—
A Decision Made Before the First Foundation
Most people assume a development project starts with land, zoning, or design. In practice, one of the earliest and most consequential decisions is about power. Will the project draw from the local grid, or will it need its own generation capacity? That choice shapes budgets, timelines, and what can even be built on a given site.
Ron Yeffet has worked on real estate and infrastructure projects across the United States, Israel, Italy, and parts of Africa, including energy supply and power plant work alongside major roadways and buildings. That range gives him a clear view of how differently this question plays out depending on where a project sits and what the surrounding grid can actually support.
Grid Power or Built-in Supply
The basic choice is simple to state and hard to answer well. A developer can plan to connect to existing utility infrastructure, or build power generation into the project itself. Most projects in mature markets default to the first option without much thought, because the grid is stable and connection is routine. That assumption does not hold everywhere.
What Grid Reliance Really Costs
Relying on the grid looks cheap on paper. There is no generation equipment to buy, no fuel supply to manage, no additional maintenance staff. But the real cost shows up later, in the form of capacity limits, connection delays, and outages that a project has no control over. A developer who assumes grid access will simply be ready when construction finishes is often wrong, especially in areas where demand is growing faster than utilities can expand.
What on-Site Generation Demands
Building in generation capacity solves the reliability problem, but it is not free of trade-offs either. It requires capital up front, ongoing fuel or maintenance costs, and staff who know how to run the equipment. It also requires space, which competes with the square footage a project is trying to build and sell or lease. Ron Yeffet’s perspective is that this option earns its cost mainly in markets where grid reliability cannot be assumed, not as a default upgrade everywhere.
Why Location Changes the Answer
There is no single right answer to this choice, because the underlying conditions vary so much by region. A project in a dense urban market with a mature grid faces a very different calculation than one in a growing city where utility infrastructure has not kept pace with demand. Some markets have unreliable supply but affordable fuel for backup generation. Others have the opposite problem: dependable grid access but strict limits on what new generation can be added nearby.
This is where experience across multiple regions matters more than a general rule. A developer who has only worked in one type of market tends to apply that market’s assumptions everywhere, which is a mistake. Ron Yeffet’s work spanning different countries and infrastructure types has shown that the right energy strategy for a project in one region can be the wrong one just a few hundred miles away.
How to Make the Call Early
The teams that handle this well ask a specific set of questions before design work goes far:
- What is the actual current capacity of the local grid, not just its stated capacity
- How long does a new utility connection realistically take in this jurisdiction
- What does the project’s power demand look like at peak use, not average use
- What happens to the project’s timeline if the grid connection is delayed by a year
Answering these early lets a developer size the project correctly and avoid redesigning power plans midway through construction. Skipping this step is common, and it is one of the more expensive shortcuts in the field, because power decisions are hard to reverse once concrete is poured and equipment is ordered.
The Cost of Waiting
Treating energy planning as a late-stage engineering detail, rather than an early strategic choice, tends to produce the same pattern: delays discovered too late to fix cheaply, budgets revised after commitments are already made, and projects that either overbuild generation capacity out of caution or underbuild it and pay for it in outages. Neither outcome serves the people who eventually use the building.
The developers who avoid this pattern are the ones who treat power as a first question rather than a last one. They size it against real demand, test their assumptions about the local grid before relying on them, and decide early whether the project needs its own supply or can lean on what already exists. That single decision, made well or made carelessly, follows a project all the way through its life.
