Maricopa AZ / approved

Why it matters

Three things to add to the wiki. (1) This is the first observable case where a hyperscale data-center site approval was conditioned on a specific, enumerable list of requirements set by a military base commander rather than just the routine 'no objection' or 'comment-only' military review most counties accept. The 9-condition framework is now a precedent every county with a base-adjacent data-center proposal will reference — Camden County GA's vote earlier this week was indirectly shaped by a similar plea from the commander of Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay. Cliff's regulatory-knowledge graph needs a new edge: 'site within X miles of a military installation' triggers a base-commander-letter dependency that can either grease (Maricopa) or kill (Camden) approval. The radius / installation type / mission profile matrix is a discrete dataset to assemble. (2) Site-selection signal: Maricopa just demonstrated that a 700 MW on-site gas plant on a 160-acre footprint clears a military-compatibility bar. That's 4.4 MW per acre of dispatchable behind-the-meter power, which is roughly 2x the typical hyperscale grid-connected MW-per-acre benchmark and confirms (alongside Stratos UT yesterday and Sopaipilla El Paso) that the 'BTM gas at hyperscaler scale, fully co-located, no public-grid interconnect' template is now a *replicable* approval pattern in three different states (UT, NM, AZ) inside 30 days. The implication for the firm-equivalent-mw-underwrite.md base case is that 'self-generation viability' should now be modeled as a near-certainty in any state with the right gas-pipeline access and at-most-moderate local opposition, not as an experimental edge case. (3) The 4-1 vote split with 225+ opposition letters and Supervisor Gallardo's dissent show the local-opposition signal can lose decisively when the military-compatibility argument lines up — useful counter-data for the moratorium-cluster pattern (where local opposition has been winning). The variable that flipped the vote was 'Luke AFB has signed off,' not the absolute volume of resident opposition. That gives Cliff customers a concrete tactic for hostile-county sites: if there's a credible military or federal-mission tenant within range, get the base commander's letter early and let it carry the political weight.