Otero, CO: data center power outlook

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities

BLACK HILLS COLORADO ELECTRIC, LLC, CITY OF LA JUNTA - (CO), SAN ISABEL ELECTRIC ASSN, INC, SOUTHEAST COLORADO POWER ASSN, SOUTHWESTERN ELECTRIC COOP INC - (NM), WAPA-- WESTERN AREA POWER ADMINISTRATION

ISO / market

NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)

Highest grid access

115 kV

Substations in county

16

Industrial retail rate

9.1¢/kWhState-level EIA-861 industrial average. The map colours by this, not by a per-county rate.

Per-utility rates in county

4 of 6 serving utilities: 2.6 to 13.6¢/kWhLowest to highest industrial rate among the utilities serving this county (EIA-861 Sales to Ultimate Customers). A spread, not the county’s rate, and it covers only the serving utilities that report one.

Interconnection queue

None on record

Proposed generation

5 MW planned or under constructionUnits filed with EIA as planned or under construction (Form EIA-860M). Declared intent from the federal inventory, not the interconnection queue and not guaranteed capacity.

Grid carbon intensity

1,870 lb CO2/MWh

Water withdrawals

354 Mgal/dAll uses, freshwater. Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.

Construction labor near site

4,451 employed in construction within ~120 km (6 of 8 counties reporting)A large build needs hundreds of skilled construction workers on site for one to three years. A county with few of them within commuting range means bussing crews in, per diem, and housing, which is real cost and schedule risk. This counts people employed in construction within about a 120 km drive (BLS QCEW), summed across nearby counties. It is not labor known to be available: most are already committed to other projects, and no public data reveals who is free.

Grid conditions in Otero

For Otero, Colorado, the following sections turn public grid records into a siting-oriented summary. The strongest mapped access in Otero is 115 kV, squarely transmission class. Otero carries 16 substations in the mapped layer, spread across the county.

Otero, Colorado lies outside an organized wholesale market, so generation and transmission are arranged bilaterally and through the local utility rather than a central market operator. The state industrial average retail rate is 9.1 cents per kWh, drawn from EIA-861 and applied to Otero at the state level rather than as a county rate. The serving utilities in Otero that publish a rate range 4 of 6 serving utilities: 2.6 to 13.6¢/kWh, a spread kept separate from the state average.

Otero, Colorado shows no interconnection-queue project in the covered feeds, whether from real quiet or a feed not yet loaded. Federal filings (EIA-860M) list 4.8 MW of generation as planned or under construction in Otero. Grid carbon intensity for Otero, via its balancing authority, is 1,869.537 lb CO2 per MWh in eGRID.

USGS 2015 puts freshwater withdrawals across Otero at 354.06 million gallons per day for all uses, a measure of use, not spare supply. Within roughly a 120 km commute of Otero, about 4,451 people are employed in construction (BLS QCEW), which speaks to how far crews for a multi-year build would travel, not to labour known to be free.

Read the Otero figures as screening-grade context: they describe the surrounding grid, not a specific parcel. The numbers for Otero, Colorado qualify one another, so grid access, substation density, market membership, and rate are meant to be read as a set, not in isolation. Past this screening view, siting in Otero, Colorado turns on a study of a particular address, something no county-level page can stand in for. Every number shown for Otero, Colorado traces to a public source listed below, with its retrieval date, so the provenance is auditable rather than asserted.

Sources