Improving Reliability for Rural Customers

By Jo Dee Black

Redundant power sources are a valuable tool when it comes to delivering reliable energy service to the cities and towns we serve in Montana and South Dakota. Power can be rerouted to restore service to customers while crews work on the source of the outage.

But many of our customers in rural areas of these states live at the end of the (power)line, some literally. When there is an outage, service can’t be restored until issues on those radial lines are resolved.

Could redundancy be built into the infrastructure to increase service reliability for rural customers?

That is what the Beck Hill Microgrid, a pilot project north of Deer Lodge, Montana, that launched in 2015, was built to determine.

And the answer is yes!

The microgrid includes a 40-kilowatt solar system paired with a battery. It can provide 80 kilowatts of energy for about two hours. Over the past six years, Beck Hill Microgrid provided backup power for 17 customers during about 16 outages and then returned those customers to service from the grid when it was available again.

NorthWestern Energy can now use the knowledge gained from the Beck Hill Microgrid pilot project to improve reliability for other rural customers.

In general, NorthWestern Energy’s urban customers experience power outages of one hour or less annually, compared to rural customers who experience power outages for about five to six hours annually.

“We now have experience with microgrid operations on our grid, and we are looking to scale the project to provide backup energy and ultimately increase service reliability for other rural customers,” said NorthWestern Energy Manager of System Innovation Jon Shafer.