[MostlyStable]

>time it takes to actually plan, build, and commission.

This is, currently, mostly regulatory. Yes, in the absence of any regulations at all it would still take time to plan, build, and commission, and I am not advocating for literally no regulations, but solar and wind plants could probably be spun up in well under a year under a dramatically reduced regulatory burden, almost certainly faster than a new Datacenter can be built. They are, after all, dramatically simpler installations.

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.

So I think that in an alternate regulatory regime both A) yes actually power plants could built ~ as fast as data centers and other large power consumers and B) we would have so much more power that increases in demand would be less of a shock to the system.

[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.

[J_McQuade]

> This is, currently, mostly regulatory. Yes, in the absence of any regulations at all it would still take time to plan, build, and commission

Choose one.

In fact, don't. Just build a new power plant and plug it into the grid. Go on, I could do with a laugh.

[palmotea]

> 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.

[bigbadfeline]

> 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.