Idaho Power Company, a regulated electrical power utility involved in the purchase, sale, generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, began efforts to build the Boardman to Hemingway power line (B2H) in 2007. But this line remains unbuilt, due to endless regulatory hurdles.
The 290-mile (467-km), 500 kV power line, mainly in north-eastern Oregon, is a key piece in the utility’s plan to reliably meet rising demand with clean resources. The company owns 45 per cent of the project and is leading its development. Portland-based PacifiCorp, which owns the other 55 per cent, has positioned the line as part of enhanced connectivity between the western and eastern portions of its six-state service territory. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) plans to use the line to serve customers in south-eastern Idaho.
The B2H line would offer a new connection between the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West, running mostly through Oregon on a route between a new substation near Boardman, in Morrow County, and one near Melba, Idaho.
PacifiCorp has long included B2H in its biennial resource plans, although it dropped the line from its ‘preferred portfolio’ of its recently released 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) because it learned that it faced delays in acquiring rights from Bonneville to redirect power from a new substation called Longhorn that is the terminus of the B2H line near Boardman. This was announced at an Oregon Public Utility Commission (PUC) meeting in April 2025.
But it turned out that an unnamed “specific local customer” — the area has several data centers and renewable energy developments — could get to Longhorn and use the B2H path. That puts the costs and benefits of the line outside PacifiCorp’s wider ratepayers, and thus outside the resource plan. So the company removed B2H from this IRP and is pursuing its construction, arrangements, and costs through a process outside of the IRP.
The Oregon Supreme Court in late March 2025, turned aside a challenge to an amendment to B2H’s state site certificate. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the lead federal agency on project permitting, confirmed that “compliance with regulations that protect cultural resources continues to move forward in partnership with BLM, Interior Preservation Committee (IPC), Tribes, the Oregon and Idaho State Historic Preservation Office, and other consulting parties.”
Despite receiving several approvals previously, and the certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN) from the Idaho PUC in June 2023, Idaho Power has been facing repeated objections from affected landowners and has not been able to secure land rights along the path of the transmission line. In December 2024, Idaho Power had filed two more eminent domain lawsuits in Baker County, Oregon, seeking permanent easements for the power line, bringing the total number of complaints for the project in Baker County to 21. The property owners had rejected previous offers to sell the easement. The company was also seeking easements in other Oregon counties along the power line route.
Idaho Power had plans to start construction of the project by the end of 2023 and operationalize it by 2026. The project is now awaiting sign-off on documents and reports related to the National Historic Preservation Act, and is hoping to break ground this summer and to have the line completed before the end of 2027, as the best-case scenario.
Idaho Power is also involved in other significant regional projects, as is PacifiCorp. The projects are all about opening up corridors to move energy — including Washington and Oregon hydropower, Wyoming wind power, and Great Basin and Desert Southwest solar — from generation points to end-use customers during peak demand periods. New transmission and grid-enhancing technologies applied to existing lines are seen as increasingly needed to meet rising demand, especially with intermittent clean resources.