Comment by palmotea
6 hours ago
> 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, and the new demand would be a much smaller drop in the much larger bucket.
Bullshit. Why would they have continuously built power plants if the demand wasn't there? The utterly insane level AI datacenter demand came out of nowhere.
And then you know, when there are tradeoffs, you can always maximize X and the expense of Y. And if you're myopically looking only at X, that may seem like a smart move, but that tradeoff may not be the right tradeoff when you look at things holistically.
And there are other tradeoffs: maybe not deregulate power-plant construction, but instead regulate AI data-center construction to slow it down. If we're in an AI bubble, that may end up being the right call and eliminate a lot of FOMO waste.
> but instead regulate AI data-center construction to slow it down.
The simplest and most logical regulation: don't connect new data centers to the grid unless they pay the cost and interest for the power capacity they commit to use - it's not hard to do the accounting for that and it's the fair way to do it for any large new consumers.