Austin Energy paid Crown Texas $725,183 for one prefabricated 16 by 60 foot control house in June 2023. The house was $489,270 of that. The truck was $12,500, the stairs shipped separately for $5,000, and the crew that unloaded and anchored it billed $58,275. Thirteen months later the utility signed a change order for $144,350 to store a house from October 2023 to October 2024, because the pad was not ready when the factory was. That purchase order is the whole argument in one record. A prefabricated electrical room moves work from the field to a factory, adds a truck, a crane and an integrator’s margin, and moves the schedule risk onto whoever fails to have the concrete poured. On a 50 MW datacenter electrical room, the Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table lands the skid route at $3.51M per MW against $3.47M stick-built, 1% more, and 27 weeks faster: 95 weeks from power-block PO to energization against 122. This piece prices the three routes line by line from public awards and purchase orders, shows why the switchgear lead time does not move, prices the freight and the crane from public rate cards, values the weeks, and ends with who should still buy stick-built and the three contract terms that make a skid deal work.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table (compiled from Riverside and Austin Energy awards, USAspending, Crown Texas purchase orders, Caltrans and FEMA rate cards, vendor list prices; as of August 2026)
Per MW of critical IT load in the mid case, stick-built is $3,469k, the skid route $3,510k and a hybrid $3,514k; equipment is $1,988k in every column, the stick-built field line is $398k against $219k for the skid, and the skid carries $360k of enclosure and $282k of integrator margin that the stick-built room does not.
The Room We Are Pricing
The unit is a 12.5 MW power block, four of them to 50 MW, each with two 15 kV metal-clad lineups, six 2,500 kVA transformers, 15 MW of UPS with batteries, the LV switchgear and the busway to the hall. Gensets, the utility substation and anything inside the white space are out of scope; the Large-Load Cost Table carries the grid side and What 50 MW Costs in 15 US Markets carries the tariff side. Turner & Townsend’s 2025 index puts the whole electrical package at 54% of an air-cooled build and 48% of a liquid-cooled one, on facility costs of $9.8 per watt in Phoenix and Columbus and $13.3 in Silicon Valley, so the room we price is roughly two thirds of a $5.3M per MW electrical line in a $9.8 per watt market.
Three routes buy that room. Stick-built: the engineer of record specifies, the contractor bids the package, the switchgear and UPS are ordered on the contractor’s paper through a distributor, and the gear is set in a room the general contractor finished a month earlier. The skid or e-house: an OEM or integrator ships the same gear pre-mounted in transport-rated enclosures with the HVAC, fire detection, lighting and internal bus already wired and tested, and the site sets modules on pads. Powell’s 10-K describes the product class exactly: switchgear, breakers, MCCs and bus duct “typically integrated into custom-built enclosures which we also build,” which it calls power control room substations, custom-engineered modules or electrical houses. The hybrid keeps the MV switchgear and transformers stick-built and owner-furnished, and takes the UPS and LV distribution as a skid, which is 87% of the equipment value at our mid prices.
The three routes buy the same $1,988k per MW of equipment; the argument is entirely about the other $1,500k. The equipment line is built from public prices with n and dates: a 15 kV lineup at $916,409 supply-only from Eaton to the Corps of Engineers (ten assemblies, May 2026), $1,310,228 for a 12.47 kV Powell lineup with a 3 kA main and tie at Austin Energy (February 2024), and $2,561,552 for Riverside’s SUB-871 (June 2024, three bids); a 2,500 kVA pad-mount at $98,000 to $104,000 list (n=3, 2026); and a UPS line whose only public transaction is a Navy award of $10,594,213 for five 750 kW modules with battery cabinets and 4,000 A switchgear modifications, installed, $2,825 per kW in September 2025, which we treat as the ceiling on an estimate of $900 to $1,800 per kW for equipment alone. Every input, its range and its source is in data/assumptions.csv; the Public Bid-Tab Price Book holds the award rows.
The Lead Time Does Not Move
The vendor pitch is speed, so start with the part of the schedule a factory cannot compress: its own. The Lead-Time Monitor carries Terrapin’s June 2026 range of 60 to 80 weeks for 15/27 kV metal-clad switchgear, 40 to 60 weeks for modular UPS above 2,000 kVA and 40 to 65 weeks for pad-mount transformers, and Schneider’s September 2026 guide at 45 to 50 weeks for LV switchgear and 24 to 40 weeks for busway. The same breakers, the same bus and the same GOES cores go into a skid as into a room; why your switchgear costs 50% more than in 2021 is the same story whether it ships in a crate or a box.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from Terrapin Construction Group June 2026 and Schneider Electric Lead Times Guide September 2026; as of September 2026)
Metal-clad MV switchgear at 60 to 80 weeks sits 15 to 30 weeks above the modular UPS at 40 to 60, the LV switchgear at 45 to 50 and the pad-mount transformer at 40 to 65, and 36 to 56 weeks above the pre-pandemic 24-week norm; the same page warns that a project schedule “now needs to assume 72”.
What the skid changes is who owns the production slot. In a stick-built package the order lands on the contractor’s paper at the end of design, and Global Data Center Hub’s August 2026 note puts the penalty plainly: without a reserved slot, nominal lead times extend by another eight to sixteen weeks, while hyperscalers reserve slots with 10 to 30% deposits at land close. In a skid package the OEM already holds the slot for its own gear, and the customer’s deposit sits on the OEM’s balance sheet. Vertiv’s current deferred revenue was $3,633.7M at June 30, 2026, from $358.7M at the end of 2022; The $60 Million Deposit read that line as the accounting shadow of slot ownership, and Vertiv Stopped Reporting Its Backlog covers what the company no longer prints beside it.
Source: SEC XBRL ContractWithCustomerLiabilityCurrent via Open Factory Book-to-Bill Table
Deferred revenue was $358.7M in December 2022, $1,063.3M in December 2024, $1,814.7M in December 2025 and $3,633.7M in June 2026, a tenfold rise in fourteen quarters and 111% of that quarter’s $3,274.3M of sales.
Schneider wrote the slot into a contract in November 2025: a $373M supply capacity agreement with Digital Realty covering UPS, LV switchgear and prefabricated power skids on “a dedicated LVS production line,” alongside a $1.9B Switch agreement for power modules and cooling, with deliveries phased across 2025 and 2026. That is the skid economy in one sentence: the buyer is not paying for a box, the buyer is paying for a line.
The slot comes with a clock the brochure does not print. Electronate’s March 2026 note puts the OEM manufacturing freeze 4 to 8 weeks into the lead time, after which a change to the spec is a change order and a new date, and puts the deposit that holds the slot at 10 to 20% of the switchgear value. In a skid package the freeze covers the enclosure too: the HVAC, the fire panel and the bus layout are frozen with the breakers, so the integration drawings have to be right in week 8, not in week 60 when the room drawings would have been.
Ninety-Five Weeks Against 122
We built the schedule from public records rather than brochures. Riverside’s own calendar for a 15 kV lineup ran 77 weeks from board award to scheduled delivery in 2024 and about 131 weeks in 2025, after 25 weeks of bidding each time; Reading a Switchgear Quote walks that calendar. Austin Energy allowed a contractor 160 working days, 32 weeks, to erect one prefabricated control house on a foundation the utility had already built, for $254,243 in 2017. Powell billed Austin $249,401 for on-site installation, interconnection cables and site acceptance testing of one lineup in 2020. Those are the field weeks a skid is supposed to remove. Austin has since moved the houses themselves onto a factory contract: a five-year, $10,000,000 not-to-exceed agreement with Crown Texas for prefabricated substation control houses, issued September 2021, three offers, approved May 2022, with the 2023 purchase orders above drawn against it.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table
Stick-built runs 10 weeks of drawings, 12 weeks in the contractor’s queue, 70 weeks of switchgear fabrication, 20 weeks to set, cable and terminate in the finished room and 10 weeks of Level 1 to 5 commissioning, 122 in all; the skid runs the same 10 and 70, then 4 weeks of integration and factory acceptance testing, 3 to ship and set, 4 to tie modules together and 4 of site commissioning, 95 in all.
The 27 weeks the skid saves are 12 weeks of contractor queue and 15 weeks of field work; the factory saves nothing. PCX, the Hubbell unit that builds skids in Knightdale, North Carolina, claims a 30% reduction in deployment time and “18 month buildouts” cut to “six or seven months” in a June 2026 post; Siemens and Delta claimed up to 50% faster time to market and up to 20% lower capex for their skid and e-house partnership in November 2025. Our 22% sits under both because we count the switchgear lead time in every route, and because we give stick-built the 8 to 16 week slot penalty rather than the 2 to 3 year datacenter-spec lead time that Electronate reported in March 2026 for buyers at the back of the queue. The Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule runs the same phases with your PO dates and the Monitor’s current weeks.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table
Stick-built spans 98 to 150 weeks with a mid of 122, the skid 79 to 120 with a mid of 95, and the hybrid 80 to 122 with a mid of 98; the hybrid captures 24 of the 27 weeks because an owner who holds the MV slot directly removes the contractor queue without buying the enclosure.
The Cost Stack, Line by Line
Here is the mid case per MW, in thousands, with the low and high cases in data/cost-stack-per-mw.csv.
| Line | Stick-built | Prefab skid | Hybrid | What sets it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equipment (MV, transformers, UPS, LV, busway) | $1,988k | $1,988k | $1,988k | Public awards and list prices, n and date in assumptions.csv |
| Room or enclosure | $256k | $360k | $346k | 800 sq ft/MW at $320 inside the shell; 400 sq ft/MW at $900 fitted and transport-rated |
| Procurement markup or integrator margin | $99k | $282k | $245k | 5% contractor markup on gear; 12% integrator margin on gear plus enclosure |
| Field installation | $398k | $219k | $242k | 20% of equipment stick-built (Powell 24%, Riverside 47% as ceiling); 55% of that remains with skids |
| Commissioning and FAT | $99k | $72k | $75k | 5% of equipment; L1 to L3 move to the factory, FAT travel added |
| Freight, crane, permits | $40k | $36k | $37k | 2% of equipment; six modules at $54k crane and $22k haul each |
| Owner engineering and PM | $274k | $234k | $261k | 10% (Riverside 11%); 8% with the OEM doing integration engineering |
| Contingency at 10% | $315k | $319k | $319k | Riverside boards approved 10% in 2018 and 2024, 20% in 2025 |
| Total | $3,469k | $3,510k | $3,514k | Skid +1.1%, hybrid +1.3% |
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table; CSV: data/cost-stack-per-mw.csv, inputs in data/assumptions.csv
Read the skid column against the stick column and the trade is visible. The skid removes $179k of field work and $27k of commissioning per MW and hands back $104k of extra enclosure and $183k of extra margin. The enclosure line is anchored to the only fitted prefabricated electrical house we can price from a public record, Crown Texas’s $478,484 and $489,270 for two 16 by 60 foot houses in June 2023, about $500 per square foot with the HVAC, panelboards, chargers and hydrogen detector inside; a UPS module has to reject 2 to 3% of 15 MW as heat and carry clean-agent suppression, so we carry $700 to $1,100 per square foot on a footprint PCX says is up to 50% smaller than a stick-built layout. The margin line is anchored to what integration is worth to the people who buy integrators: Eaton paid $1.45B for Fibrebond on about $378M of sales in April 2025, and Powell’s gross margin on integrated work was 31% in the June 2026 quarter.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table
Stick-built runs $2,259k to $6,344k per MW around a $3,469k mid, the skid $2,296k to $6,466k around $3,510k, and the hybrid $2,308k to $6,445k around $3,514k, so the skid premium is 1.1% in the mid case, 1.6% in the low case and 1.9% in the high case, and the input ranges swamp all three.
That is the honest v0 answer to “is modular cheaper”: no, and it is not meaningfully dearer either, at the labor package we used. The claim in the title stands because the claim in the brochures does not. Siemens and Delta’s up to 20% capex reduction requires the integrator to charge less than the field labor it replaces, and in our stack the integrator’s 12% on $2.35M of gear and enclosure is $282k, against $179k of field labor removed. The public awards say the same thing from the other side.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Riverside and Austin Legistar, Austin open data, Leavenworth bid tab, USAspending; as of August 2026)
Riverside paid Crown Technical Systems $2,509,063 for a 15 kV metal-clad switchgear enclosure in July 2023 against a $2.1M engineer’s estimate, with Myers at $2,584,678 and Eaton, AZZ and RESA declining to bid; Leavenworth, Kansas opened bids in December 2025 for a prefabricated enclosure housing a new 15 kV main switchgear at $1,499,117 and $2,012,750 against a $2,527,051 estimate; and Austin’s fitted house came in at $725,183 all-in. The Riverside memo has the sentence every estimator should frame: “The last time RPU procured a switchgear was in 2018. Due to the time gap, our most recent historical records for pricing this type of equipment are no longer relevant.” The Quote Check tool exists so that the next buyer does not have to write it.
Freight, Crane and the Storage Clause
Freight and crane are the lines the brochure never prints and the purchase order always does. Crown Texas billed Austin $12,500 of shipping per house, $5,000 to ship the stairs, and $49,652 to $58,275 for “unloading and anchoring” on two houses in June 2023 (n=2). The public rate cards bracket the crane: FEMA’s schedule effective July 2025 puts a 125-ton crawler at $338.94 an hour and a 60-ton all-terrain at $285.76; Caltrans’s book for April to August 2026 has a Link-Belt HTC 11100 at $335.52, a Grove TMS 875 at $212.55, a six-axle low-bed at $87.68 and a tractor over 60,000 lb at $101.56 an hour, and notes that “pilot vehicles are extra.” Texas prices the paperwork: a $60 single-trip permit plus a $150 to $375 highway maintenance fee by weight tier and a $35 supervision fee over 200,000 lb, with one escort over 14 feet wide and two over 16. A 16-foot house takes two escorts through every state it crosses.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table, Crown Texas purchase orders (Austin Energy 2023 to 2024), Caltrans and FEMA rate cards, TxDMV
Six modules per block cost $324k to crane and anchor, $120k to haul 1,000 miles and $12k in permits and escorts, $456k in all, plus $150k of FAT travel and retest allowance, against $497k of freight and rigging for the same gear arriving loose; the one-year storage charge of $144,350 on a single house is the line that is not in either base stack.
Logistics is a wash; the storage clause is the risk. The prefab house that Austin stored for a year sat on the vendor’s yard at $144,350 because the utility’s pad was not ready, and Eaton’s standard terms filed with Santa Clara say the same thing in contract language: “Buyer shall reimburse Seller for all costs of storage and handling incurred by Seller after the date that Seller is prepared to make shipment.” A skid arrives on one date as one object; a stick-built room absorbs late gear one crate at a time. The RFQ template puts ninety free days in the PO, and Crown’s own 30/40/30 milestones, $217,555 at drawing submittals, $290,073 at material receipt, $217,555 at delivery and acceptance, show where the vendor expects to be paid before your pad exists.
What a Week Is Worth
If the skid costs 1 to 3% more and delivers 27 weeks sooner, the question is what a week is worth, and that depends on whose money is waiting. A 50 MW build at Turner & Townsend’s $9.8 per watt is $490M; at the 4.68% ten-year Treasury of August 2026 that is $441,000 a week of carrying cost, and at the 6.32% Baa yield $596,000. Digital Realty signed Americas leases above 1 MW at $186 per kW per month in the fourth quarter of 2025, which is $2.15M a week of rent on 50 MW that is not energized. The Liquidated Damages at 0.5% a Week piece built the same ledger; here we set it against the premium.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table, Turner & Townsend DCCI 2025, FRED GS10, Digital Realty Q4 2025
Twenty-seven weeks of carrying cost alone is $11.9M, 6.9% of the $173.5M stick-built room; with rent it is $69.8M, 40%; the skid’s 1.1% premium is $1.9M, so the break-even is under two weeks of rent or eight weeks of interest.
That arithmetic is why the title is not “Buy Stick-Built.” Modular is not cheaper, and it does not need to be: a route that costs 1 to 3% more and is 22% faster pays for itself in the first two weeks of rent it brings forward, provided the weeks are real. The weeks are real only if the OEM’s slot is real, the FAT is witnessed, and the pad is poured, which is what the paid section is about. The Datacenter Electrical Roadmap tracks the capacity additions that decide whether the slot is real.
Cheap Electricians Punish the Skid
The one input that moves the premium most is the wage the skid displaces. Our field line is priced at the IBEW Local 48 journey-level package of $95.79 an hour in Portland, where the premium is 1.1%. Reprice the labor share of the field line at each metro’s May 2025 median electrician wage times a 1.55 burden and the premium rises where labor is cheap: Dallas at $28.37 and Atlanta at $28.20 an hour give a 3.3% premium, Chicago at $49.21 and Portland at $50.53 give 1.8 to 1.9%.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table, BLS OEWS May 2025
The premium runs 3.3% in Dallas and Atlanta, 3.2% in Phoenix and Memphis, 3.1% in Columbus, 2.8% in Reno, 2.7% in Washington, 1.9% in Chicago and 1.8% in Portland, a 1.5-point spread that comes entirely from the wage, because the enclosure, the margin and the truck cost the same in every metro.
The skid is a labor arbitrage, and labor is cheapest in the metros where the datacenters are being built. Datacenter construction is eating your electricians in every one of those markets, and the Local 48 rate is where the bidding ends up when three campuses compete for one hall’s worth of journeymen; the Electricians by Metro piece has the pipeline against the headcount. A buyer in Dallas who expects the skid to save money on labor will be disappointed by about $115k per MW; a buyer who expects it to save 27 weeks of a crew he cannot hire will not.
Who Builds the Boxes
The people who build prefabricated electrical rooms have all been bought, and the prices tell you what integration is worth. Hubbell paid $112.8M for PCX in July 2022, calling it “a leading designer and manufacturer of factory built modular power solutions for applications in the data center market.” Quanta bought Cupertino Electric on July 17, 2024 for its “engineering, procurement, project management, construction and modularization services.” Eaton paid $1.45B for Fibrebond, a builder of “pre-integrated modular power enclosures,” on about $378M of trailing sales, 3.8 times revenue, in April 2025. Vertiv bought BMarko Structures on April 13, 2026 for structural fabrication behind its “prefabricated, and converged infrastructure.”
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill Table (compiled from SEC filings and company releases; as of August 2026)
Four acquisitions in 45 months, two with disclosed prices ($112.8M and $1.45B), plus three capacity additions: Vertiv’s 215,000 square foot Pelzer, South Carolina plant for “modular solutions, integrated power systems and other prefabricated infrastructure” in 2024, Powell’s $12.4M for 335,000 square feet of power control room laydown at Jacintoport, a 62% increase, and PCX’s 159,600 square foot Knightdale plant opened in October 2021 with 75 electricians.
Powell is the cleanest public read on demand, because it is a pure switchgear and e-house builder that reports quarterly. Its backlog went from $1.4B at September 30, 2025 to $2.4B at June 30, 2026, with about $800M of data center awards in the fiscal year including one mega order above $400M; the Book-to-Bill League Table has the ratio. Austin Energy’s contracts with Powell trace the same curve on a utility’s paper: $22M over five years for indoor arc-resistant switchgear in 2018, $5M more in 2024, and a new $56.9M five-year contract in September 2025, with $16.5M in the first year. Vertiv’s 10-K says the company has “more than doubled its manufacturing capacity for switchgear, busbar and integrated power solutions” since late 2021 and that most of its $15.0B backlog ships within 12 to 18 months. The OEM Disclosure Scorecard grades who prints what.
What to Do Monday
Price the room three ways before the design freezes, with the same equipment line in each column, and make the contractor and the integrator both quote against it; the Datacenter MEP Cost Table has the eight lines and the Quote Check tool bands the gear against the Bid-Tab Price Book. Decide the route on the schedule, not the price, because the price difference is 1 to 3% and the schedule difference is 27 weeks; run your PO dates through the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule and see which route energizes in the month your lease starts. If you go stick-built, buy the MV switchgear yourself under a frame agreement with a deposit, because the 12-week contractor queue is the cheapest schedule you will ever buy back. If you go skid, pour the pads before the factory finishes, because the storage clause is real and the invoice was $144,350 for one house. And put the copper index and the tariff instrument in either PO; the Copper and Wire Price Sheet and the Tariff Exposure Calculator give you the base dates.
Behind the paywall: the four buyer profiles that should still build stick-built, with the labor rate and the integrator margin at which the skid loses, from a sensitivity grid that runs from 4.1% cheaper to 6.4% dearer; the three contract terms that make a skid deal work, slot transfer, FAT witness and integration responsibility, with the clause language and the PCX FAT exclusions that show where integration responsibility leaks; and the named vendor capacity claims with dates, from the Datacenter MEP Cost Table and the OEM Disclosure Scorecard.