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Three questions, three places

Gridwyn answers the three questions a data centre developer, a planner or a lender keeps asking. The menu follows them.

"What changed this week that I must know?"

This week is your Monday digest on a page: what to act on, what to know, the week in a paragraph, the dates coming up. Feed is every published change, newest first. Under Changes: Positions, where each topic stands today in a few cited sentences; Coming up, every dated deadline in the next 90 days; Digests, the archive; Trends, which way the rules are moving.

"Where in England is it easier or harder to build?"

Under Places: Authorities, every planning authority with its verdict, scores and record; Scores, the league table; Map; Compare, up to five side by side; NSIP cases, the national register with its statutory clocks; Applications, data centre planning applications from the councils' own registers.

"What about this site?"

Site check takes a postcode, a grid reference or coordinates and answers with the authority, the parish, the nearest substations in the operator's own words, flood zone, green belt and every designation at the point; it prints as a one-page report. Sites side by side does the same for up to twelve places on one printable page.

How to read an item

Every item is one of two kinds. A fact was read straight from a register, such as a case moving to examination or an instrument being made: it comes from the difference between two readings and carries no quotes. An extracted item was read from a document by a model, and it is published only when every quote it rests on is found word for word in the stored document and a written policy admits it. The quotes are checked again every night. Anything found wrong is withdrawn with the reason on record, never deleted.

Importance has three levels. critical changes whether or how a data centre can be consented or connected: a direction, a new consenting route, a connections decision, a moratorium. material changes cost, time or process. informational is the record. The digest turns these into Act (a date inside 30 days, or a decision on a live case), Know and the feed.

How a score is made

Each authority is scored on nine dimensions: permitting timeline, grid connection access, zoning and policy clarity, water constraints, environmental review burden, tax and incentives, community consultation burden, political risk and regulatory change velocity. Each is a fixed rule over a public record, written out in full under "how this is scored", and every number opens to the record behind it. The composite is the plain average of the dimensions measured for that authority; a dimension with no record does not count, and nothing is ever guessed. A model never scores anything.

The method is versioned. A change is adopted only after it has been compared with the method before it on the same day's data, and the comparison is written down. An authority the method sets apart, such as one that is almost wholly national park, is shown as "not ranked" with the reason.

What the electricity figures mean

The substations and what is left at them are the six distribution network operators' own published figures, read from their portals, each on the basis that operator states: some publish what is left after demand already contracted, some publish a headroom from which contracted demand is subtracted, one publishes only a forecast while its live figures are off its portal. So a figure on one network is not compared with a figure on another. Limits on the transmission system, which decide connections of tens of megawatts and more, are in the figures only where the operator says so. The nearest substation is not necessarily the one a site would be connected to; that is the operator's decision.

Where a supply point carries a line from the national register, it counts the generation and storage contracted there and not yet built. It is not demand; it says how contested the point is.

Your watch-list and your email

The Watch-list is what your organisation follows: topics bring national changes, authorities bring local ones, cases bring register moves; nothing followed means everything. It shapes the feed, the Monday digest and the same-day notices, which go out only for items to act on that touch what you follow. The Monday digest arrives by email at 06:00; each person can switch their copy off on the Account page and read every issue on the Digests page instead.

What it is not

It is information, not legal advice, and not a connection offer. It covers England. It does not know about fibre, land prices or customers. Every figure is from a public record and says which one, and every rule is written down; where a record does not exist, the page says so rather than guessing.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and the network operators' open data under their own licences. Questions: hello@gridwyn.co.uk.