How we score every project.

The BuildReadiness score

BuildReadiness is a 0–100 composite reflecting how close a Western-Canada DC project is to commissioning. It rewards projects with locked-in power, named land, disclosed proponents, filed permits, real capex, and a credible timeline — and penalizes projects where any of those signals is missing or undisclosed.

The 7 components

The score combines seven weighted components. Each measures a different piece of "is this project actually going to break ground."

• Power Secured — strength of the power-supply commitment (AESO interconnect filing, SaskPower contract, BC Hydro CFD allocation, behind-the-meter gas-gen plan). The heaviest component, because no power = no DC.
• Land Control — how far the proponent has gone toward locking the physical site (title transfer, named-municipality identification, multi-site option).
• Zoning — whether the site is appropriately zoned (industrial / utility pad) or whether rezoning still needs to clear council.
• Permitting — presence of regulatory filings (AUC applications, municipal development permits, environmental approvals).
• Capital Commitment — disclosed capex tier in the public registry. Real money committed beats announced intentions.
• Proponent Track Record — operator tiering based on prior DC deployments, infrastructure history, and disclosed counterparties.
• Timeline Credibility — proximity of the in-service date and how closely it aligns with regulatory + interconnect filings.

Each component is scored 0–100 from automatic signals against rubrics tuned for the Western-Canada market. Component scores, weights, and the cited evidence behind each score are rendered in the operator console. Two reference projects — Greenlight Electricity Centre and Crusoe AI Data Centres Alberta — are also visible publicly as worked examples.

Two adjustments to the raw weighted score

The weighted-component sum is then adjusted by two policies that exist to keep us honest:

• Disclosed-proponent multiplier. If the proponent is listed as Undisclosed, the raw score is materially down-weighted. Vendors can't sell to a phantom buyer; investors can't underwrite a phantom counterparty. We refuse to over-rank projects we can't name.
• Confidence cap. The final score is capped by data confidence (high / medium / low) so a thin-evidence project can't post a misleadingly-high composite. A 95-point raw score with low confidence reads "65 · low confidence." The cap forces honesty about how much we actually know.

Reading a project page

Each project page shows the composite BuildReadiness score plus links to every piece of underlying evidence (AESO interconnect rows, AUC filings, news signals, municipal permits) — those are public sources you can verify directly. The per-component score breakdown, math chain, operator-practice library, and per-unit gen-set inference are in the paid operator console.

Want to see a full breakdown? Greenlight Electricity Centre and Crusoe AI Data Centres Alberta are public sample profiles with the entire 7-component breakdown, math chain, and gen-set inference visible. Use them to spot-check our methodology against AESO + AUC + the proponent's public materials.

Data sources

Every score is grounded in primary sources. Live sources are scraped on every refresh. Curated sources are hand-maintained until the underlying registry catches up; remove individual entries when they're picked up automatically.

Refresh cadence

The full pipeline runs daily at 06:00 Mountain Time:

1. Re-scrape AB MPI, BC MPI, AESO ArcGIS, AUC, AB+BC+SK government news
2. Reconcile against curated SEED projects + power allocations
3. Re-link power allocations and filings to projects (token overlap + ProjNo aliases)
4. Recompute BuildReadiness scores for every DC project
5. Regenerate scores.json, every project deep-dive page, and the OG card
6. Deploy to blackstart.c3ksolutions.com via Cloudflare Pages

Raw snapshots of every source are archived locally per run, so any value on any project page can be replayed back to the source feed and the date it was first observed.

What we don't do

• We don't fabricate data. If a field is empty in the registry, the project page shows —.
• We don't infer power allocations from rumour. Bell Sherwood gets credit for SaskPower's contracted 300 MW because the SK government and Bell jointly announced it; speculation isn't scored.
• We don't scrape paywalled or auth-required sources. All data is from publicly accessible primary feeds.
• We don't resell vendor contact data. Stakeholder enrichment is for subscriber use only, sourced from public filings.

How vendors use BuildReadiness

A score isn't a forecast — it's a procurement signal.

Each of the seven components maps to a vendor decision. Power Secured tells switchgear vendors when interconnection equipment specs lock — once an AESO allocation moves from Review to Active, the project's electrical scope of work gets defined within months. Permitting tells transformer vendors when site-acceptance schedules become real — AUC filing dates align with the procurement-locking window. Land Control + Zoning tell gen-set packagers and mechanical contractors when site mobilization shifts from quarters out to weeks out.

What "high confidence" means for your sales pipeline.

When BuildReadiness marks a project High confidence, every component score traces to a primary public source we can show you: the AESO queue row, the AUC case file, the municipal permit record, the proponent's regulatory filing. You can act on that number — not because we say so, but because the evidence is sitting one click away. Vendors who win the pre-construction window typically lock the entire 2027-2028 buildout cycle.

The 12-18 month procurement window.

A project at Pre-construction stage today means critical-path equipment specs lock in 12-18 months. BLACKSTART surfaces these projects when the spec is still soft and your team can still influence it — not when the purchase order is being awarded to a competitor. Built-in filters let you scope to project class (hyperscale AI, colocation, telecom, mining, stranded-gas compute), to MW threshold, to province, to in-service date. The leaderboard sorts by BuildReadiness — the highest scores are the projects most worth your attention this quarter.

What we DON'T claim

BLACKSTART scores projects on public-record signals. We don't have insider information about which vendors win which contracts. We don't predict timelines beyond what proponents have publicly committed to. We don't track every project — only those large enough to surface in regulatory or planning data. If a 2 MW colo in Cranbrook is being built quietly with no AESO filing and no MPI entry, we won't see it until it shows up in news or permits.

Our job is to make the public data-center pipeline legible and ranked — not to invent intelligence that isn't there. Every fact behind every score links to its primary source. If a number on BLACKSTART surprises you, the source is one click away and the citation chain is on the page.