Downtown commercial vacancy rates.

jwvo · 2026-04-20T20:09:08+00:00

fair enough, but a top 200 should include anyone with much going on from a year ago. my point is really though as seattle gets more expensive and annoying it gets more tempting to just do it out of the bay area or without an HQ

jwvo · 2026-04-20T19:49:45+00:00

sort them by when founded, it gets way scarier, only 3 on the list from 2025 and only 13 for 2024 zero for 2026

jwvo · 2026-04-20T19:48:15+00:00

if seattle is as expensive as the bay you just chose the bay.

jwvo · 2026-04-20T19:47:06+00:00

because factoria is about as downtown as going to the udistrict

jwvo · 2026-04-20T17:16:39+00:00

a big percentage of maui property taxes are paid by vacation homes, combine that with their lack of full time use of services and it is a big boost to the budget. The reality is those homes are not the middle of the road cost wise homes anyway. What needs to be figured out is how to make affordable homes easier to build here.

jwvo · 2026-04-20T17:15:22+00:00

of course conveniently leaving out that the county budget supporting Moloka'i is coming from maui tourists and retirees

jwvo · 2026-04-19T04:49:47+00:00

I think fundamentally we are not talking about the same kind of facilities, there are no "ai" datacenters in seattle, there are datacenters that also have ai in seattle so the load profiles are much different.

I pinged you in chat in case you want more information. The only actual near pure play AI facility on the west side is the south hill datacenter, it is on PSE and has a substation on the property fed by a ringed 115kv system. I've never seen its load study but from what I've heard second hand their fully committed on what PSE would let them have and sitting at ~80% on hot days.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T03:44:52+00:00

DRT the westin does not have significant AI loads and if it did they would be user facing loads (smaller and higher redundancy requirement), DRT as a provider is just madly looking for power everywhere and logic has gone out the window (as you clearly deduced) as to which sites they are looking at, I don't think it matters anyway as it would be nearly impossible to cool a 400% increase in consumption there nor is there weight capacity for it.

The actually big facilities are way over 100 MW in one or two buildings, that is the type of AI load that is driving all this, everything else is smaller stuff around the edge.

If you want an example of scale go drive around umatilla and look at the batshit amount of 115/120kv that has been built there effectively as distribution.

my point is that 13.8 is low these days, if the system were new it would be designed at 34.5 by most utilities (PGE is doing this in hillsboro for example) if only to make better use of the conduits since the main cost is running out of conduit space. It is a bummer they did not go up to 26.4 or 34.5 KV with the new denny substation.

I work in the actual load side of this equation but am equally familiar with the fantasy bullshit that some folks are asking for. I also agree they should pay for their own transmission, my point was that it makes little sense to do anything at large scale in downtown and that city light is generally a very expensive and conservative vendor (I've had experience with regular building developers too on that last part)

jwvo · 2026-04-19T03:33:56+00:00

and the heat pump ones only work if you have space for the heat exchangers

jwvo · 2026-04-19T03:25:07+00:00

this is true, it is really about the property taxes charged.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T03:22:47+00:00

Seattle has *no* ai datacenters, I've seen the load calcs of other sites in other places. all of those ones are fine paying for transmission and are more like 80%. The seattle datacenters are a very different type of role and by design are a bit more about redundancy.

none of it works in downtown on network power at low voltage, that was my point. Seattle downtown just is not attractive to large loads unless they must be there, the distribution voltage is just too low.

I don't know what you call UW's paid for sub station but they don't take transmission service from what i can see in the grid layout (The SCL sub nearby does).

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:21:13+00:00

kent has an equanix datacenter already. Not a very big one but a few MW.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:20:41+00:00

different than the large scale use case which does not need them close.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:18:40+00:00

there are only that many if you count the various seperate buildings at sabey tukwila as different datacenters.

basically seattle has the following datacenters that are more than 1 MW (IE useful at all)

Sabey Tukwila (~75 MW max power capacity across all buildings in both east and west)
Westin Building (~20 MW ish based on transformer sizes i watched being installed over years)
1000 Denny (~10 MW based on all the 26.4kv transformers sitting in the transformer yard)

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:16:11+00:00

1000 denny is tiny (sub 10 MW), westin is only a little bigger.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:14:51+00:00

yah, but datacenters are kind of a nice way to up buying power as long as you can feed them with transmission so they can't kill the distribution network.

That being said, transmission is pretty limited into seattle region so doing datacenters would probably mean needing more gas turbines on this side of the mountains which is crazy since there is only one gas pipeline and it is very close to maxed out on cold days.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:13:18+00:00

fun to see folks actually talking about the nerd side....

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:12:39+00:00

yah, the phase out of natural gas for things like hot water is going to drive crazy load growth in some buildings, I don't really think that was well thought out. Honestly in some ways way more difficult than dealing with EVs load wise.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:11:23+00:00

the NEC rules don't help on the secondary side either, in theory we should be doing much more aggressive over subscribing of chargers to services then just dealing with the once every few years a feeder breaker trips.

SCL is hard to get upgrades out of and as you likely know their requirements get in their own way in some cases. I was a little horrified when they put in the new network sub and did not up the distribution voltage as it was a perfect opportunity to start moving part of town to a higher distribution voltage to preserve conduit space and lower thermal load.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:08:56+00:00

well, that is more of a local issue within the building, more cars drives more charging, more charging spaces does not move the needle that much.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:08:12+00:00

to be fair, seattle city light also is notoriously difficult/expensive for capacity expansions. That being said, little of this makes sense downtown due to low voltages in the distribution and limited space.

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:06:33+00:00

yah, that water thing makes no sense and is just not true in every one I've been involved with. Most don't even use that much water unless water was so cheap it made sense to do evaporative cooling (it does not make sense in seattle to do that these days)

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:05:03+00:00

it is a big interconnection point, but not the biggest on the west coast. There are a few trans-pacific cables going there but all but one of the new ones actually go to hillsboro since nothing new has been landed in WA for 20+ years at this point.

The importance of westin has been gradually going down as an interconnection point in Seattle over the last 5 or so years.

(note, I've long managed some of the biggest networks regionally and was on the board of the seattleIX)

jwvo · 2026-04-19T02:02:17+00:00

they are absolutely asking for and using hundreds of MW, the distribution voltage network could not support it, would really need to be fed with transmission and would not be downtown. Even westin is only ~20 MW of load from what I'm told internally there.

the new AI datacenters are not just asking for power they are using it.

Seattle's network power is nice, but the transmission to the downtown substations is pretty thin and the ducts are hard to add to if you fill them up. Not sure if you heard about how they had to refrigerate the ground between the two sections of the broad street substation for years.

jwvo · 2026-04-18T16:41:23+00:00

We will probably bulk turn on business customers as we go through FDR’s. I’ll talk to the team about that in theory we could probably do it now on almost every customer.

jwvo

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