You know, except for that whole climate change thing. The fastest power to spool back online is older coal, oil, and gas plants.
Then make those uneconomical, and reap the benefits of a slower (but still massive) rampup of clean power.
Re:Less Popular Than Coal
by harimau777 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:05PM
(#50373180)
It doesn't seem like the people most opposed to AI are the people opposing more energy. Wasn't it MAGA that was fighting solar and off shore wind?
Re:Less Popular Than Coal
by ZnerflBerp on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:14PM
(#50373278)
Because rushed out power plants have a high chance of going wrong?
> Right - so instead of getting mad at datacenters, how about getting out of the way of building more powerplants?
Grid upgrades take years at the best. Utilities are already doing what they can, with re-conductoring existing power lines, adding more substations, etc.
Re:Less Popular Than Coal
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:42PM
(#50373490)
To add to that: Datacenters are not waiting for those grid upgrades, or at least they are not planning to. They're planning to add onsite generation, which will be more noisy and more polluting per kWh than real power plants would be.
Electricity is the ultimate fungible resource. You can convert electricity into food, housing, medicine, video games, football games (either sort), transportation, etc.
The more electricity we produce, the more broadly prosperous we will be.
It's not a question of needing more electricity - we don't need any electricity at all. We got by without it for 100k years until just the last few. But still, the more we have, the better all our lives will be.