The Montana Public Service Commission actively opposed the construction of Colstrip 3 and 4 and kept customers from being responsible for Colstrip 4. The Montana Department of Natural Resources also opposed the construction of Colstrip 3 and 4. MPC actually recognizes this. It seeks to recover costs associated with its generation facilities only during a four year transition period. This makes for a fairly complicated situation.
Some costs appear legitimately to be the responsibility of current customers.
Others may or may not be appropriately assigned to customers. Still others clearly are not completely the responsibility of customers. Even where customers should be responsible, absolving the utility entirely of responsibility for those costs removes any incentive for the utility to seek to reduce or mitigate those costs. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the question of who should be held responsible for these costs is very important and will be hotly contested. It is also very complicated and technical.