An Inside Look at the New Natural Gas Power Plant in Laurel

The Big Sky Business Journal's Evelyn Pyburn got an inside look at the new natural gas fired power plant in Laurel, Montana and delivers some very interesting insight.

Evelyn joined me Monday morning on the radio. Here were the three interesting takeaways from her tour of Northwestern Energy’s Yellowstone County Generating Station at Laurel, as featured in the Big Sky Business Journal's "Hot Sheet" e-newsletter.

1. The plant is fully operational and serving customers. The new $310 million generating station is comprised of 18 reciprocating internal combustion engines that are capable of generating a total of 175 megawatts, which helps close the gap of the generation needs for NWE’s customers in Montana.

2. She says Josh Follman, the generating station’s project manager, describes the plant as “one of the cleanest facilities because of its emissions profile.” The plant does not have to monitor for emissions because their emissions are “far below the levels set to initiate controls.”

3. The generators are little different than the combustion engine that runs your car. Noise level is about 65 decibels, about that of the noise level in a restaurant.

Evelyn Pyburn added this on air: "I think it's important to note that this plant will go a long ways to meeting the power that Northwestern Energy needs in order to really be able to fully meet the needs of their customers. The CEO, Brian Bird, in a recent interview I had with him, said that the additional power is about half of what they need. And they'll get most of the rest of it next year when they take over the ownership of Colstrip units three and four. But they pushed really hard to get this plant completed because when they meet peak demands they don't have enough energy to provide their customers with the power we need. So like when it's minus 20 degrees in January and everybody is using lots of energy, they have to go out in the market and buy it."

Catch the full conversation with Evelyn in our 7 a.m. hour podcast by clicking here once the segment is available.