[phil21]

Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.

The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.

Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.

To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.

[infecto]

Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason.

We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.

[cduzz]

I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"

Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.

And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.

In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.

[samothrace]

What do you mean by "AI dioxin"? Google turns up nothing for data centers releasing dioxin.

[coryrc]

You mean boomers have been voting against any and every infrastructure investment besides more roads while they lived off the investments of their parents and grandparents? Worse generation in American history.