Gridwatch is built on a single rule: a facility enters the registry when a primary record says it exists, and not before. This page describes how that record is found, how it is verified, how a facility is graded, and what happens when we get it wrong.
Sources are ranked, and the rank determines what a fact is allowed to do.
County property appraiser records and parcel GIS. Recorded deeds. County ordinances, resolutions, and commission minutes. Building permits. Regulatory filings — Public Service Commission dockets, Department of Environmental Protection permits, water management district consumptive use permits. Securities filings. An operator's own first-party publication about its own facility.
Trade press. Industry directories. Broker listings. Aggregator databases.
These are useful for finding things. They are not sufficient to register anything. A facility that appears only in a directory is a lead, not a row — it gets verified at the parcel or it does not get registered.
The reverse also holds, and matters more than it sounds: silence is not evidence of absence. Gridwatch regularly registers facilities before directories list them. A facility missing from an aggregator is not thereby disproved.
Every document consulted to reach a verification decision is recorded as its own source and cited to the fact it supports. That includes the ones that said no: a deed showing the seller was not the operator, a permit that turned out to be for a warehouse, a geocoder result that placed a site in a different county than its address implied. A check that closes a question is as much a source as one that opens it, and it is kept.
So the source count is exactly that — the number of documents actually consulted and recorded, not a count of scrapers or feeds. The large majority are one-off citations from a single verification: a recorded deed, a county permit, a Census geocoder call. A small number are genuinely polled feeds that run on a cadence. Each is a row, tied to the fact it supports, which is what makes the total auditable rather than asserted.
Nothing.
That is the entire policy, and it is the one most likely to be misread as a gap.
If a facility's capacity is not in a primary record, the field is null. We do not carry a figure from a directory, a developer's projection, a press release, or a prior estimate. A number in a field reads as a fact, and it must be one.
The result: 283 of 362 facilities carry no capacity figure. That is 78 percent, and it is the truth about disclosure rather than a defect in the registry. A summed total across the disclosed 79 is a floor, and it is labeled as one everywhere it appears.
The full power and water picture →How water figures are labeled →
The operator holds title to the parcel, directly or through an entity it controls. Title and operation agree.
The facility and operator are verified; a third-party landlord holds title.
Each facility also carries a confidence value reflecting how much of it is primary-verified. Confidence is not a guess about whether the facility is real — a registered facility is real. It reflects how completely the record supports every field.
Florida is complete. All 67 counties have been worked to a determination — either a verified facility exists, or the county has been certified as having none. That second finding is not an absence of effort; it is a positive result, reached by enumerating every candidate and dispositioning each one.
Nationally, coverage is partial and deepening. Facilities are registered across 21 states. This is not a claim of national completeness, and nothing on this site should be read as one. A state with few facilities listed may have few, or may not yet have been worked. Where a county has been certified complete, we say so.
We would rather tell you where the map is thin than let you assume it is finished.
A county is certified only when three gates pass:
A county with no data centers is certified the same way as one with twelve. “There is nothing here” is a finding that has to be earned.
We have been. A county was certified as having no data centers, and it had one — a site being actively marketed that our sweep did not reach. We found it, reopened the county, corrected the record, and changed the procedure that missed it.
Corrections are made in the open. Facilities are never deleted — a rejected record is marked rejected, with the reason and the date, and it stays. The registry's history is part of the registry, because a source you cannot audit is a source you have to take on faith.
We do not estimate a facility into existence. We do not publish a number we cannot show you the source for. We do not treat a directory's confidence as our own. And we do not quietly change a figure and let you assume it was always that way.