> "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise.

And should never be a thing. It's not for others to decide something is useless. Let the market figure that out. It should simply be an even playing field, and in theory we already have the regulatory mechanisms to get that done. If the rates are currently able to be abused, that is entirely correctable.

It should not matter if I want to build 1000MW of aluminum smelting capacity, or a facility that digs holes and fills them back in again - so long as I'm paying the regulatory rates that have been set to be fair across all similar power consumers.

The bigger problem by far is that we spent 40-60 years not building anything. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's power capacity. Can only ride inertia and offshoring your industrial energy usage for so long. There are a lot of chickens coming home to roost in the next decade or three on this topic, electric grid was just pulled forward a bit due to the AI bubble.