Power
Utility-confirmed megawatts first, transmission-class substation proximity second. A signed load letter and a 230 kV substation inside five miles is a different asset to a field near a distribution line.
Data center site development
Most sites fail on power,
water, or a flood map.
Volterris finds land that can actually carry a data center — and proves it against public record before anyone drives out to walk it.
The problem
A listing tells you the acreage. It won't tell you whether the grid can feed it.
Land listings are written to sell land. They rarely mention the substation four miles away that is already fully subscribed, the interstate gas lateral that stops one county short, or the fact that a third of the parcel sits inside a special flood hazard area.
Those are the things that kill a data center deal — usually after months of diligence. We check them first, from public record, and rank what survives.
What we screen for
Seven things, weighted by what actually stops a project.
Natural gas
Distance to pipeline, weighted toward interstate over intrastate. On-site generation and dual-fuel backup both live or die on this number.
Flood risk
A hard screen, not a tiebreaker. Anything inside a FEMA special flood hazard area scores zero — you cannot underwrite a hall on it. Zone X takes partial credit.
Substation
Scored again on its own, so genuinely well-served land separates from land that merely has a utility willing to talk.
Fiber
Carrier count within reach and distance to long-haul route. Two providers beats one, and neither beats a meet-me you can actually get into.
Land
300 developable acres is the floor. Below that the campus does not pencil, whatever else the parcel has going for it.
Freshness
A penalty, not a credit. A listing sitting untouched for six months is telling you something, and the score should say so.
Power
The constraint everything else is downstream of.
We pull plant and voltage data from EIA Form 860 — roughly 15,000 US plants with coordinates — and measure every candidate against it. That gives a defensible starting number before a single utility call.
What it does not give you is availability. Capacity is a conversation with the utility, and until that letter exists we mark the site unconfirmed and say so plainly.
Process
Discovered, enriched, scored, reviewed.
Candidates surface from listing and economic-development sources. Each one is then enriched from public GIS — FEMA flood layers, USGS elevation for slope, FCC broadband data for carriers, EIA for grid infrastructure — and scored 0–100.
Then a person looks at it. The score orders the queue; it does not make the decision.
How we report it
Listed facts and verified facts are not the same thing, and we don't blur them.
Acreage, asking price and source URL come off the listing. Utility-confirmed megawatts, substation capacity and a fiber meet-me come from someone putting it in writing.
Anything unconfirmed carries a yellow badge, never a green one. A tool that flatters its own data is worse than no tool, because you stop checking.
Have land, or looking for it?
Get in touch and we'll tell you what the public record already says about it.