Pro-building. Unwilling to bend the record.

Evidence statuses

Source hierarchy

1. Controlling agreements, regulatory orders, permits and audited government records.
2. Government operating and financial records; EPA, DOE, Berkeley Lab and similar technical sources.
3. Company disclosures, clearly labeled as company claims.
4. Responsible secondary reporting used to locate or contextualize primary evidence, not replace it.

Rules that prevent false precision

• A permit is permission, not proof of use.
• A projected job is not observed employment.
• Construction workers, job-years, permanent employees and contractors remain separate.
• Announced investment is not completed investment.
• Withdrawal, consumption, discharge, make-up water and avoided potable use remain separate.
• Developer, owner, operator, tenant, subsidiary and guarantor are not silently merged.
• Local fiscal return, statewide economic effects and neighborhood/resource effects use separate ledgers.

Index and size rules

• A campus, a building, a physical facility and a provider presence are different units.
• Project-lead counts and facility-research counts are separate, overlapping inventories and are never added.
• Anticipated site demand is not measured demand, contracted demand or critical IT load.
• Project size bands use disclosed anticipated site demand. Facility bands use disclosed critical IT load only when a source identifies that scope. Numeric bands are navigation aids, not business-model labels or regulatory definitions.
• A source-listed lead is not independently verified. It enters the verification queue with its provenance intact.
• Withdrawn and expired projects remain in the historical index instead of disappearing.

National aggregation rules

• A state page is not automatically a statewide census. Coverage is labeled statewide first pass, selected project only, selected topic only or not started.
• Unresearched counts remain blank. They never enter a national sum as zero.
• Regional and operator totals only combine records with compatible entity units, time periods and measurement scopes.
• A disclosed-capacity total must show how many active records have a comparable figure; unknown capacity remains in the denominator.

Complete-inventory protocol

1. Build a discovery union from operator lists, state and local records, utility and commission dockets, permits, tax and incentive records, historical archives, and commercial directories used only as leads unless licensed.
2. Resolve each lead to a project, campus, physical building, provider presence or historical event. Unresolved leads stay visible and out of confirmed totals.
3. Check current and former names, subsidiaries, acquisitions, closures and withdrawals so a rename neither deletes nor duplicates a site.
4. Publish a statewide total only after the named source families and candidate queue have been reconciled to the same record unit.
5. Keep monitoring after publication. A census is a dated snapshot, not a permanent claim.

Document packets and watch points

A dossier’s source packet lists the controlling or evidentiary records reviewed and explicitly names missing agreements. Page or section locators identify the relevant provision when possible. A watch point may be a date, phase trigger, annual filing, docket event or replacement proposal; an unknown date remains unknown rather than becoming an invented deadline.

Corrections and commercial independence

We publish the source, source period, last-reviewed date and uncertainty with each finding. Better primary records should lead to a visible correction. Sponsorship, if ever accepted, cannot buy a verdict, select only favorable projects, delay a finding or suppress a correction. Editorial findings and commercial relationships remain separate and disclosed.