Flathead, MT: data center power outlook

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities

BC HYDRO, BONNEVILLE POWER ADMINISTRATION, FLATHEAD ELECTRIC COOP INC, GLACIER ELECTRIC COOP, INC, LINCOLN ELECTRIC COOP, INC, MISSOULA ELECTRIC COOP, INC, NORTHWESTERN ENERGY LLC - (MT), USBIA-MISSION VALLEY POWER, WAPA-- WESTERN AREA POWER ADMINISTRATION

ISO / market

NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)

Highest grid access

230 kV

Substations in county

56

Industrial retail rate

7.0¢/kWhState-level EIA-861 industrial average. The map colours by this, not by a per-county rate.

Per-utility rates in county

4 of 8 serving utilities: 1.8 to 8.9¢/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

212 lb CO2/MWh

Water withdrawals

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 Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.

Construction labor near site

6,634 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 Flathead

What follows is a screening-grade read of Flathead, Montana, built only from named public datasets. At 230 kV, Flathead sits in the transmission class that a large load would look to. The mapped layer packs 56 substations into Flathead, a dense spread of options.

Because Flathead, Montana sits outside an organized market, capacity and interconnection are handled by the utility and bilateral deals, not a market operator. For Flathead, the rate shown is the state industrial average of 7.0 cents per kWh (EIA-861), a state figure and not a county-specific one. Beneath that state average, the utilities serving Flathead that report an industrial rate span 4 of 8 serving utilities: 1.8 to 8.9¢/kWh, shown as context and never as the county rate.

No interconnection-queue project is on record for Flathead, Montana in the covered feeds, which reflects either genuine quiet or a queue not yet ingested. Flathead, Montana has no EIA-860M generation on file, which reads as zero rather than as a gap. Flathead sits under a balancing authority that eGRID puts at 212.458 lb CO2 per MWh.

Flathead withdrew 87.71 million gallons per day for all uses in the USGS 2015 data, which counts demand, not headroom. About 6,634 people are employed in construction within a 120 km commute of Flathead (BLS QCEW), which frames staffing distance rather than free labour.

For Flathead, treat this as screening-grade county context useful for narrowing a search rather than settling a site. Taken together, the figures for Flathead, Montana describe the grid around a prospective site, drawn from public data with their gaps left visible on purpose. To move past screening in Flathead, Montana, a specific address needs its own interconnection study, which this page does not attempt. The figures for Flathead, Montana refresh as their public datasets do, and the exact sources and dates sit in the source log below this section.

Sources