LocusGrid
The FICO score for data centre land
Australia

Know which sites survive
before you commit the capital.

LocusGrid scores whether a data centre site will get through community and regulatory scrutiny. One number, 0 to 100, built entirely from the Australian public record, with every claim sourced, dated and rated for confidence.

View sample reports See what a pilot includes

Two real, fully sourced NSW sites. No login required during preview.

0–19 Critical
20–39 High-risk
40–59 Contested
60–79 Guarded
80–100 Clear

High is good. Like a credit score, a high LVI means the site is clear to proceed.

The problem

Social risk is the constraint nobody quantifies.

Grid and water get modelled to three decimal places. Whether the community and the regulator will let you build gets a gut feel, a consultant, and six months of finding out the hard way.

#2

Global site-selection criterion

Community support now ranks second among global data centre site-selection factors, behind only power.

JLL, 2026
Largely
exhausted

Western Sydney transmission

Transgrid states capacity to connect in Western Sydney "is largely exhausted" and that new data centres "will not be able to connect in this area without major network augmentation."

Transgrid, June 2026
Formal

Social licence is now regulatory

Social licence is a formal criterion in the federal approvals pathway, and the NSW Legislative Council is running a dedicated inquiry into data centres.

NSW Parliament, self-referred Jan 2026
And the objection is getting better organised

Australian opposition is professionalising

It is no longer scattered residents at a council meeting. In Victoria it is a structured, publicly editable wiki with a database entry for each data centre site, maintained by volunteers and campaign groups and edited continuously through August 2026.

Per-site databaseDeveloper, address, coordinates to the arcsecond, cost, area, power draw, diesel backup and local council, held as structured fields rather than prose.
Planning-file precisionCosts recorded to the exact dollar. One site appears at $119,318,934, another at $973,974,248. That is council register precision, not press clipping.
Permit pathway trackedEach site records whether approval used a standard council application or Victoria's Development Facilitation Program fast-track. That is the evidence base for challenging the pathway itself.
Mobilisation readyMinisterial and council email templates, a public events calendar, shared FOI results, and campaign group spaces available on request.
Why this matters more than a petition. Australian opposition is often described as procedurally weak, and in one sense that is fair: state significant pathways and ministerial call-in routinely proceed over council objection. It is no longer informationally weak. A group that has your permit reference, your diesel volumes and your approval pathway in a structured database can escalate from a local complaint to a pathway challenge, a ministerial question or a condition on your permit. That is a portfolio-level risk, and it is the kind the LVI is built to price.

We index campaigns, never people. No individual organiser is profiled, named or tracked, in this product or in any report we issue.
What it is

The LocusGrid Viability Index

Four pillars, 25 points each, twelve named sub-indicators. Every score traces to a public record you can open yourself. The published scorecards below were scored under rubric v0.3, versioned so two scores are only ever compared under the same method.

Grid Headroom

25 points
  • Available capacity in zone
  • Connection queue and timeline
  • Network upgrade dependency

Water Headroom

25 points
  • Basin and catchment stress
  • Cooling water demand vs supply
  • Drought and restriction exposure

Community Licence

25 points
  • Formal objection volume
  • Organised opposition presence
  • Media and public sentiment

Regulatory Clearance

25 points
  • Zoning and land-use fit
  • Approval pathway and precedent
  • Environmental and heritage constraints

Sub-indicators marked in terracotta are critical: each one can end a project on its own, and is treated accordingly. See the Critical Sub-Indicator Rule below.

How it works

Four rules that make the number mean something

Anyone can add four numbers. The defensibility is in what happens at the edges, and in refusing to let a good average hide a fatal flaw.

1. The Critical Constraint Cap

If any pillar lands in its bottom band, the whole index is capped at 39 regardless of the raw sum. Two pillars, and it caps at 19. Real approvals do not average out: one dead grid zone or one over-allocated basin ends a project by itself, and the score has to behave the same way.

2. The Critical Sub-Indicator Rule

Three sub-indicators can each kill a project alone: available grid capacity, basin stress, and zoning permissibility. A severe score on any of them holds its whole pillar in the bottom band, even if the pillar's arithmetic would otherwise lift it clear. This rule exists because on our first real site, correcting one indicator would have moved the score two bands upward while the decisive fact, a transmission zone with no spare capacity, had not changed at all.

3. The Latent Opposition Flag

Absence of objection is not evidence of support. On an early-stage site nobody has objected yet because nobody has been asked. Where a site scores high on community licence purely because the record is empty, the report says so in plain terms rather than presenting silence as a clean bill of health. Quiet is not consent.

4. The Source Lineage Record

Every one of the twelve sub-indicators carries three things: a confidence rating, the date the underlying evidence was published, and whether the claim is primary, secondary or our own inference. A score without lineage is an opinion. This also makes a report visibly perishable, which matters: planning status, grid commitments and dam levels all move.

What you get

A pilot, on your sites

Our sample reports prove the method. A pilot proves it on land you are actually considering.

Three sites, scored, in two weeks

You nominate the parcels. We score them against the published rubric and hand back a report per site.

  • Final LVI and band, with the raw sum shown alongside so you can see whether a cap fired and which pillar caused it
  • Four pillar scores and all twelve sub-indicators, each with its evidence written out
  • Confidence, date and lineage on every single claim, so you know which parts are solid and which are thin
  • Explicit data gaps, including what we could not confirm and what it would take to close it
  • An interactive what-if, so you can test how the score moves if a connection offer lands or an objection arrives
Pricing
On request

Pilots are priced per engagement depending on site count and complexity. Ask and you will get a number the same day, not a proposal process.

How it is delivered
Expert-curated

Reports are assembled by hand today, not generated by a pipeline. That is deliberate at this stage: it keeps the methodology honest and lets us calibrate against real approval outcomes before automating anything.

Request a pilot
Sample reports

Two real NSW sites, opposite answers

Both scored under the same rubric, from the same categories of public source. They land 36 points and two bands apart, which is the whole point: an index that only ever flagged risk would not be telling you anything. Below them sits the grid deep-dive, which shows how far down a single pillar goes when a customer needs the detail.

View the sample reports

Full interactive scorecards for the AirTrunk Mamre Road campus and the Kurri Kurri data centre, including every source, confidence rating and the what-if sandbox.

No login required during preview
Module 1 · goes deeper on Pillar 1

Mamre Road: grid readiness deep-dive

Thermal and N-1 firm capacity · connection queue · planned augmentations · cost-allocation exposure
791 MVA
The gap by 2032/33
The binding constraint, named and quantified. Sydney West BSP has been in N-1 firm capacity deficit since 2025/26. Transgrid's own RIT-T puts the gap at 48 MVA rising to 791 MVA by 2032/33, against a committed remedy of one 375 MVA transformer. The Kemps Creek BSP that gets cited as the fix was scoped for Macarthur and distribution growth, not a gigawatt at Sydney West. Four fields are marked "requires network study" rather than guessed.
Open the deep-dive →

NSW pipeline, profiles in preparation

Live State Significant Development applications · verified 6 Aug 2026
Julius Avenue Data Centre
North Ryde, City of Ryde
170 MW · SSD-80018208
187 submissions
In preparation
NEXTDC S5 and Innovation Hub
Macquarie Park, City of Ryde
SSD-63168959
9 submissions
In preparation
Apollo Place Data Centre
Lane Cove West, Lane Cove
45 MW · SSD-67407231
Approved Oct 2025
In preparation
Muswellbrook battery and data centre
Upper Hunter
Scoping lodged
Pre-exhibition
In preparation
Mayfield Energy Precinct
Port of Newcastle
~1,000 MW
Early development
In preparation
Every site listed is a real, publicly lodged application you can look up yourself on the NSW Planning Portal. Submission counts are tallied directly from the portal register, never from press reporting. Want one of these prioritised, or a site of your own scored first? Tell us which.

What LocusGrid is not, yet

  • The rubric is a draft. v0.2, pending calibration against real Australian approval outcomes. Weights are equal placeholders, not empirical findings.
  • Public record only. Community licence is measured from planning portals, council registers and media. We do not survey residents, and we say so rather than implying we have a signal we do not have.
  • Reports are assembled by hand. There is no automated pipeline behind this yet. Every number you see was checked by a person.
  • A score is perishable. Our own first report needed twelve corrections at its six-week verification pass, four of them material. That is why every claim now carries a date.

Which of your shortlisted sites is the one that fails?

Send us three parcels. In two weeks you will know which one carries the risk your grid model cannot see, and exactly why.

Request a pilot

Tell us which sites keep you up at night

Only your name and email are required. Everything else helps us come back with a useful answer instead of a discovery call.

We reply within one business day. No newsletter, no sequence, no reselling your details.