How to verify a power claim on a data-center site

There is no standard definition of powered land, and no registry that certifies one. The term is applied to sites holding wildly different positions:

• A conversation with the utility. No document. Sometimes a meeting and a map.
• A nonbinding letter of intent. Utilities routinely enter these with developers in order to *evaluate* what transmission and generation would be needed. It is an input to a study, not a commitment by either side.
• A will-serve letter. A statement about capacity the utility currently expects to be able to provide — conditioned, and often on things outside the seller's control.
• A completed interconnection study. Tells you what upgrades are required and roughly what they cost. Does not entitle anyone to build them.
• An executed interconnection agreement. Allocates the responsibility for constructing interconnection and system-upgrade infrastructure, and allocates the cost between the parties.

All five get marketed as "powered." The gap between the first and the last is measured in years and in tens of millions of dollars of upgrade obligation. The first question is never *how many megawatts* — it is *which of these five exists, in writing, today*.

A will-serve letter is genuinely useful. It is also routinely presented as proof of something it does not prove.

What it does: gives comfort as to current or reasonably expected capacity at a point in time, from the party that would actually deliver it.

What it does not do:

• It is not an allocation. It generally does not reserve capacity against other applicants, and it does not stop a larger load from taking that capacity first.
• It is conditional, and the conditions are the substance. If additional capacity turns out to be needed, or lines must be rerouted, the risk of delay — or of the project not completing at all — sits with the developer, not the utility.
• It has a shelf life. A letter written against a load forecast that has since been revised describes a grid that no longer exists.
• It says nothing about the transmission network beyond the point of interconnection. See the next section, which is where most surprises actually live.

Read the conditions, the date, and the load it was written against. A will-serve letter you cannot read in full is not a will-serve letter you can rely on.

Power diligence has traditionally looked at local utility capacity, substation proximity, voltage class, available feeder capacity and interconnection timing. Those still matter. They are no longer sufficient.

A site can sit next to a substation, present well on every utility service map, and still fail — because the surrounding grid cannot absorb a new 100 MW, 300 MW or 1 GW load without years of network upgrades. Transmission planning has become one of the highest-risk variables in data-center development, and it is invisible in exactly the materials a site is marketed with.

This is why substation proximity is not a power position. Proximity tells you the interconnection is physically plausible. It tells you nothing about whether the capacity is spoken for, whether the upgrade is already in a plan, or who pays for it.

The question to ask alongside every power claim: *what has to be built beyond the fence, who is obligated to build it, and what does that do to the energization date.*

Verification is not a single checklist, because the mechanism differs by market and the mechanism changes.

Texas is the clearest example of how quickly the ground moves. ERCOT's board approved NPRR 1325 and PGRR 145 on 2 June 2026, establishing a one-time transitional "Batch Zero" process that evaluates qualifying large-load interconnection requests system-wide rather than one at a time (ERCOT / Willkie Farr & Gallagher, as of July 27, 2026). By way of transition, the previous Large Load Interconnection Study process under Planning Guide Section 9 ran through 10 July 2026, and electing Provisional Controllable Load Resource treatment in Batch Zero required a completed, signed and notarised Form W Part A submitted to the interconnecting DSP or TSP by 10 July 2026. Separately, Texas PUC Project 58481 — proposed 16 TAC §25.194, Large Load Interconnection Standards — carries Senate Bill 6 into the interconnection rules, published for comment 12 March 2026.

The detail matters less than the implication: a site whose power position was established under a process that has since closed is holding a position in a queue that no longer works the way the seller believes it does. In PJM, the equivalent question is queue reform and load-forecast treatment. In a vertically integrated Southeast utility, it is the tariff and who bears the upgrade.

Ask when the position was established, under which process, and whether that process still exists in the form the claim assumes.

There is a persistent assumption that a site gets financed by persuading someone. Increasingly it does not. Asset-backed infrastructure capital — private credit funds and private equity deploying against defined criteria — turns up with a buy-box: a fixed specification of what it will take, agreed with its own investors before it ever sees your asset. Your site either fits the box, is restructured to fit it, or is declined. There is no third outcome, and no amount of narrative moves it.

A buy-box is typically explicit about:

• Seniority and the security package — senior secured as standard, with deposit account control, UCC-1 filings, a defined payment waterfall, and lien rights taken at the SPV rather than the sponsor.
• Tenor, and whether the facility revolves.
• Geography, often hard-bounded. US-only mandates are common, and an otherwise perfect European asset simply falls outside them.
• Advance rate — what fraction of assessed value the facility will actually advance against.
• Whether offtake must be binding and contracted, as opposed to indicated or forecast.

Two consequences follow for a power claim, and they are the practical point of this page.

Binding contracted offtake is where powered land most often falls out. The power position can be genuine, documented, and still fail — because demand behind it is a letter of interest rather than a contract. Power without contracted offtake is an input, not a project.

The document you hold sets the advance rate. This is the part most sellers miss. The quality of the power position does not merely decide *whether* a site is financeable; it moves what the asset is worth inside the box. A nonbinding letter and an executed interconnection agreement do not produce a slightly different outcome — they produce a different asset.

Which is the thread running through all of the above: capital is not underwriting the megawatts. It is underwriting the documents that make the megawatts contractual — and the gap between those two is where most marketed sites fail.