- Behind-the-meter generation
- Electricity generation located directly at the campus, on the customer's side of the utility meter, used to serve the facility without relying entirely on grid interconnection. Developers pursue it to sidestep parts of the transmission and interconnection bottleneck.
- Entitled, powered land
- A parcel that is simultaneously legally permitted to host a data center (entitled) and able to secure firm, deliverable power on a workable timeline (powered). The rare coincidence of both conditions on one site is the industry's scarcest asset.
- Entitlement
- The legal right to build a specific facility on a parcel, established through zoning, permits, special-use approvals, and required clearances. It is granted by local and state bodies and can be denied, making it one of the two scarce conditions in site selection.
- Firm power
- A committed, reliable supply of a specified amount of electricity delivered on a defined schedule, as opposed to a vague indication that power exists nearby. Securing firm power requires real transmission and substation capacity and is the pacing constraint of most projects.
- Interconnection queue
- The formal waiting line, managed by a regional grid operator, that generators and large loads must join to connect to the electrical grid. Applications undergo engineering studies, and typical waits now stretch to several years, making the queue a primary driver of project timelines.
- Kill criteria (gates)
- Pass-or-fail conditions that a site must satisfy to remain viable, such as a credible firm-power path or the absence of a hard entitlement barrier. Strength on other factors cannot offset a failed gate, so gates are applied first to eliminate unbuildable sites cheaply.
- Sensitivity analysis
- A test of how stable a site ranking is when weights or scores are nudged within their plausible range. A ranking that holds across reasonable adjustments is robust; one that flips easily reveals a close, assumption-dependent decision that warrants further diligence before committing.
- Weighted scoring model
- A decision framework that lists the factors that matter, assigns each a weight reflecting its importance, grades every candidate site against each factor, and sums the weighted scores into a single comparable ranking used to evaluate imperfect sites consistently.