The registry
Ten registers. The joins are where the answers live.
Everyone in this market holds one layer. The advocacy organizations hold public finance. The utility consultants hold regulatory. The engineering and construction firms hold physical. Nobody joins them.
Sites
The spine. Parcel identifier, jurisdiction, owner and operator and tenant as three separate fields, nameplate against IT load, entitlement date, permit numbers. Counts carry the unit they were counted in, because six competent sources will give six different answers for one small city.
Instruments
Abatement agreements, strategic investment programs, enterprise zone authorizations. Program, statute, term, covenants, fees, and which of owner, operator or tenant the instrument attaches to. Expiry dates are the highest-value field in the schema: each one is a predictable assessed-value event, years out, buildable entirely from public documents.
Money
Assessment rolls, abatement series by program, budgets, auditor reports. Gross abated, fees actually paid and net incentive are three fields and never one. Every figure carries the population it describes, because two correct numbers from different populations look like a contradiction without it.
Power
Utility and balancing authority, queue position and date, rate schedule and tariff sheet, contracted capacity, minimum demand and exit terms, behind-the-meter generation, gas lateral capacity, substation proximity.
Connectivity
Long-haul route geometry and ownership, carrier count, physically diverse path entry, lit against dark capacity, middle mile, exchange presence and latency, rights of way, subsea landings. Under-tracked by everyone and it decides sites as hard as power does.
Equipment
Prime mover class and model, lead time from firm order to commercial operation, manufacturer backlogs, capacity expansions, named orders, allocation policy. The fastest-decaying register in the schema, and the one that carries a visible clock.
Trade and cost
Tariff actions, trade remedies, commodity exposure, foreign-entity sourcing thresholds, domestic content requirements. A tariff docket is a schedule risk and almost nobody writes it that way.
Regulatory
Ordinances, moratoria with statutory basis and expiry, zoning classification, setback and acoustic standards, review level, air permit thresholds, water rights and discharge. The megawatt level at which a state treats a temporary generator array as a permanent source is the difference between a six-week deployment and a twelve-month permit, and nobody has assembled it.
Actors and decisions
Votes, recusals, approvals, denials, appeals, litigation. Last, deliberately — only interpretable once the other registers establish what the instruments required. Nothing here characterizes motive or state of mind.
Community impact
Fire and life safety standards for energy storage, acoustic standards and measurement method, electromagnetic fields, environmental review triggers. Findings only. Recommendations on setback, separation distance or mitigation design come from a licensed engineer in a separately signed document, never from the corpus.
The joins
| Join | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Sites, instruments, expiry | Assessed-value forecasting. Predictable fiscal events, years ahead, from public documents. |
| Sites, power, equipment | Which announced projects are actually deliverable, and when. |
| Regulatory, engineering | Whether a specific site can meet a specific standard. |
| Trade, equipment | Cost trajectory and schedule risk from dockets nobody connects to projects. |
| Connectivity, power | The joint constraint layer. Same rights of way, correlated maps, undrawn. |
| Instruments, actors | The accountability layer. |
Two of our strongest findings so far came from cross-referencing registers built for unrelated reasons. Neither was something anyone set out to look for.
The site score
Seven inputs, one number, three buyers.
- Power availability — queue position, behind-the-meter feasibility, substation proximity, gas lateral
- Connectivity — carrier count, diverse path, middle mile, latency tier
- Water — rights, discharge path, cooling type feasibility
- Acoustic headroom — distance to the nearest sensitive receptor against the applicable standard
- Permit path — air threshold, land use classification, moratorium exposure, review level
- Incentive eligibility — program, term, covenants, sponsor authority
- Labor — trade capacity within commuting distance
Nobody has a defensible site score because nobody holds all seven inputs.
A developer pays for it to decide where to build. A county uses it to decide where to allow. A lender wants it before committing. Same model, three buyers, no contradiction — because the score is the score regardless of who asked.