The siting filterRegions, not sites

Where clean power is wasted and a county is willing.

Four regions pass the filter on today’s evidence. The sites inside them are in the room; the regions, and why, are here.

Offer a site The five tests

As of: 31 October 2026
Rule: The site follows the county.
Status: Draft, for review.

A white model of a ridgeline with wind turbines, a brass transmission line marching away on pylons with one span open at a switch, and below it in the valley a small campus inside its red line, drawing the power by a short brass line from the switch. — **Plate 5**Stranded power. Wind on the ridge, one span of the line opened at the switch, and in the valley a flexible campus taking the power that would otherwise be thrown away. An illustrative model.

01The regions

Four places where the filter passes.

Curtailed or constrained clean generation within reach; a county that adopted an ordinance rather than a moratorium in the last eighteen months; a large-load tariff or a bring-your-own-capacity rule; water without a river or aquifer draw; a bridge tenant possible.

West Texas, ERCOT West
5.3 TWh curtailed
Clean power thrown away in 2024 for want of a line or a load, in a market where colocation vacancy stood at zero. Texas already runs about 5 gigawatts of flexible load through demand response.
Research note 04.
The MISO wind belt
Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas
Wind curtailed behind constrained lines, a bring-your-own-capacity rule in the market, and counties, Sioux County among them, that chose an ordinance over a ban.
Research notes 03 and 04.
AEP Ohio territory
85% for up to 12 years
The regulator now requires large data-centre loads to pay for 85 per cent of subscribed capacity for up to twelve years: the neighbours’ bill, answered before the hearing.
Public Utilities Commission of Ohio; research note 03.
Scotland, behind the constraint boundary
10 TWh and £1.51 billion
Great Britain curtailed 10 terawatt-hours of wind in 2025 and paid £1.51 billion in constraint costs in 2026 alone. A flexible campus behind the boundary is a grid service, and the first site of a British arm.
Research note 04.

02Counties

The county comes before the land.

We pick the pilot jurisdiction, not the pilot site: a county that adopted a data-centre ordinance in 2026, Davidson County in North Carolina, Sioux County in Iowa, Cleveland in Tennessee, or Loudoun under its special-exception process, and we offer the Standard’s community section as the basis for the conditions of approval. The site follows.

If you sit on a planning commission in a county like these, talk to us before the application. Nothing is hidden and nothing is signed under seal.

Four places where the filter passes.

West Texas, ERCOT West

The MISO wind belt

AEP Ohio territory

Scotland, behind the constraint boundary

The county comes before the land.