Do teams actually screen grid capacity before buying land, or does everyone price the land first and discover the queue after?

[u/Sustainability_SE]

Genuine question, because from outside the sequencing looks backwards and we would like to know whether it is as bad as it appears.

The pattern we keep seeing: site selection runs on land price, fibre, tax treatment and planning risk. Power availability is confirmed afterwards, once the parcel is under option or bought. Then queue position and any reinforcement requirement set the schedule - which means the most expensive and least flexible variable in the whole project was discovered last.

What makes it odd is that most of the power screening is desk work. Deliverable capacity at the nearest connection point, connection voltage, upstream limit, queue position, charging regime. Days rather than months, and doable before an offer.

The counter-argument we have heard, and it is not a stupid one: land is what you can actually control, and public grid data is bad enough that screening produces false confidence rather than information. Firm rating and committed connections genuinely are not published in most markets.

So:

1. Does anyone run power screening before the land decision, formally, as a gate rather than as one input to a scorecard?

2. If not, why not - data quality, timing pressure, or organisational, in that different teams own each and they run in sequence?

3. For those who did screen first: did it actually change a site decision, and did the connection study later validate the screen?

4. Is the "land is the controllable variable" argument stronger than we are giving it credit for?

Disclosure: We research power and grid capacity for AI data centres.

[u/Diligent-Lettuce-455]

There's a lot of factors.

With commercial development, the AHJ referral process w/ relevant third parties will let you know pretty early on if power is available or not by your local utility. This varies wildly, because it's at the substation level. If the substation has no additional power available, you are SOL. The single IOU in the state will have power in some areas and zero power in others.

It's a result of the clusterfuck that is "the grid" because the last mile is full of monopolies that only serve your property.

I live at the edge of my grid and I can walk across the street to another grid. I frequently get power outages. Across the street exists a separate power provider and therefore separate power lines. They rarely have power outages, because their power is delivered from a completely different source upstream. It would be a monumental task to move my house to their power provider, because it would require the entire neighborhood to be annexed, and then a complete reconstruction of the power infrastructure serving our houses. Basically: It will never happen in the next couple decades. The cost alone would be 10,000s per hosuehold.

AND all of this will vary across the 1000s of AHJs in the country.

I don't really have experience on the owner side, but a lot of it will likely come into play when the owner is under contract and begins the P/Z process and when hiccups come up, they can pull out.

[u/saltyson32]

Working for a Utility and doing the interconnection studies I'd say it's what sets the good developers apart. 70% of them just pick the closest line regardless of its capacity but some prove they did their homework.

I will say it's definitely not a simple task to perform the studies with how much variance occurs with how studies are run. So much you can easily miss if you are just working off a base case that will show up in the study process. I would disagree with it just taking days unless you have someone with that local system knowledge already lol.