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by jeffbee 56 days ago
America basically did not add any net generating capacity in the first two decades of this century, instead treading water with repowering and efficiency. This was a mistake and now that we could use the energy everyone is acting like it's impossible to expand the grid at the same rate we expanded it in the 1980s.

In many ways this mirrors the way America walked into the housing crisis with its eyes closed.
1 comments
dalyons 56 days ago
I don’t understand how it could have realistically been different. In say 2001 how can you possibly make the case for very expensive grid expansion for future loads that haven’t been invented yet?
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jeffbee 56 days ago
Thats fine. If we did not need it, then we didn't need to build it out using what was at the time more expensive technology. But in 2026 we should not be pretending that the rate at which the grid expanded in the 1980s was caused by alien technology transfers. We can easily repeat or exceed that expansion. Even the most outrageous predictions for IT loads do not exceed what we did in the 1980s.
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dalyons 56 days ago
absolutely agree with that. However, its not so much the capability, its the cost. In 2026 big projects cost a lot more, whos gunna pay for it? In the 80s we all paid for it, but we roughly all benefited as we got more and more electric capacity and day-to-day use cases. Today, it looks like we are all gunna pay for it, but only the datacenter owners are going to benefit. That model is broken.
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jeffbee 56 days ago
Well, I don't think the evidence supports that. According to two recent LBNL reports consumer prices are lowest in states with huge demand increases (Texas), and highest in states with shrinking demand (California). The existence of large consumers tends to amortize the cost of grid updates.
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dalyons 56 days ago
theres tons of news articles going around about how datacenter installs are causing large local rate spikes. for eg: https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...

> That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

> director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and co-author of a March 2025 paper exploring how the public is funding Big Tech’s power-intensive facilities. “Utilities are building infrastructure, and then we all pay for it because that’s how the utility business model has always worked,” he says.

> Residential electricity costs are also rising because the rush of new hyperscale data centers wanting to draw power from the grid is spiking demand. That drives up prices for everyone, Peskoe says

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jeffbee 56 days ago
There absolutely is a narrative out there, but it's mostly unfounded. Bloomberg ran a completely absurd article about how AI was causing voltage drops in Colorado. Totally insane stuff, some of their contributors are pushing an agenda.

This Dept. of Energy analysis, which was recently updated, makes a lot more sense. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...

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