Research note
Announced, contracted, energised, consumed
Four different numbers, one word, and most of the confusion in datacentre reporting.
A datacentre described as '500 megawatts' might mean any of four things, and the difference between the largest and smallest reading is typically a factor of five or more.
- Announced or requested: a queue position or a press release. Carries no commitment.
- Contracted: a signed delivery agreement with milestones and financial obligation.
- Energised: electrical supply physically delivered and available.
- Consumed: power actually drawn, which for a datacentre is well below energised capacity almost always.
Across the four markets in our interconnection dataset, requested capacity totals roughly seven times energised capacity, and roughly eleven times peak consumed. When a figure crosses from a filing into a news report, the qualifier is usually the first thing lost.
Our house convention is to state which of the four we mean every time we give a capacity figure, including in charts and captions. It makes for slightly heavier prose. It prevents a category of error that we think accounts for a large share of the wrong numbers in circulation.