Buying Land in Grant County, Washington

How cheap hydropower turned Quincy into a data-center hub

Grant County's data-center story began in earnest in 2006-2007, when Microsoft bought 75 acres of former bean fields in an industrial-zoned part of Quincy to build a 500,000-square-foot data center for Bing and Hotmail, and Yahoo opened alongside it. The draw was Grant County PUD's electricity, generated from the county's own Wanapum and Priest Rapids dams on the Columbia River, priced at roughly a third of the national average and about half the statewide average. Dell, Intuit, Sabey, and H5 followed over the ensuing two decades, and the Quincy area now hosts at least 27 data-center buildings, including several large multi-building campuses. That growth transformed Quincy's tax base and employment, but it also transformed local land-use and utility planning in ways most rural Washington counties never have to consider.

The utility is now managing scarcity, not just abundance

Two decades of data-center growth eventually outran even Grant County's substantial hydropower supply. By 2025, the county's 8 data-center operators together accounted for roughly 280 average megawatts of load -- about 37% of the entire county's electrical demand -- and Grant PUD has projected using the full extent of its roughly 63% share of Wanapum and Priest Rapids Dam output by 2026. In March 2025, PUD commissioners voted to impose load-growth caps on data-center customers rather than continuing open-ended expansion, with data-center customers expected to hit those caps by the third or fourth quarter of 2025. A new high-capacity transmission line connecting Wanapum Dam to Quincy is underway but not projected for completion until 2029.

For a land buyer, the headline takeaway isn't just about data centers -- it's that Grant County's historically abundant, historically cheap power is no longer an unconstrained resource in and around Quincy specifically. Any land purchase premised on easy access to large-scale or even moderately expanded electric service in that corridor should be checked directly against Grant PUD's current capacity planning rather than assumed based on the county's long-standing reputation for cheap power.

Cryptocurrency mining carved out its own regulatory and rate history

Grant County was also an early hub for cryptocurrency mining, again drawn by cheap hydropower. When miners' cumulative electric load growth more than doubled the utility's typical annual demand growth, Grant County PUD responded in 2018-2019 by creating a distinct 'evolving industries' rate class specifically covering crypto mining -- phased in through 2019, the rate roughly tripled bills for the class, topping out at 13.7 cents/kWh for small-scale miners and 7.9 cents/kWh for large-scale operations. Nine cryptocurrency firms challenged the rate; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed it in March 2021. More than a dozen mining operations have operated in the county at various points, together drawing a combined 27 megawatts by one recent count -- a small fraction of the requests the PUD has fielded since 2017.

A full GMA planner with genuinely mapped growth boundaries

Apart from the power story, Grant County otherwise runs a fairly conventional fully-planning GMA framework: a Comprehensive Plan and Unified Development Code (Title 23) organize land into five principal classes -- unincorporated Urban Growth Areas, rural lands, rural activity centers, resource lands, and special/overlay zoning districts. The county's UGAs around its cities are specifically mapped and quantified: Moses Lake's totals 30,583 acres with 18,170 acres (59%) still unincorporated, and Quincy's totals 5,188 acres with 1,389 acres (27%) unincorporated. On-site sewage systems, where a parcel isn't served by public sewer, are permitted through the Grant County Health District, which requires a county building permit application before it will accept a septic application. Confirm a specific parcel's UGA status, zoning district, and septic feasibility directly with the relevant county office before assuming either the power-capacity constraints or the general zoning framework described here apply exactly as summarized.