as Colstrip owners Portland General Electric and PacifiCorp have turned to Montana wind energy to balance energy delivered by summer-peaking windfarms in the Columbia River Basin. Most of the electricity is exported on the major transmission line running west from Colstrip, where capacity is being freed up as generation from the power plant is retired.

The Haymaker Wind Farm, which has spent 10 years in development, is located on a single ranch near Two Dot. Developers have for years identified a shortage of transmission capacity to the Pacific Northwest as a major hurdle facing Montana wind  exports.

Clearway, in a Tuesday press release, credited tax incentives in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as instrumental in getting Haymaker off the ground.

“Reinforced by the Inflation Reduction Act, Haymaker represents a major investment in central Montana’s economy, and we’re eager to work with the community through development, construction, and our long-term stewardship of the project,” said Valerie Wooley, the company’s senior vice president of origination.

Although Haymaker has been associated with the nearby development of a pumped storage hydro project, known as Gordon Butte, this week’s releases by Puget and Clearway didn’t mention that project, which would use surplus energy production to pump water to a man-made lake to store it for generation when the wind isn’t blowing.