Data Center Reference Model · Movement 6 · Your Place

Would the town miss it?

It is the only question that matters. If this facility left in twenty years, would the town be relieved — or bereft? Build the plan that earns the second answer. Pick a real place, compose a stewardship portfolio from its own menu, and watch the Five Capitals balance move.

Open the what-if sandbox →See the living pattern in Explore ↗

The plan comes first

The modeler sits behind the plan

Movement 6 starts with the plan of record. The sandbox is useful because it cannot silently rewrite that plan: it only explores, then an explicit promotion can turn a scenario into the next committed version.

Plan of record

The committed plan is the front door: the place, portfolio, covenant terms, and gates that decision-makers can review together.

What-if sandbox

The modeler sits behind the plan. You can try scenarios freely; those edits never touch the plan of record by themselves.

Explicit promotion

A scenario becomes the plan only when a person promotes it. That action is explicit and logged.

The reader is never handed a loose slider and asked to invent the project. The place produces a plan; the sandbox tests alternatives; promotion is deliberate and recorded.

The what-if sandbox

Five steps from a place to a plan

The sandbox composes a portfolio from the live catalog and runs it through the Balance Modeler engine — every figure it shows is computed, never authored.

Pick a place

Search a real place or drop a pin — the map suggests a climate band and you confirm every dimension. Your place answers its own questions.

Answer seven questions

A short interview sets facility scale, cooling approach, land situation, who you are, and what the place loves about itself.

Compose a portfolio

The geo-filtered menu opens. Add and scale interventions; watch synergies light up as compounding portfolios form.

Watch the balance

The Five Capitals beam and radar move in real time. Every number comes from the engine — none are hand-written.

Learn your stage & export

See your pathway stage, the exact gates you have met and missed, and export a Stewardship Profile you can carry into FEED.

A cold-climate place opens a cold menu — waste-heat district heating, greenhouses, snow-melt loops. A hot arid place opens an arid menu — zero-water cooling, aquifer recharge, agrivoltaics — and the heat-district options fall away. Same model, different place, different math.

Data Center Reference Model · Tab 5 · Place Planner

Would the Town Miss It?

Pick the place. Compose the portfolio. Watch the scales — then find your next gate on the Regenerative Pathway. All figures are Illustrative Examples.

Stage 1 · Extractive

Take and apologize. Standard build plus a community fund.

Balance ratio 1.6 (Illustrative)

Stewardship investment$4.5M – $21M

Illustrative capital cost of this portfolio — the project cost increase every party is signing up for, alongside the balance it buys.

On-site solar + storageHigh$12M
Story of Place process (pre-FEED)Medium$3.6M
Registered apprenticeshipsMedium$3.3M
Standing advisory board w/ decision rightsLow$450K

Extraction footprintStewardship offset

Per-capital coverage

Natural138%

Social225%

Human228%

Built132%

Financial92%

The Regenerative Pathway

1Extractive
2Mitigated
3Balanced
4Contributing
5Regenerative Anchor

Next gate → Mitigated

Offset ratio ≥ 0.25 (met)
A primary water-cooling item active (zero-water | closed-loop liquid) (not yet met)
An embodied-carbon / hardware-reuse disclosure item active (EPD | hardware reuse) (met)

Recommended next moves

Your next step

Bring this Stewardship Profile to your FEED stage — the place writes the spec before FID locks it.

Get a data-center report for this place

Draft an honest, sourced report for A sample place (Temperate · moderate stress · metro) at 150 MW — the imbalance context, place-based opportunities, the stewardship pathway, and Five Capitals framing. Every figure is cited or marked Illustrative Example. This also registers the planned place as a project.

How an engagement works

Story of Place discovery2–4 months (Illustrative) · Gate: The community recognizes its own story in the brief and agrees it is ready to test readiness.
Readiness Gates1–3 months (Illustrative) · Gate: All three readiness gates pass in public session — or the engagement pauses honestly at the one that failed.
Design — the place writes the spec3–6 months (Illustrative) · Gate: FID is taken on the place-authored spec — the portfolio is in the base design, not an appendix.
Covenant — commitments with teeth1–2 months (Illustrative) · Gate: Covenants are executed and published in the registry before ground breaks.
Verify & StewardAnnual cycle, life of facility (Illustrative) · Gate: Each year's whole-place accounting is published and independently verified — the gate never closes; that is stewardship.

Illustrative Example — the deterministic engine owns every number; nothing here is a performance claim. Precedent flags: OPERATING = verified operating project · PILOT = documented pilot · PROPOSAL = concept with adjacent precedent only.

The community benefit is a structural gate

A benefit agreement is architecture, not public relations

What separates a durable plan from a press release is enforcement, proportion, governance, and consent. These are the four things the Planner asks you to make real.

Clawback-secured commitments

A community benefit is only as real as its enforcement. Lancaster County secured its agreement with a ~$10M letter of credit — while noting flexible-language gaps in the qualitative promises. A letter of credit secures payment; it does not secure a vague sentence.

Scale to the host, not the headline

Byron, NY — a town of fewer than 3,000 — reportedly negotiated roughly $25M over 20 years. The test is not the absolute dollar figure; it is whether the benefit is proportionate to what the place carries.

Govern the fund, publish the terms

Benefit funds work when a standing community body holds decision rights and the terms are public. The no-NDA principle is load-bearing: secrecy is where trust goes to die, and where counter-cases like the xAI Memphis dispute begin.

FPIC where Indigenous land or water is touched

Free, prior, and informed consent is not an add-on. Where a project touches Indigenous land or water, FPIC is the gate — not a courtesy consultation after the design is fixed.

What you come away with

Three readers, one covenant

One journey. One covenant. Three reasons to walk it.

Mayor / community

The one project I can champion — and be proud of in twenty years.

Builder

Permission stops being my critical path. Faster to FID, not slower.

AI operator

Scale and speed, with the community as co-owner and a story that survives scrutiny.

A data center the town would miss if it were gone. That's the whole idea.

Life before Profits.

Talk to RDC about your place →