>Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else.

Common utilities are common to everyone. Signing a contract for supply of power is what they should be doing.

The only "negative externality" is that extra supply might, in whatever jurisdiction this is, not be brought online as demand increases. That's a feature of however your polity has designed their power market. The "negative externality" was brought into existence when that system was designed. The same effects occur regardless of who purchases the power, including residences.

Not to mention that, it literally benefits you to have this generation on grid, instead of running privately where only the datacentre can access it. Growing the common utility is better than demanding the monster of the week goes off and sources their own generation.

Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today.

> Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today.

No - it's a real problem:

> While hyperscale data centers can be built within 18 to 24 months, high-voltage transmission upgrades often require 7 to 10 years to plan, approve, and construct. As such, data centers are depleting available grid capacity faster than it can be physically replaced. As new generation sources can spend 4 to 5 years in interconnection queues before coming online, shrinking reserve margins (or the quantity of power that operators use to absorb system shocks and maintain reliability) cannot be replenished fast enough to meet demand. As reserve margins shrink, the grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to shortages and instability. [1]

Data centers place vastly different demands on a grid than residences, and it's a bit silly to suggest that they should be treated the same by utilities:

> For decades, the U.S. electricity system experienced gradual, diversified, and relatively predictable demand growth. This environment influenced how grid forecasting methods, reliability standards, and cost-allocation mechanisms were designed. However, data centers are now entering the electricity system faster and at a larger scale than planning, regulatory, and market-based institutions can manage.

To be clear I'm not saying that data centers must be off grid. Just that they should not be permitted to destabilize energy markets where they are built. To this end, Texas and Viginia are passing laws that require large-load customers to fund the increased generation and transmission costs:

> To manage price increases and allocative risk, Dominion proposed the GS-5 “High Load” tariff, which would apply to customers with at least 25 MW of demand. Under the tariff, large customers would pay a greater share of the generation, transmission, and distribution investments needed to serve large loads (such as data centers). Although large customers already pay for some on-site connection facilities, the proposed GS-5 tariff would go a step further. For example, if Dominion must build a dedicated substation or high-voltage line to serve a GS-5 campus, the infrastructure would be treated as customer-specific, and their costs recovered from the high-load customer instead of through general rates.

This is a reasonable approach to me. Although in some cases it might actually be quicker and cheaper for data centers to just handle their own power generation (as was the case with that data center in Ireland) separate from the grid.

[1] https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-...