The RFS date is the number that matters. Capacity is presold, financing is drawn against it, and when it slips, liquidated damages, lost revenue, and defaulted lease covenants arrive at once.

Most RFS delays are not construction failures. They start upstream: entitlement fights, interconnection queues, coverage that doesn’t respond to the actual loss, and contract clauses drafted for a conventional build.

Six practitioners discuss where RFS exposure begins, who carries it, and how to allocate it before it becomes a dispute.

Topics:

// Key Risks in Data Center Design, Construction, and Turnover That Impact Ready-for-Service (RFS) Dates
Garrett Fultz, Gregory Parker / FTI Consulting

Where schedule exposure actually originates across the delivery cycle, and why the point of failure is rarely the point where the delay becomes visible. Design and procurement decisions, construction sequencing, and the turnover and commissioning gauntlet that stands between a finished building and a revenue-producing asset.

// Data Centers Land Use and Regulatory Considerations

Art Clarke / JS Held

Data centers have recently come under a large amount of scrutiny by legislators, the public, and governmental agencies that regulate land use, energy, and environmental impacts.  There are major concerns about Federal, state and local approvals for constructing and operating the centers as well as public image and stigma concerns.  The impacts on energy supply and energy markets are looming large as utility rate payers are bearing the brunt of increased energy demand associated with data centers.  In addition to constructing the centers on Greenfields, land development alternatives include brownfields and gray fields (out of date office buildings, shopping malls, industrial parks) each of which brings its own set of issues. New technologies regarding cooling and heating may impact the scale, size and location of data centers that may ease some of the pressures they currently put on the environment.

// De-Risking the Build: Contracts, Capital, and Coverage Across the Data Center Lifecycle

James C. Bosen / Marsh

// Allocating Risk in the Construction Contract

Jason E. Kosek, Keith A. Lazere / Anderson Kill P.C.

The clauses that decide who absorbs an RFS delay. Force majeure and its treatment of government action and permitting delay. Delay damages and liquidated damages provisions. Waiver of consequential damages. How the three interact when the cause of the delay is regulatory rather than construction, and whether the contract as drafted allocates the risk the parties actually face.