data centers

The Montana Supreme Court on Thursday vacated an earlier ruling that the Butte-Silver Bow elections office print a citizen’s initiative question on the ballots after learning the department had already mailed ballots to voters.

Oregon’s second largest investor-owned electric utility could soon directly assign the costs of new energy projects and infrastructure needed for data centers to data center operators.

A draft bill to protect power customers from paying for data center costs advanced Wednesday with a unanimous vote — but with criticism from NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest public utility.

Tribal communities are grappling with the fact that more developers are eyeing their land for future data center projects.

The county adopted the moratorium in early July and state law requires it to initiate its study within 30 days. That process has already begun, officials said this week.

Members of the public and a coalition of advocacy groups want NorthWestern Energy’s long-term plan for power to include more renewable energy and account for data centers’ impacts on their pocketbooks.

In the Silicon Forest region outside Portland, Oregon, a lawsuit over tax breaks is the latest front in a local war between data center developers and the public.

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge, first signed by the president in March, requires companies that build and use data centers to pay for any new infrastructure upgrades and generation resources that serve them.

The pause, which will last up to a year, is the nation’s first statewide ban on data centers, which have drawn increasing concern from lawmakers and citizens based on their impact on electricity prices and the energy grid.

Across Montana, concerns about data centers are spurring questions about what kind of oversight citizens and local governments have over large-scale projects.