The Montana Department of Environmental Quality awarded $10.34 million to 10 grid resilience projects across the state to strengthen electric infrastructure and improve reliability for rural Montana communities, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.
The grants, funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, will help utilities upgrade aging infrastructure, reduce outage frequency, shorten restoration times following storms and extreme weather events and strengthen system reliability in high-risk wildfire areas.
“DEQ is proud to champion these projects to ensure reliable energy supply for the rural communities these projects serve,” said DEQ Director Sonja Nowakowski. “Utility customers in these areas will benefit from improved reliability, because the utilities will be able to better anticipate, prepare for and adapt to changing conditions as well as respond and recover from disruptions that do occur.”
The two largest awards went to Montana-Dakota Utilities and Ravalli Electric Cooperative. MDU received $3 million to rebuild a transmission line on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation near Poplar, replacing a nearly 70-year-old 7.9-mile segment of 60-kilovolt line with a new 115-kilovolt double-circuit line. The upgrade is expected to increase transmission capacity, reduce wildfire risk and improve reliability for customers on the reservation.
Ravalli Electric Cooperative received $2.9 million to bury 21.3 miles of overhead power lines in high-risk wildfire hazard areas near Hamilton and to install new system monitoring and control equipment that will allow utility managers to reduce the number of homes affected during outages.
Other awards include $141,788 to the City of Troy for advanced metering infrastructure; $548,264 to Marias River Electric Cooperative for advanced circuit breakers and monitoring technology; $306,417 to McCone Electric Cooperative for remote monitoring equipment; $1,923,647 to Northern Lights Inc. to upgrade 4.5 miles of overhead distribution line and bury 1.25 miles of line; and four NorthWestern Energy projects totaling $4,545,484 for engineering studies and resilience upgrades including pole replacements, reconductoring and transformer replacements in the Missoula, Billings, Bozeman and Great Falls areas.
Additional funding opportunities are available through DEQ’s Energy Infrastructure Resilience Grant Program. The deadline to apply is September 17, 2026. More information is available at deq.mt.gov/energy/Programs/grid.