When the first wave of these datacenter stories came out, the utilities complained that they couldn't finance the work because the data centers refused to commit to paying for them over the longer term, leaving other ratepayers on the hook for the investment.

This seems to further confirm that, though now the data centers are being portrayed as the victims in this.

The sentence immediately following your quote:

> securing grid-connected power now often requires developers to post substantial letters of credit, security deposits, or sign take-or-pay commitments to fund the generation built to serve their load.

The question is, if they couldn't commit to paying the utility, how can they finance building their own independant grid equivalent? Did they find some other sucker to take on the risk?

> The grid is a shared resource, used by enterprise and individuals. If some class of consumers demand an outsized share of that resource, they should pay an outsized share of its maintenance and development. I don't see that happening.

That makes sense up until you realize that the data centers aren't just burning watts for fun. They're providing a service that is in extremely high demand to a very high amount of those other electricity customers.

> It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.

And those trucks are delivering products to the stores those commuters shop at.

It's not "worse" per-say in that the buyer is crunching the numbers and deciding to go with on-prem generation for a lot of their jiggling electrons.

But holy shit is something broken if that sort of approach is more economically effective (middle of nowhere Alaska not withstanding) than having the people who not only specialize in pipes for jiggling electrons, but have all sorts of preferable treatment from regulators and expertise in financing these sorts of things, just enlarge the size of the pipe to your door.

Furthermore, the grid wants to be as big as it can for basically all the same inflow/outflow smoothy reasons a bank or an insurer wants to be. Something is very, very broken here if big, highly financed corporate interests are saying "no I'm not gonna get all my power from the grid" and the grid is saying "actually this is fine". They should be jumping at the chance to essentially have someone else at least partly subsidize their improvements.

Everyone wants to whine about future volatility, will the data centers be around to pay for what they ordered, etc, etc. But the energy industry has a long, long, long track record of financing this risk away. Oil and related energy infra has been boom and busting for over a century.

30yr ago it would have been unfathomable that anyone without an extremely niche case would go where the energy is rather than just ordering up power from the grid.

As an (eastern) European this is to me a greater concern than the Russian invasion in terms of availability of gas for the winter, considering how so many of those places run on gas turbines.

Putin only has a certain amount of the resource on tap and sells it to someone eventually. Meanwhile data centers will eat up whatever you throw at them at any price, especially that in principle they don't need to be connected to the grid, so I imagine setting up their power supply must take months at the longest.

Alternatively the crisis can be used to accelerate right development - quickly build up solar farms and transmission lines. Both of these can be done quickly if there were a political will. Yet, that will is missing.

So, we're talking 40GW. Lets see what China does:

https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

"In the first two months of 2026, China added:

32.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity, down 18% from last year. 11 GW of wind power capacity, up 19% from last year. 20 GW of thermal power capacity, up 414% from last year. 1.2 GW of hydro power capacity, down 36% from last year. 1.2 GW of nuclear power capacity. "

By that logic almost any kind of economic development is an ecological disaster because it uses power.

This is a defeatist EU attitude that leads to the worse outcomes. Expensive power and a failing economy.

There is money now for a huge investment boom, which is what is happening in the US and China. With EU failing completely.

And especially terrible for the communities that have to live with gas turbines or other local power generators as neighbors. Noise and air pollution constantly [1].

But fuck them, they are poor people so we don't care about them /s .

Additionally, people against data centers are accused of being paid by China [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus... [2] https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...