JLL ranks speed to power as the primary site-selection criterion. Not cost. Not location. Timing.
The two timelines
Interconnection queue study
24 to 36 months in constrained markets, frequently with significant upgrade obligations attached. This is the formal utility process of determining whether and how a large new load can be served.
Time to energize
From utility application to power delivery:
- About 18 months in favourable markets
- Five years or more in congested ones
CBRE frames the premium tier as greenfield sites able to receive power within 18 to 36 months. Where new infrastructure is needed, interconnection runs 24 to 48 months or more.
Why months cost more than acres
Consider a project with capital committed and a customer waiting. Every month of delay carries financing cost on committed capital, deferred revenue, and contractual exposure to a customer who expected capacity on a date.
DataCenterScope's illustrative model prices delay at roughly $1.5 million per month on a large project. Twenty-four months of delay is therefore a $36 million line item — which on a 100-acre site is $360,000 per acre of pure timing cost, before a single dollar of infrastructure.
That is why a developer will pay what looks like a preposterous premium for a site that can be energized sooner. They are not overpaying for land. They are buying back time at a price lower than what time costs them.
What makes a market fast or slow
Faster: utility reserve margin, existing transmission at adequate voltage, a utility with experience serving large loads, streamlined permitting, political support.
Slower: congested queues, transmission constraints, utilities without large-load experience, contested entitlement, moratoriums.
This is the mechanism behind the geographic shift. Northern Virginia did not become less attractive technically. It became slow. Capital went looking for fast. What happened there →
What a landowner should take from this
Your parcel's value is substantially a function of your utility's condition, which you do not control and probably have never thought about.
Two owners of near-identical land, one in a county served by a utility with headroom and large-load experience, one in a county with a congested queue, are in very different positions. Neither did anything to deserve it.
Worth knowing: which utility serves your parcel, whether they have publicly discussed large load growth, and whether any data centers have been announced in your service territory. All of it is public, and all of it tells you more about your land's prospects than anything about the land itself.
Attributed to JLL, CBRE and DataCenterScope as noted. The $1.5M per month delay figure is from an illustrative model, not transaction data.