To get electricity from our power plants to the homes and businesses of our customers, the company constructed thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines. The electricity that lights a home in Twin Falls, for example, could have been produced at our Hells Canyon Complex. The electricity that powers an irrigation pump near Caldwell might well have been generated at the Valmy coal-fired plant in northern Nevada.

The power produced at each of the generating plants is channeled from the generators to a transformer. The transformer “steps up” or increases the voltage to 230,000 volts. This is done so power can be transmitted over long distances. The longer the distance electricity has to travel, the higher the voltage must be. High voltage power lines carry electricity from the power plants to points throughout the Idaho Power system.

Customers, however, can’t use electricity directly from these high voltage lines because homes and businesses are not set up to handle hundreds of thousands of volts. Instead, the high voltage electricity flows into transformers at substations where the voltage is “stepped down” to levels that in some cases can be used by industrial customers but is still too high for residential use. Smaller distribution lines bring electricity to homes and businesses. Transformers, frequently at the top of power poles, reduce the voltage again to 120-240 volts before it enters a home.

Since electricity travels at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), it takes only a fraction of a second for it to get from where it’s generated to where it’s used. A customer in Pocatello can operate a vacuum cleaner on electricity produced less than a second earlier hundreds of miles away in Hells Canyon.