Power by county

Custer, ID: data center power outlook

For Custer, Idaho, the public grid picture begins with its place in an area outside an organized wholesale market and the infrastructure mapped inside the county. Grid access across Custer tops out at 230 kV, over a footprint of 12 mapped substations. In Custer, 4 utilities share the retail territory, among them IDAHO POWER CO, LOST RIVER ELECTRIC COOP INC, PACIFICORP.

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities
IDAHO POWER CO, LOST RIVER ELECTRIC COOP INC, PACIFICORP, SALMON RIVER ELECTRIC COOP INC
ISO / market
NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)
Highest grid access
230 kV
Substations in county
12
Industrial retail rate
8.0¢/kWhState-level EIA-861 industrial average. The map colours by this, not by a per-county rate.
Per-utility rates in county
3 of 4 serving utilities: 5.8 to 8.3¢/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
None on file (EIA-860M)Units 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
225 lb CO2/MWh
Water withdrawals
145 Mgal/dAll uses, freshwater. Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.
Construction labor near site
3,238 employed in construction within ~120 kmA 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 Custer

For Custer, Idaho, the following sections turn public grid records into a siting-oriented summary. The strongest mapped access in Custer is 230 kV, squarely transmission class. Custer carries 12 substations in the mapped layer, spread across the county.

Custer, Idaho 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 8.0 cents per kWh, drawn from EIA-861 and applied to Custer at the state level rather than as a county rate. The serving utilities in Custer that publish a rate range 3 of 4 serving utilities: 5.8 to 8.3¢/kWh, a spread kept separate from the state average.

Custer, Idaho shows no interconnection-queue project in the covered feeds, whether from real quiet or a feed not yet loaded. No generation is filed as planned or under construction in Custer, Idaho in the federal EIA-860M inventory, a measured zero rather than missing data. Grid carbon intensity for Custer, via its balancing authority, is 225.071 lb CO2 per MWh in eGRID.

USGS 2015 puts freshwater withdrawals across Custer at 145.16 million gallons per day for all uses, a measure of use, not spare supply. Within roughly a 120 km commute of Custer, about 3,238 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 Custer figures as screening-grade context: they describe the surrounding grid, not a specific parcel. The numbers for Custer, Idaho 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 Custer, Idaho turns on a study of a particular address, something no county-level page can stand in for. Every number shown for Custer, Idaho traces to a public source listed below, with its retrieval date, so the provenance is auditable rather than asserted.

Sources