SCIENCE

Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center has partnered with Northrop Grumman on a long-term project to help businesses identify the best sites for wind and solar energy production.

The partnership could help expand both green energy in Montana and the capabilities of Big Sky, the Butte-based supercomputer.

"It took over a year to put this together," said Earl Dodd, director of the supercomputing center, who first met with Northrop Grumman representatives at a national supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., in 2009. "It takes a long time to do some of this stuff, but we immediately saw this as an excellent business opportunity for us."

Northrop Grumman, a Virginia-based global security company with more than 120,000 employees, has more than 15 years of highly specialized weather and climate data that can be fed into the supercomputer for fast, reliable results on where to best site new wind farms and windmills.

Dodd said there are two types of potential customers for the new service: developers looking to site new facilities and existing producers looking to expand or become more efficient.

With more specialized, less-costly data, financing and operating a network of wind energy farms could become increasingly viable. The information can be useful to those interested in solar production as well.

The program is called the Maximizing and Optimizing Renewable Energy (MORE) POWER initiative.

Robert Brammer, vice president and chief technology officer of Northrop Grumman's information systems sector, said in a press release that significant progress in alternative energies is being made throughout Montana and the Rocky Mountain region, which could become "a renewable energy leader in North America."

Studies using Northrop Grumman's data have already been run on the computer by both Montana and international companies, according to Dodd.

The underlying financial gain for RMSC is still under negotiation, he said. Companies that purchase the information will pay both RMSC and Northrop Grumman, and the cost will depend on the amount and intricacy of requested information.

But Dodd, speaking Monday from the 2010 Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, said that a number of customers are interested in purchasing such information.

"We're very excited to do this, another Montana first by the way," he said. "It's going be an excellent long-term arrangement that we're just beginning to see the benefits of."