Site-control funnel
Buildable acres by stage
Est. acquisition cost by stage
Candidate parcels — site control
Synthetic shortlist. Click a row to locate it on the map.
| Parcel | County | Status | Buildable ac | $/ac | Title | Suitability | Updated |
|---|
Methodology & About
The model
Every rural parcel ≥ 50 acres is scored with a transparent weighted overlay: each criterion is normalized
to 0–100 against absolute, domain-anchored breakpoints, weighted, summed, and ranked. Interconnection leads,
because in ERCOT that is the constraint that makes or breaks a site. All weights and breakpoints live in a
single config.yaml — illustrative and tunable; a production-tuned model is discussed in
conversation.
| Criterion | Weight | How it scores |
|---|---|---|
| Interconnection proximity | 35% | Distance to nearest ≥138 kV substation/line (≤1 mi → 100, ≥10 mi → 0) |
| Buildable acreage | 20% | Acres after exclusions/setbacks (50 ac → 0, ≥640 ac → 100) |
| Terrain | 15% | Mean slope (≤2% → 100, ≥5% → 0; very steep excluded) |
| Land cover + soils | 10% | Open/marginal land favored; prime farmland (NRCS LCC 1–2) penalized |
| Hazard-free | 10% | % of parcel outside floodplain/wetlands |
| Road access | 5% | Distance to paved public road |
| Contiguity / shape | 5% | Polsby-Popper compactness |
Exclusions & setbacks (subtracted before scoring): FEMA SFHA high-risk floodplain, NWI wetlands, PAD-US protected lands, plus Eagle Ford setbacks from Texas Railroad Commission data — 150 ft around active wellheads, 50 ft around pipelines — and 100 ft parcel-boundary / 150 ft right-of-way setbacks.
Two more lenses
The same parcels can be re-scored for flexible / large load (interconnection headroom, proximity to generation, demand-response value) and for whole-site dual use (agrivoltaics — grazing compatibility, marginal-soil preference, pollinator habitat, soil-and-water stewardship). The base model and flex-load lens reward open, buildable, non-prime land; the agrivoltaic lens rewards working ag land. Same ground, three value systems.
Why this geography
San Antonio's data-center load is on track toward 3,300+ MW by 2033, with CPS Energy planning upwards of $1.3B in transmission to keep up. An hour north, Rockdale (Riot Platforms) turned a bitcoin mine into an AI data center on a ~700 MW on-site substation that curtails 95%+ of its load near-instantly when the grid needs it — and signed a ~$311M, 10-year AMD lease in January 2026. Interconnection-aware land screening is the live problem in this corridor.
Data sources & restricted-data discipline
All layers are public and cited with retrieval dates in data/SOURCES.md (TxGIO parcels; HIFLD
transmission & substations; FEMA NFHL; USGS 3DEP/NLCD; USDA-NRCS soils; USFWS NWI; USGS PAD-US; Texas RRC
wells/pipelines; ERCOT/EIA generation context; USDA NAIP imagery). No MLS/IDX data is used. The
license-restricted ERCOT network model is never displayed raw — any capacity signal is abstracted to a 0–100
"Grid Connectivity Index"; the public map overlay uses HIFLD.
| Layer | Source | In this build |
|---|---|---|
| Parcels | TxGIO StratMap (county appraisal districts) | live |
| Substations · transmission | HIFLD · DOE-NETL Energy Atlas | live |
| Terrain (slope) | USGS 3DEP | live |
| Land cover | USGS / MRLC NLCD 2021 | live |
| Soils (capability class) | USDA-NRCS SSURGO · Soil Data Access | live |
| Floodplain | FEMA NFHL (SFHA zones) | live |
| Roads | U.S. Census TIGER | live |
| Generation | EIA power plants | live |
| Aerial basemap | USDA NAIP / Esri World Imagery | live |