Powered Land and Site Economics
What powered land trades for: the deals, the rents per megawatt, the edge premium, anchor tenants, and the underwriting that gets a site financed. 34 articles from The Grid Report, newest first.
- Texas Elected a Pause Advocate, and Riot Disclosed a $28 Billion Lease
Grid Board. Peak this week: n/a this week (no official daily peak sourced; record about 91.1 GW, Jul 22) | Large-load queue: 474 GW (June figure, latest public) | Houston Hub TB4: $45.52/MWh (7-day avg to Nov 5) |...
- The Moratorium Loophole: $15B in Zoning Wins and a $521M ABS
Three of this week's five deals got done because a moratorium, an overlay district or a pre-filed application let them skip the line. The other two got done because a lender decided a leased building is a bond....
- From $3.6M to $3B, the Asset Is the Megawatt
Four deals crossed the wire this week outside Texas, and only one of them is a signed lease. The other three are a contingent land contract, a state filing and an 8-K for a warehouse. Strip the legal wrappers off...
- 1.5 GW Gets a Split Vote, 4 MW Gets a Tenant
The paper is running ahead of the leases. This week a county in Alabama voted to give away a billion dollars of tax revenue for a 1.5 GW campus, a Michigan utility locked a hyperscaler into a 20-year power contract...
- Entitled, Not Energized: 55 MW in Salisbury, 73 MW Out of Bankruptcy in Bryan, and TVA's $1.5 Million-a-Megawatt Toll
Nobody signed a marquee tenant in the sub-75 MW band this week. What got done instead was the unglamorous work of turning contested or stranded positions into bankable ones: a 55 MW colo entitlement in the...
- The Tenant Is the Equity Now: $2.2M a Megawatt-Year in Spartanburg County, a $42.9M GPU Divorce in Columbus, $112 a Foot in Eagan
Four deals between 5 and 50 MW got done this week, in four states, and in every one of them the person who owns the building is no longer the person who owns the chips. A neocloud is prepaying a South Carolina...
- Who Pays for Meta's 366 MW of Gas? Judges Say Not El Paso Ratepayers
On September 23, two administrative law judges at the Public Utility Commission told El Paso Electric that its proposed 366 MW gas plant for Meta can be built, but only if the people who live in El Paso do not pay...
- Permits Are the New Power: $2.7M an Acre in Phoenix, $1.75M a Megawatt in Georgia, and 7.875% on a Meta Guarantee
Texas told TCEQ on September 21 to stop issuing permits to data centers, islanded ones included, until ERCOT and the water board finish audits in December. Loudoun voted 7-1 for a twelve-month application pause...
- "No Other State Agency Shall Move Forward": TCEQ Halts Data Center Permits, Paxton Names 18 Counties, and the PUCT Sets $50,000 a Megawatt
Last week I said the era of announcing megawatts was over and the era of documenting them had arrived. This week the state added a third era, and it arrived on letterhead. On September 21 Governor Abbott sent a...
- Seventy-Five Megawatts Is Now a Design Parameter
On Thursday, CNBC reported that Anthropic and OpenAI are both shopping data center allocations of 20 to 30 MW — sounded out across the UK and the Nordics, with sources saying both companies have discussed similar...
- "Very, Very Intrusive": 461 Surveys, 231 Notaries, and a Board That Voted Itself a 30% Raise
Last week I said the Batch Zero scoreboard was self-reported and that ERCOT had published nothing. On September 11, two days before that issue went out, ERCOT filed the aggregate in Project 59142, and the numbers...
- Nobody Disclosed a Square Foot
Four sub-75 MW deals closed or cleared in the past seven days. Between them: 29 acres in Texas, three acres and a building in Arkansas, forty-one acres of a decommissioned Kodak campus in Colorado, and twenty acres...
- ERCOT Sorted the Queue and Published Nothing, So the Market Built Its Own Scoreboard
On September 3 at 3:55 in the afternoon, ERCOT sent Market Notice M-A080326-04 to transmission and distribution service providers, telling them which large loads had been conditionally included in Batch Zero. It...
- $161 a Kilowatt-Month in Tulsa, 333 Watts a Foot in Dowagiac: The Middle Market Prices Live Power
Nobody in the sub-75 MW market bought dirt this week. They bought meters. A Tulsa business park with 43 MW already landed signed a 15-year take-or-pay worth $1.25 billion. A Michigan bitcoin barn switched off its...
- Around the Queue, Not Through It: $35 Billion in Nueces County, 400 Miles of 765 kV, and a Batch Zero List Three Days Late
At 7:16 p.m. on Monday, August 31, ERCOT issued Market Notice M-A080326-03, informing the market that it "requires additional time to complete its data validation and due diligence processes" and would release the...
- The 40 MW Gets a Credit Rating
For two years the capital markets treated anything under 100 MW as a rounding error. This week the rounding error got a credit rating. J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs closed an investment-grade-rated facility of up...
- Buy at $4.2M a Megawatt, Build at $5.9M, Rent at $1.5M a Year
Five transactions printed this week, and for once none of them needed a gigawatt to be interesting. A private equity platform bought ten metro boxes at $4.25 million a megawatt. Eleven banks committed $800 million...
- Wires or Pipes: Moving 7.6 Gigawatts 100 Miles, Two Ways
Here is the question, stripped of everything else. You have a gas field. You have a data center 100 miles away that wants 7.6 gigawatts. You can build a power plant at the gas field and run a transmission line to...
- Eighty-Two Dollars a Foot in Oakland, Thirteen Sixty-Seven in Bristow
Six data center buildings changed hands or got entitled in the lower 48 in the last seven days, and every one of them is small — 3 MW to 55 MW, the band this newsletter exists to cover. Put their trade prices on...
- Twenty Megawatts: Now a Zoning Trigger, Still a Financing Orphan
Two things happened this week at opposite ends of the market, and neither one was good news if you build in the middle. Tucson set its data center permitting trigger at 20 MW or 25,000 square feet. The Town of...
- Demand First, Dirt Second: A 40 MW Pre-Lease, $50M/GW Deposit Math, and the ABS Window Reopens
The week's tape reads like the market decided dirt is the easy part. The deals that actually closed between July 28 and August 4 were contracts and credit structures — a 40 MW campus 100% pre-leased before it's...
- The Comp Is $1.76M per MW-Year. The Constraint Is Permission.
The week priced both ends of this market at once. At the top, AMD put chipmaker credit behind 529 MW of 15-year leases on converted mining campuses — call it $1.76M per MW-year, and every mid-size take-or-pay in a...
- The Edge Premium Prints at 20%: A 10 MW Deal in Columbus Just Priced the Curve
The most useful number this week is one of the smallest. Duos Edge AI signed an investment-grade hyperscaler to a five-year, 10 MW colocation agreement in Columbus, Georgia worth $111 million — about $2.22 million...
- 727 to 1: Abbott's Deadline Arrives and Nobody Has Decided Who Pays
Shave one megawatt off your demand at the system peak and Texas will save you money on transmission. How much money depends entirely on what kind of customer you are. For a commercial or industrial customer, the...
- 32 Plants, 287 Million Tons: Somebody Finally Added Up the Texas Gas Buildout
The Environmental Integrity Project published a report on July 1 that did something nobody in Texas had bothered to do: it counted the gas plants. Not the ones utilities are building for the grid — the ones being...
- Credit Is the New Gatekeeper: A 50 MW Reuse in Colorado Springs, and Three Ways to Pay for the Box
The most instructive deal in the inference market this quarter never closed. A well-funded neocloud came to the table with a 15-year term, six months of rent prepaid, millions committed to liquid cooling, and...
- Power First, Tenant Later
Three deals defined this week, and they rhyme in a way that should make anyone underwriting mid-market inference pay attention: the power got secured before the tenant did. A Bitcoin miner in southwest Michigan is...
- Buying Around the Queue: A Lexington Brownfield, a Cedar City Gas Plant, and Amazon Sets the 6% Comp
Five deals closed or cleared this week, in five different states, and not one of them was really about money. Capital is everywhere right now. What these sponsors actually bought was a way around the grid...
- The Week the Grid Said No: 900 MW Dead, a Year-Long Freeze, and a $14.5M Exit
Some weeks the news is what got built. This week the news is what got killed. A 900 MW campus in Hanover County died on a 4-3 vote. Central Arkansas froze new data centers for a year. A 2.6 million-square-foot...
- The Anchor Tenant Is the Underwrite: Four Deals, One Pattern
Four deals closed or got entitled in the past week and they read like the same memo. A $7.5 billion lease that won't tell you what state the building is in. A $225 million portfolio sale at $4.25 a watt that turns...
- "We Don't Want It in Our Community": Texas Starts Pushing Back
For three years the Texas data center story has been a one-way ratchet: more megawatts requested, more campuses announced, more capital committed, and a grid operator that kept raising its own forecast. This week...
- Hut 8 Books a $9.8 Billion Tenant, and the Texas Queue Tilts Back to Gas
Two stories landed on the same Wednesday this week and they deserve to be read together. Hut 8 announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion triple-net take-or-pay lease at its Nueces County campus — 352 MW of NVIDIA DSX-spec...
- While Regulators Scramble, the Capital Doesn't Wait: A $14 Billion Week in Texas Energy
Last week I wrote about the communities pushing back — San Marcos, Lacy Lakeview, Fort Worth — places where the local math on water, roads, and tax abatements wasn't adding up. The resistance is real. But this...
- "Inflection Point": 226 GW in the Queue, a 7.65 GW Permit, and the Week Texas Energy Got Real
Something broke loose in Texas energy this week. Not one story — five, all at once, all pointing the same direction. A 226 GW interconnection queue that's quadrupled in a year. A crypto miner sitting on 1.7 GW of...
Barrio Energy develops powered sites in Texas and publishes the Barrio Grid map and API the reporting above draws on. Questions from communities: see Community.