At Shoshone Falls, Ira B. Perrine began seeking investors in 1900 for a hydroelectric plant and ultimately formed the Shoshone Falls Power Company on March 9, 1904. In 1907, the site was sold to William S. Kuhn and became the Great Shoshone and Twin Falls Water Power Company, and the 500-kilowatt plant began generating power in August 1907. Chaotic early conditions in Idaho’s electricity business forced the company into economic failure in 1914. Idaho Power Company was formed in 1916 from its assets and those of several other companies, then made a series of improvements at Shoshone Falls, including expanding the powerhouse in 1921 to accommodate a 12,000-kilowatt generator. That construction faced major transportation difficulties, requiring a 60-foot-long, 20-foot-wide ferry driven by side paddle wheels with a capacity of 40 tons, expensive road work down a steep and winding hillside, and a large cable controlled by a powerful electric hoist to lower machinery, some weighing 20 tons, to the powerhouse. A final dam structure was completed in 1927 to fully contain and redirect the river, allowing retention of about 750 acre-feet of water for a more constant generation volume. As a run-of-river dam, the project has a small 1,500-acre storage reservoir extending about two miles upstream, and water beyond the plant’s 950 cubic feet per second hydraulic capacity flows over the falls. The facility includes three generating units and four diversion dams, one gated and three fixed, while all three dams are ungated and function as uncontrolled overflow spillways. About 1,000 cubic feet of water per second passes through the turbines, and the plant annually averages about 90,000 megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to supply approximately 9,000 households. The concrete diversion dam is about 800 feet long and averages about 16 feet high, its four sections separated by rock islands at the crest of the falls; the plant has three generating units totaling 12.5 megawatts of installed capacity, with unit one installed in the original 1907 project, unit two added in 1909, and unit three installed as part of the 1921 addition. A 137-foot powerhouse contains the turbine-generator units, a 450-foot-long concrete and steel tunnel provides water from the reservoir to the powerhouse, and a 100-foot-long tailrace channel returns water to the river. The reservoir is 1.8 miles long and the project occupies 1.98 acres of BLM lands. Idaho Power serves residential, business, and agricultural customers in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon across a 24,000-square-mile service area, with hydroelectric projects providing about half of its generation, 40 to 45 percent coming from coal- and natural-gas-fired plants, and the remainder from wholesale market purchases. On August 4, 2004, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Idaho Power a 30-year operational license for the project, including protection, mitigation, and enhancement measures for threatened and endangered snail species, aquatic species, spring habitat, aesthetic flows, recreational facilities, and white sturgeon.