Showed up at the county hearing to complain about generators, left with a phone number

The parking lot conversation being better than the actual hearing is the most real detail here. Every useful thing I've learned in this business happened after somebody closed their laptop.

I'll ask the thing I would have kept to myself in a room. What is an energization date actually, in plain terms? Is it just "the day the electricity turns on," or does it mean something more specific in a contract?

@compass it's roughly the day the utility can deliver the contracted amount of power to the site, not the day a light switch works. My brother-in-law sells electrical gear and the lead times he quotes on big transformers are measured in years now, not months. He says the order goes in before anyone has a signed tenant.

I only learned what a cap rate was in October, so this thread is a lot to take in. "The grid is on backorder" is going to live in my head.

cairn, you've cost me a weekend. I went looking for my state's transmission planning maps last night and now I have a tab open on interconnection queue reports. My actual list is small rental houses. I don't know what I'm doing with any of this yet.

I did one cooling retrofit in a small server room for a law firm and it turned into six weeks of scope creep because the floor loading numbers were wrong. Scale that to a building where the mechanical plant is the whole point and I understand why nobody lets a general renovation guy near it.

I built a spreadsheet last spring that tried to back out megawatts of capacity per share for the two big public names. It taught me nothing I could act on, mostly because leased capacity, contracted capacity, and the stuff still sitting in a queue don't mean the same thing and the disclosures don't line up cleanly. I stopped. Progress, for me.

Is the noise thing legitimate or is it the same complaint people make about everything new? Genuinely asking. I've never stood next to one.

@ember from what I've read the generators only run on test cycles, and the constant sound is the cooling equipment. Depends heavily on the design and the setback.

cairn, the part I keep circling is holding period. Everything I read says this sector ranks first for investment prospects, three years running now, and every time something is that consensus I want to know what I'm buying that the next buyer isn't already paying for. I'm not saying it's a bubble. Plenty of serious people say the demand is structural. I'd just rather size the position so I don't need to be right quickly.

I looked at a private fund in this space last year. Development focused, seven year lockup, and the offering deck spent more pages on AI demand than on how the sponsor had secured power at any specific site. When I asked for the interconnection agreements and the utility correspondence, I got a summary table instead of documents. I passed. Might have been a fine deal. I couldn't verify the one thing that mattered.

@canton that's the document I'd want too. There's a structural mismatch that interests me more than the growth story. A tenant lease can commit you to deliver capacity on a date, and the utility's side of that is a separate agreement with its own conditions and its own timeline. Whoever eats the gap between those two dates is the whole risk allocation, and it's written in delivery and outside date language that varies deal by deal. On any specific contract you want a lawyer who has read that gear before, but even as a reader you learn a lot from which side asked for the cushion.

The underwriting shift that took me longest to absorb: rent per square foot is close to meaningless here. It's dollars per kilowatt of critical load per month, and then you're arguing about power usage effectiveness because inefficient cooling eats the tenant's economics and eventually shows up in renewal pricing. A building with secured power and thin fiber routes is worth less than the square footage suggests. A building with both is scarce, and the scarcity is why the supply constraint helps existing owners.

@sextant the debt reads the same way. Construction facilities I've seen described in this space hang draws and completion tests on utility milestones, not just on physical percent complete. Terms move constantly and you'd confirm anything current in writing with the lender, but the shape of it is that the bank is underwriting the utility as much as the sponsor.

Nobody in that world says property management. It's critical facilities operations and the staff are electricians and controls people on shifts. I priced out what a friend's team charges to run one and it made my apartment management fees look like a lemonade stand.

Filing this whole thread. I'm still deciding between paper and equity and this pushed me a little toward reading more before either.

I went and looked at the dividend yields on the public names hoping for income and they're lower than my boring apartment REITs. Which makes sense once you see it as a growth story, I just came in with the wrong expectation.

cairn, this thread is oddly why I'm still buying a duplex. I like that I can walk the roof of the thing I own. I'll take my data center exposure in whatever tiny slice my index fund already holds and think about it never.