v0.1 · draft

Methodology

Compute Sentinel measures whether compute can actually be delivered. It does not measure who issued the most impressive press release.

What is measured

Every site is an Intelligence Object: identity, compute, energy, network, water/thermal, development, financial, risk, evidence. Every material claim has a source, date, evidence type and confidence band. Infrastructure is classified as existing, committed, proposed or speculative.

Deliverable MW

Deliverable MW is a range, not a score.
today / +3y / +5y / +10y
low–high MW + confidence + infrastructure class
announced MW is stored separately and never copied into deliverable
retired generation nameplate ≠ connectable load
adjacent kV line ≠ spare MVA
REZ potential ≠ 2028 campus feeder
storage MW ≠ IT MW

Time to power

Earliest plausible energisation assumes the optimistic path (retained assets usable, approvals on the published timetable). Likely energisation includes studies, competing load, fibre and the absence of a proponent. The difference is the product.

Confidence

Verified, high, moderate, preliminary, unverified, conflicting. Confidence is shown separately from MW. Absence of data is labelled Not verified — never rendered as zero in a way that looks like a measured empty socket, except where we explicitly know there is no compute connection (today = 0 with a note).

Mousterian ranking

The profile is editable. Criteria fail, fit, or sit in conditional/unknown. We never emit a single 0–100 site score.

Thermal

Northern Australia is not given a negative score for heat. Heat is a cooling-energy and water-architecture consequence. v0.1 states that consequence in prose; it does not fake a PUE decimal.

Site zoom — Sentinel-2 and meteo

mosaic = withheld — EOX Sentinel-2 cloudless 2024 is CC BY-NC-SA
latest scene = Earth Search STAC sentinel-2-l2a, cloud < 40 %, newest first, no service guarantee
meteo = withheld — Open-Meteo free API is non-commercial
seeded climate prose on the object is not a design-day and is not a PUE

The EOX year-composite is not loaded. A dated Earth Search granule, when the API answers, is a different product and is labelled as such. Live weather is off. Seeded climate prose remains on the intelligence object.

Players

Operator class is major (established colo / hyperscale landlord) or junior (AI factory, floating, specialist). Junior is not a size insult — Firmus has gigawatt announcements. Built, contracted and announced MW are stored separately. Pipeline totals are never copied into built.

Never-claim

We never present announced megawatts as deliverable megawatts, treat an adjacent transmission line as commercially connectable capacity, describe software-generated output as a grid offer, a planning consent, or a bankable energy assessment, or collapse a site into a single opaque score.