Comment by giantg2

"And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades"

That would only be true if you could forecast the demand to justify the cost of the new infrastructure. It seems the demand from AI was beyond forecasts. The policies doesnt make the plants impossible to build, just slower. So your argument about continuously building plants is true in our current reality, and those plans include the extra time to comply with policies.