Boulder, CO: data center power outlook

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities

CITY OF LONGMONT, MOUNTAIN PARKS ELECTRIC, INC, POUDRE VALLEY REA, INC, PUBLIC SERVICE CO OF COLORADO, TOWN OF LYONS - (CO), UNITED POWER, INC, WAPA-- WESTERN AREA POWER ADMINISTRATION

ISO / market

NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)

Highest grid access

230 kV

Substations in county

34

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

6 of 7 serving utilities: 2.6 to 9.5¢/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

803 lb CO2/MWh

Water withdrawals

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 Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.

Construction labor near site

138,961 employed in construction within ~120 km (14 of 15 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 Boulder

What follows is a screening-grade read of Boulder, Colorado, built only from named public datasets. At 230 kV, Boulder sits in the transmission class that a large load would look to. The mapped layer packs 34 substations into Boulder, a dense spread of options.

Boulder, Colorado is not inside an organized market, which leaves interconnection to the utility and bilateral contracts. For Boulder, the rate shown is the state industrial average of 9.1 cents per kWh (EIA-861), a state figure and not a county-specific one. Beneath that state average, the utilities serving Boulder that report an industrial rate span 6 of 7 serving utilities: 2.6 to 9.5¢/kWh, shown as context and never as the county rate.

Across the covered feeds, Boulder, Colorado carries no interconnection-queue project, from either real quiet or a feed not yet loaded. Boulder, Colorado has no EIA-860M generation on file, which reads as zero rather than as a gap. Boulder sits under a balancing authority that eGRID puts at 802.655 lb CO2 per MWh.

Boulder withdrew 165.6 million gallons per day for all uses in the USGS 2015 data, which counts demand, not headroom. About 138,961 people are employed in construction within a 120 km commute of Boulder (BLS QCEW), which frames staffing distance rather than free labour.

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

Sources