Every Boom Draws Speculators

Real Estate Insights. Success Mindset. One Step at a Time.

Issue #66 | August 30, 2026

🧠 Market Insights

Every Boom Draws Speculators

Every boom draws them. The gold rush had claim jumpers. The oil patch had wildcatters. Lease broad. Lease cheap. Hold the paper. Wait for one to hit. They never needed most of the ground they tied up. They needed the option on all of it.

Data centers are no different. The wildcatters have been working this boom for years. What changed is that we can finally see how much of the queue belongs to them.

Wood Mackenzie projects utilities will commit to about 298 gigawatts of the 1,066 gigawatts requested for data center projects. Bloomberg reported it on August 12. That is 28 percent. The rest is paper.

The mechanism was simple. A developer filed interconnection requests with several utilities, at several sites, for one project. Filing cost almost nothing. No financing. No permits. No signed customer. He held every position until one penciled out. Then he walked from the rest. Often, he never withdrew them.

Power Magazine named the filers. Developers. Private equity funds. Land brokers. Shell companies. Many held no site control and no end user.

That is how the queue got clogged. It is not how it works now.

Texas changed the rules with Senate Bill 6. A load of 75 megawatts or more has to show site control, post financial security, disclose duplicate requests elsewhere in the state, and pay a study fee starting at $100,000. The commission rule implementing it sets security at $50,000 for every megawatt requested. A one-gigawatt project posts $50 million.

Virginia went further. Dominion's large load tariff requires $1.5 million in collateral per megawatt of contracted capacity from customers who cannot meet its credit and liquidity tests. Prove the balance sheet or post the cash. On a 100-megawatt request, that is $150 million.

The backlog was built before any of that. ERCOT is still holding about 474 gigawatts of requests, more than five times the state record peak. Data centers are about 90 percent of it. On August 3, Governor Abbott ordered an audit of every data center project in the queue before any new one moves. Projects that fail should be denied grid access. ERCOT paused Batch Zero and is auditing up to 300 projects, aiming to finish by December.

Utilities are already cutting. Exelon dropped its pipeline by nearly 40 percent in July, to about 11 gigawatts. AEP Ohio cut its from more than 30 gigawatts to 13.

What It Looks Like at Your Door

I have watched this hit my own clients.

A Buyer offers a large number. A long option period. Very little money down. Small monthly payments to hold the land off the market while they shop it. Option agreements drafted by the buyer with terms no landowner should sign.

He does not want your land yet. He wants time. Texas stopped giving time away for free. A landowner can do the same.

🐾 Dirt Dawg Take: There are two markets now. Sites with contracted power, priced off megawatts, command a premium, and they get it. Everything else is waiting in the queue with everybody else. That is a price adjustment waiting to happen.

✨ The Alpha Effect

Show Me The Money

Being wanted feels good. That is the trouble.

A stranger calls. He says your dirt is what a major end user needs. He hints at a number bigger than anything you have been offered. He mentions the capital behind him and does not name it. For a minute, the thirty years you held that ground feel like they paid off.

He is not underwriting your land. He is underwriting how bad you want to believe him.

His model runs on the fear that this is the one shot. That the wave passes and never comes back. That fear signs a five-year option for pocket change.

The fix is not suspicion. Suspicion wears you down and costs you real deals. The fix is not needing this one. An owner who does not need the deal can ask the hard question and sit through the quiet.

The quiet tells you what you have. Real money answers. It has answered before.

Money at risk is the only proof. The rest is talk.

🚀 One Step at a Time

Action Steps This Week

1. Learn How Power Actually Gets Requested

Call the utility that serves your parcel. Do not ask for a number. Ask how the process works. What starts the clock. What the first screening costs and how long it runs. What a customer has to show before the request is taken seriously. How fast you learn whether there is capacity for you. You may never file one yourself. But once you know the steps, you can ask the man holding your option which step he is on and whether he has paid for it.

2. Fix the Terms Before the Price

An option lands on your desk. Do not open with the number. Open with the structure. Consideration big enough that walking away hurts. Non-refundable. Payments that climb at milestones and extensions. Diligence measured in months. A cheap option on a long fuse costs you the market.

3. Ask Two Questions and Wait

Who is the end user? What are you putting at risk that you cannot get back? Ask both. Then stop talking. Some answer. Some go quiet, and that is worth more than the option payment.

Small steps compound. When the paper clears the queue, the real sites move up.

Here's to building your success, one step at a time...

from the dirt up.

Kris "Dirt Dawg" McGee 🐾

The Dirt Dawg Den