Methodology
How site screening works, and where it stops
Every result on this site is assembled from public infrastructure data. This page says what that data is, how the model reads it, and, the part that matters most, what it cannot tell you.
What the tiers mean
A tier is a summary of grid position, not a grade of the site. It is driven by the serving utility, distance to adequate transmission voltage, the retail rate, interconnection context, and how the designed load compares to what the surrounding grid plausibly serves. Tier and confidence are separate axes: a site can be Tier A on thin data or Tier C on thorough data.
Tier A · Strong grid position
High-voltage transmission is close and the serving utility is resolved with a real industrial rate. The design fits inside the plausible load envelope with headroom. A capacity study is still required, but nothing in the public data argues against the site.
Tier B · Workable with diligence
The infrastructure is present but something needs checking, distance to adequate voltage, a queue that is filling up, or a load that sits near the top of the envelope. Expect the interconnection conversation to be substantive.
Tier C · Constrained
A specific factor pushes back: the nearest adequate voltage is far, the retail rate is high, or the designed load exceeds what the surrounding grid plausibly serves without major upgrades. The site is not ruled out, but the constraint is named.
Tier D · Insufficient data
The resolver could not assemble enough corroborating facts to score the site, usually a geocode that did not land, or a location outside the loaded datasets. This is an absence of evidence, not evidence against the site.
What drives the confidence score
Confidence measures how much corroborating data resolved for the point, nothing more. It goes up when the geocode is exact, the point lands inside a utility territory and an ISO region, substations and transmission are nearby in the data, and a retail rate joins to the utility. It goes down when any of those are missing. It is a statement about completeness of inputs, not about the quality of the site and not about the odds of a successful interconnection.
A binding constraint is reported alongside the tier: the single factor footprint, power, or grid distance, that limits the site first. It is the sentence to read before any of the others.
Which datasets feed the model
Retrieval dates below are read live from the provenance table each time this page loads. Where a date reads “not yet loaded,” that dataset has not been ingested into this environment and does not contribute to results.
Serving utility and its ownership type, by point-in-polygon.
Which market operates the grid at the point.
Nearest substation, its voltage, and the high-voltage access band.
Nearest line voltage and distance to the best grid access.
Industrial retail rate for the serving utility, by EIA ID.
Congestion context, scoped to the ISO and state.
Grid carbon intensity for the region.
Distribution headroom, where a utility publishes it.
What this cannot tell you
- Available capacity is known only to the utility. Nothing here measures the headroom on a specific feeder or transformer. Proximity to a 230 kV substation says a connection is physically plausible; it says nothing about whether that substation can take another 80 MW.
- Hosting-capacity maps are built for generation export, not large load. They model how much solar or storage a distribution circuit can push back onto the grid. Reading them as a large-load import budget is a category error; we surface them only where a utility publishes them, and even then as context.
- Queue data covers generation, not load. Interconnection queues are dominated by generators seeking to export. They indicate congestion and study backlog in a region; they are not a list of large-load requests and do not reflect load-side hosting.
- No output here reflects any conversation with any utility. This is a desk screen of public data. No result has been confirmed, priced, or reserved by a utility, and nothing here should be represented to a utility as their position.
- The only authoritative answer comes from a capacity study. A tier is a reason to make the call, not a substitute for it. Treat every number here as a hypothesis to test in the interconnection process.