Location, Location, Location: Winning Site Selection Proposals

Attracting energy intensive commercial and industrial customers to a local community can significantly enhance the utility's bottom line. Moreover, when a CI selection consultants to help' make location decisions. Site selection is both an art and a science, and location decisions are usually made only after careful analysis of data sets and sophisticated financial and risk modeling. Site selection is an investment decision, and most companies calculate the costs, benefits and returns on investment among alternative locations. In today's globally competitive business environment with rapidly changing product markets and new technologies, the location of a "bricks and mortar" facility is a decision with long-term implications that companies cannot afford to get wrong. The prevailing wisdom is that professional consultants are employed in 35 to 45 percent of the location decisions, but economic development agencies report a wide variation in this number. Smaller, privately owned companies are more prone to undertake a site search without the help of a professional consultant. Economic development representatives from utilities that are perceived by company executives or consultants to be highly knowledgeable and professional in the site selection process and who evoke a sense of partnering to solve a company's location "problem" are more likely to win the project. …