FAQs
The questions we are asked most often, answered plainly.
FAQs
What does CommonWatts do?
We run community engagement processes around proposed data centers — designing and facilitating the conversation between developers, local governments and residents. We are not a public relations firm and we do not represent either side. Our product is a process people can trust and a decision that holds up.
Are you for or against data centers?
Neither, and we mean that specifically. We are neutral on whether any given project should be approved. We are not neutral on whether a claim is true — that’s a different thing, and we correct the record in both directions, publicly, on the same page.
Who can engage you — developers or communities?
Either can fund the work. Neither gets an advocate. The service list is the same regardless of who called; what changes is the funding structure, and we publish it. What we will not do is act for one party against another in the same dispute, or write advocacy materials for anyone.
How are you paid, and doesn’t that compromise your neutrality?
It’s the right question and we have a whole page on it. The short version: our fee is never contingent on any outcome, it’s funded into escrow in advance so nobody can defund us mid-process, we take no downstream work from any party, and we publish who pays us and how much before the first public meeting. Our preferred structure is applicant-funded and community-selected — the developer pays, the local government instructs us and receives the work.
Your founder worked for a data center developer. Why should a community trust you?
Because we’ve told you, up front, rather than leaving you to find out. That experience is genuinely useful — it means we know what a developer can actually agree to, and we’ll tell a community when an ask is realistic and when it isn’t. It’s also a fair question about independence, which is why the terms on the "How we’re paid" page exist and why we publish what we decline.
What if our community doesn’t want a data center at all?
That’s a legitimate position and we’ll say so. What we won’t do is tell a community it has leverage it doesn’t have. In much of Texas, for instance, a project on unincorporated county land can’t be zoned out, and pretending otherwise wastes a year that could have been spent negotiating operating conditions that will matter for thirty. We’d rather be the person who tells you that early.
What’s a community benefit agreement, and are they worth pursuing?
It’s a set of commitments a developer makes to a host community — infrastructure, taxes, environmental protections, workforce, public services, direct investment. They’re worth pursuing and easy to get wrong. The failure mode is a generous package with no enforcement: gifts, not conditions. We work on the terms — numbers instead of adjectives, financial security instead of assurances, clawbacks tied to milestones, obligations that bind whoever owns the facility next.
What happens after an agreement is signed?
The years after approval are where trust is actually won or lost, and it’s the part everyone under-resources. We help set up reporting, compliance dashboards, verification, renegotiation triggers and dispute processes — built before anyone needs them, because building them afterward is how they end up unenforceable.
Do you guarantee a project will be approved, or stopped?
No, and anyone who does is selling something. Good engagement produces a defensible decision and a community that can live with it. It does not produce agreement, and it is not a permitting strategy.
Will you tell us things we don’t want to hear?
Yes. That’s most of the value. If the evidence is thin on something, we’ll say it’s thin. If a community’s real grievance is with the utility rather than the project, we’ll say that too. And if we think an engagement is being set up to produce a record rather than a process, we’ll decline it in writing and tell you why.
Start a conversation
Tell us where the project is, who is involved, and what stage it has reached. A short conversation is usually enough to work out whether this is the kind of thing we do.
info@commonwatts.com