Ashe, NC: data center power outlook

Grid position at a glance

Serving utilities

APPALACHIAN POWER CO, BLUE RIDGE ELEC MEMBER CORP - (NC), DUKE ENERGY CAROLINAS, LLC, MOUNTAIN ELECTRIC COOP, INC, NEW RIVER LIGHT & POWER CO

ISO / market

NON_ISO (Not in an organized wholesale market)

Highest grid access

230 kV

Substations in county

15

Industrial retail rate

7.8¢/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: 7.4 to 7.8¢/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

485 lb CO2/MWh

Water withdrawals

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 Water already withdrawn locally, not water available for a new load.

Construction labor near site

51,143 employed in construction within ~120 km (41 of 48 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 Ashe

Read on for the public power picture of Ashe in North Carolina, assembled for data center siting. Transmission-class access reaches 230 kV in Ashe at its strongest mapped point. Ashe contains 15 mapped substations, a moderate footprint spread across the service area.

No organized wholesale market covers Ashe, North Carolina, so capacity moves through the local utility and bilateral agreements. Ashe carries the state industrial average retail rate of 7.8 cents per kWh from EIA-861, applied statewide. For Ashe, the per-utility spread is 2 of 5 serving utilities: 7.4 to 7.8¢/kWh, which qualifies but never replaces the state average.

Ashe, North Carolina 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 Ashe, North Carolina, a real zero rather than a gap. In eGRID, the balancing authority over Ashe shows 484.617 lb CO2 per MWh.

For Ashe, the USGS 2015 compilation records 5.57 million gallons per day of all-use freshwater withdrawals, not water available to a new load. Ashe sits within commuting range of roughly 51,143 construction workers (BLS QCEW, about 120 km), most already committed elsewhere.

Every figure for Ashe here is screening-grade and describes the county as a whole, not any single parcel within it. None of the figures for Ashe, North Carolina 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 Ashe, North Carolina requires a study of the specific parcel, a step beyond the county-level picture drawn here. Sources and data dates for Ashe, North Carolina are logged directly below, so each figure on this page can be traced back to its public dataset.

Sources