The bottleneck is not generation
It is easy to confuse. When people say "there is not enough power", it sounds like there are not enough power plants. In practice the problem is transmission and distribution: getting energy to the point where you need it, at the capacity you need, requires lines and substations, and those take years to build.
Your demand, on the other hand, arrived with a contract date. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not solved by negotiating the tariff: it is solved by deciding what to do in the meantime.
That is why the first question in a data center project is not how much a kilowatt-hour costs. It is how much capacity is available at that point of connection and by when — because whether the project exists at that site depends on the answer.
What can be done without waiting for anyone
Defer the load increase with storage. If the service upgrade has a date your service plan cannot tolerate, a well-sized battery bank can carry the increase in peak demand without upgrading the service, and buy the time the permitting process needs.
Design the infrastructure to grow in stages. A data center grows in large steps as it fills up. An installation designed for the first step and rebuilt at the second costs more than one designed for all three. That is an engineering decision, not a budget decision, and it is made at the start or not at all.
Solve the backup architecture as a system. A backup generator, storage and transfer designed separately leave gaps that only show up in a real outage. The battery covers the instant of transfer; fuel covers the duration; and protection coordination has to match a critical load, not a generic industrial plant.
Measure the quality of what arrives. A purely electronic load does not tolerate what a motor does: transients, voltage sags, distortion. That is measured before sizing the protection, not after the first event.
A regulatory fact that shortens the path for backup
The Electricity Sector Law (Ley del Sector Eléctrico) establishes that power plants of any capacity intended exclusively for own use in emergencies or during supply interruptions do not require a generation permit (article 19).
In a project where the schedule is the critical variable, that distinction matters a lot. Backup has a substantially shorter regulatory path than generation for self-supply, because it does not go through a permit.
And on the other side: from 0.7 MW, generation requires a permit granted by the National Energy Commission (Comisión Nacional de Energía), with the particularity that interconnected self-supply between 0.7 and 20 MW may have a simplified procedure under the guidelines the CNE issues (articles 18, 19 and 30). Knowing which bracket your project falls into before sizing it changes the entire schedule.
Where our scope ends
What we do is the capacity survey and the utility service study, the electrical architecture inside your facility, storage, backup, protection coordination and monitoring under a reliability contract.
If the project calls for own generation above 0.7 MW, participation in the electricity market or long-term capital, we do not send you to look elsewhere: it is developed by GIS Power, part of the same group, which currently evaluates projects above ten megawatts. We do the assessment and the introduction, and we stay at the table until handover.
We say this explicitly because in this sector the line is crossed quickly: a project that starts at 400 kW and grows in stages ends up on the other side of the threshold. It pays to have the conversation at the start.
On market figures
Projections of required megawatts, announced investment and interconnection timelines circulate, attributed to various industry sources. They are useful for context and change from quarter to quarter.
We do not reproduce them here because they are no use in a site decision: what decides your project is the capacity available at your point of connection and the timeline you are given in writing, not a national average.
That figure is obtained by asking, and it is the first deliverable we can help you get.
Sources
Electricity Sector Law (Ley del Sector Eléctrico), DOF March 18, 2025 (articles 18, 19, 24, 25, 30 and 42) · Regulations of the Electricity Sector Law, DOF October 3, 2025.
The thresholds and the backup exemption are statutory text, verifiable by article number. The rest of this post is engineering judgment, not statistics.
How much capacity is there at your point of connection, and by when? With that answer everything else is decided. Without it, any design is a bet on letterhead.
