Energy is one of Idaho's quietest large industries, spanning a national nuclear laboratory, a downtown heated by hot water from underground, and an agricultural economy that doubles as a fuel source. Its highest-profile recent project, though, did not survive.
INL and the reactor that wasn't built
The Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls is the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear-energy research lab. For years its highest-profile tenant-in-waiting was the Carbon Free Power Project, a plan dating to 2014 to build a NuScale small modular reactor plant — six 77-megawatt modules, 462 megawatts in all — on the INL site. In November 2023, NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems terminated the project after the estimated cost rose from $3.6 billion to $9.3 billion and subscriptions fell short, as Utility Dive reported. Nuclear research at INL continues, but the nation's first commercial small modular reactor will not be built there on that timeline.
Geothermal under the streets
Boise sits on a resource most cities would envy: geothermal water. The city operates one of the largest geothermal direct-use district heating systems in the United States, piping naturally hot water to heat dozens of downtown buildings — a low-carbon system that has run since the early 1980s and still expands building by building.
Biofuels and agriculture's energy side
Idaho's farm economy is also an energy story. The state's crops feed ethanol and biofuel production — ethanol has been produced at facilities such as the plant in Burley — and agricultural byproducts increasingly factor into renewable-fuel and biogas projects. It is a smaller piece than nuclear or hydropower, but one tied directly to the state's largest traditional industry.
Rising electricity demand — from data centers, from manufacturing such as Micron's Boise fabs, and from population growth — is the throughline. Whether Idaho meets it with more hydropower, solar, transmission upgrades, or a future revival of advanced nuclear at INL, energy capacity is quietly becoming one of the state's binding constraints on growth.