The Site Selectors Guild's March 2026 Pulse Check found 61% of site selectors naming utility and infrastructure capacity as the top elimination factor. Top reason a site gets cut before anyone visits it.
Elimination happens on paper. A site selector building a short list from 300 candidates to 8 is not calling your office to ask follow-up questions. They are scanning the fields you submitted and cutting every row with a blank cell or an undated claim. You know your sites. But what you know and what you can attach to an RFI response are rarely the same thing.
Most of the time, the gap is authorization, not ignorance. You can describe the substation capacity in a meeting. But the utility has not produced a letter with a number, a date, and a validity period. You can talk about wastewater headroom. But the POTW has not issued a determination you can attach to a response packet. The answer exists somewhere in the utility's system. It has not been reduced to a document you can submit.
Two questions worth answering before Monday. For each site in your active inventory: what is the first RFI field you cannot fill with a dated, sourced document? And who controls that answer, not in your office, but at the utility, public works, the community college, the redevelopment authority? They may not know you need it yet.
Who controls the proof
Utility → Available capacity (MW/kW), voltage and phase, redundancy, upgrade timeline, cost responsibility, study deposits. A verbal confirmation is not a service letter.
POTW / wastewater authority → Permitted hydraulic capacity, remaining headroom, pollutant-loading limits, pretreatment requirements, expansion timeline.
Site owner or redevelopment authority → Contiguous usable acreage, site control, environmental status (Phase I date matters), geotech, floodplain/wetland, documented utility proximity.
Community college or training provider → Annual program completions by occupation, registered apprenticeship enrollment, customized-training commitment capacity.
Planning / zoning / fire marshal → By-right vs. conditional-use path, actual recent approval timelines, not estimated ones.
Railroad → Service status, switching frequency, car-spot capacity. A spur on a map is not a service commitment.
The test: Can the answer be attached to an RFI response today, or does it require a phone call first? If it requires a call, the proof does not yet exist.