China invested hugely into renewable energy. Their grid is strong. Ours is falling apart and our renewable energy contracts keep getting shredded. Gas powered data centers is beyond dystopian

▲

bluGill 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That doom take has a few roots in truth, but it is mostly false. Our grid for the most part is very good and improving. A lot of the gloom is it is good for today, but here is why we are trying to expand it anyway - that is the gloom itself is helpful to get the needed changes made.

There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.

	▲	2ndorderthought 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's really not "doom" it's reality. Highly recommend googling the state of the us grid. It's under funded otherwise data centers would not be running on gas. Similarly one of the biggest anticipated bottlenecks for new data centers is power right now. https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/11/data-centers-at-risk-th... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/opinion/elect... Although renewables are on the rise in use, huge projects have recently been cancelled in favor for gas. Meanwhile the us is going around blowing up and encouraging other gas producing nations to blow up gas infrastructure. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5851702-trump-... https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2026/04/... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/15/how-successful-is-... It's only doom if we willfully do nothing to make it better or ignore it until it becomes a problem we can no longer fix.

▲

toast0 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're worried abour grid health, how is adding distributed generation colocated with new loads dystopian?

Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.

Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.

	▲	goda90 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Gas = greenhouse gases. We needed to be reducing those decades ago, not increasing them.
	▲	2ndorderthought 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's unsustainable and bad for the local environments surrounding it. How many people need to die so people can chatgpt a social media post or summarize an article? These are real unanswered questions we are facing because the US has inadequate energy infrastructure. https://sustainabilitydialogue.uchicago.edu/news/data-center... You ever lose power and run a generator? The stink and sound is awful. Imagine powering more houses than there are in a suburban town with gas? Imagine doing that in hundreds of thousands of locations across the us. It's a dystopian thought. I agree it is hard to stand up an effective grid to sustain technological innovations and products. It sounds like something we needed to be ready for like other countries are. Or maybe something that should happen first in order to be responsible and get ready for the future.
	▲	16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]