Powder River, MT: data center power outlook

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities

NORTHWESTERN ENERGY LLC - (MT), POWDER RIVER ENERGY CORP, SOUTHEAST ELECTRIC COOP, INC, TONGUE RIVER ELECTRIC COOP INC, WAPA-- WESTERN AREA POWER ADMINISTRATION

ISO / market

NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)

Highest grid access

115 kV

Substations in county

3

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

2 of 5 serving utilities: 1.8 to 6.9¢/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

1,583 lb CO2/MWh

Water withdrawals

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 Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.

Construction labor near site

199 employed in construction within ~120 km (1 of 4 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 Powder River

The sections below set out what public data shows about siting a large electrical load in Powder River, Montana. Transmission-class access reaches 115 kV in Powder River at its strongest mapped point. Powder River, Montana shows 3 substations in the mapped layer, a thin spread across the county.

No organized wholesale market covers Powder River, Montana, so capacity moves through the local utility and bilateral agreements. Powder River carries the state industrial average retail rate of 7.0 cents per kWh from EIA-861, applied statewide. For Powder River, the per-utility spread is 2 of 5 serving utilities: 1.8 to 6.9¢/kWh, which qualifies but never replaces the state average.

Powder River, Montana shows no interconnection-queue project in the covered feeds, whether from real quiet or a feed not yet loaded. The federal EIA-860M inventory files no planned or under-construction generation in Powder River, Montana, a real zero rather than a gap. In eGRID, the balancing authority over Powder River shows 1,583.022 lb CO2 per MWh.

For Powder River, the USGS 2015 compilation records 80.37 million gallons per day of all-use freshwater withdrawals, not water available to a new load. Powder River sits within commuting range of roughly 199 construction workers (BLS QCEW, about 120 km), most already committed elsewhere.

Every figure for Powder River here is screening-grade and describes the county as a whole, not any single parcel within it. None of the figures for Powder River, Montana settles a site on its own; each one qualifies the others, and all of them come from public federal and state datasets. Settling a site in Powder River, Montana requires a study of the specific parcel, a step beyond the county-level picture drawn here. Sources and data dates for Powder River, Montana are logged directly below, so each figure on this page can be traced back to its public dataset.

Sources