Synthesis: Building a Coherent Site-Selection Thesis at Portfolio Scale
Everything converges here. Power, land, entitlement, incentives, and community are not a checklist to be scored independently and summed; they are threads in a single thesis that either hangs together or does not. The expert deliverable is not a ranked spreadsheet of sites. It is an argument: this portfolio, sequenced this way, across these grids and jurisdictions, monetizes the scarce asset while surviving the failures we can foresee. Incentives should be the tiebreaker, never the thesis. A thesis built on abatements is a thesis with a countdown timer.
Knowledge check
Why should tax incentives and abatements function as a tiebreaker rather than the foundation of a site-selection thesis?
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Because incentives are politically reversible, time-limited, and increasingly contested by communities scrutinizing data center subsidies, a thesis anchored on them is fragile; durable advantages come from firm power, entitlements, expansion runway, and community consent, so incentives should only break ties between sites that are already strong on those fundamentals rather than compensate for weakness in them.