An industrial plot is not a ready-to-operate facility

The most consequential distinction in industrial site development is between a service that has been announced or planned, and a service that is committed and available to this plot on a date.

An announcement establishes intent. It may reflect a genuine programme with funding and a delivery team, or it may reflect a longer-term aspiration. It does not establish that capacity has been reserved for this project, that the connection will be made by a particular date, or that the terms on which it will be provided have been agreed.

A committed service, by contrast, is evidenced by something written: a capacity reservation, an offer with terms, a connection agreement, an executed contract. And even then, the useful questions continue — what is the date the connection will be available, what conditions attach, what happens if the date slips, and who bears the cost of a delay. The operating date of the facility is fixed by the project's own plan; the utility connection date is usually controlled by someone else.

Treating the first as though it were the second is how projects arrive at commissioning without the power to run.

Two dependencies cause more delay than the others and are consistently underestimated at feasibility stage.

The first is effluent. Power and water are understood to be essential and are usually investigated; effluent is treated as a downstream detail and is frequently left until the process is designed. But the effluent route determines whether the process can operate at all, and the consent or agreement that allows discharge depends on the flow and its characteristics, which depend on the process, which may still be being selected. The dependency is therefore circular, and resolving it late means designing a process whose discharge cannot be accommodated.

The second is site preparation. A plot is not a platform. Ground conditions, levels, the drainage strategy, and whether the plot requires filling, compaction or treatment before construction can begin are all matters that affect both cost and programme, and they are established by investigation rather than assumed. A plot that appears ready on a plan may require significant preparatory works before the foundation can start.

The remedy for all of this is straightforward in principle and demanding in practice: treat each utility and each approval as a project activity, with a duration, a predecessor, an owner and a date, and put it on the same critical path as the construction.

This does several things at once. It forces the project to identify who controls each dependency, which is frequently not the project itself. It makes the lead times explicit, which is the only way to see whether the facility's operating date is achievable. And it converts a set of assumptions that would otherwise be discovered at commissioning into tracked activities that can be chased, escalated and, where necessary, designed around.

The register should be maintained as a live document through the project, because utility dates slip and approvals take longer than expected. The value is not in producing it once but in reviewing it regularly against the programme, so that a slip in a connection date is identified while there is still time to respond to it.

Where a dependency cannot be committed by the date the project needs it, the honest position is to state that and to plan for it — through interim provision, phasing, or a revised operating date. A project that proceeds on the assumption that a connection will arrive is a project whose risk has not been priced.