man, you guys are getting out pretty lucky seems to me!..I have about $7400 worth of CoServe electricity work at my place!! They wanted over $10K to go underground the entire 400 ft, so instead they put in a pole about 200 ft in, ran underground to a transformer box, (100 ft away) and then went underground to my house!
As far as temporary power, they just hooked up the electrical contractors temp pole out by the road, then the electrical contractor made up a couple long 220V extension cords for the subs to run their tools off of.
Instead of a temporary panel for construction, I bought a "Meter Main" panel when I built my house six years ago. It is a combination meter panel/ exterior breaker panel that I set on a stub post near the corner of the lot closest to the utility pole. The electric coop even let me dig the trench between the pole and my panel (only 10 feet but they wanted $10 a foot for them to dig it) It is now the main distribution panel for the acreage.
I had them power up the panel about a month before construction began. During construction, I wired in a 50 amp outlet powering a portable distribution panel of 110 outlets. Once the house was framed in, I just ran my direct burial on top of the ground to the panel inside temporarily until I could get the trencher in.
Last year I rented a backhoe to install a waterline, so I also trenched in another set of direct burial to a junction box on the far side of the driveway,(getting the full 200 amps that much closer to my future shop).
It turns out the main panel I bought can be equipped with a simple ($70) interlock that converts it into a generator transfer panel. I buried 2 smaller sets of wire, along with the 4/0, so I am going to use one of those to bring power back from my shed and be able to power the entire acreage. I installed a generator panel in the house during construction, but of course, I guessed wrong in choosing which circuits I want to power during a outage. I will still have to be carefull about loads, but I won't have to run extension cords to the bathroom to shave, or to the living room to watch the weather forecast.
And the generator can sit on the far side of the shed, where I won't have to listen to it.
The point to all of this is, I've had a lot of flexibility doing it this way, without extra cost.
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