I agree the permitting process has hindered building in America, but I'm not convinced the current regimes in charge can craft legislation that actually helps people. America keeps voting for something new because the last attempt hasn't changed the status quo.
Is there a source for this?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/united-airlines-ceo-...
but generally loud gas turbines (don't have to have jet engine lineage)
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/old-polluting-jet-engi...
Not all turbines operate the same. What are you trying to argue or advocate for here?
Even if congress "fixed" this problem tomorrow it would still take years to build the increased capacity (as you note). Since we do essentially have a fixed supply regime the fast buildout of data centers we've seen over the last few years has indeed been the cause of increased power prices. I'll also add that several renewable power generation projects had been in the works and this administration killed them (even paying a lot of money to kill them).
I haven't read it, and I do support some level of expediency with grid buildout, but it sounds like it opens the door to ruining cultural landmarks, no prevention of abuse for fossil fuel purposes. Finally, and I mean this honestly: If the administration supports it, it probably is something worth pausing to consider.
It's not their sovereign land, except in the sense that the entirety of the US is 'their land.' Tribes are sovereign over their own land and BAJAA does not change that. It is common for tribes to litigate things outside of their own lands and administered by/for the public, for instance this landmark case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation_v._United_States...
Some cases that have won use RFRA to legally discriminate against minorities by Evangelical Christians. Native Americans bring lawsuits based on their religion over a sacred site and reclaimed water, just like anyone else can, and yet losing "this landmark case" somehow proves they have too much power?
It really does though. And you are misattributing the why you don't have to give shit about their "bullshit superstitions". Are you from the US? This is taught in grade school...
> Thats the whole point(major point) of how this country was founded, religious freedom from the government.
I would be very happy if we repealed the RFRA and returned to the well established case law for fundamental 1st amendment protections.
Would you personally be A-OK with tonnes of treated sewerage being dumped upshed from your drinking water extraction point?
Responsible elders / leaders are expected to to do their best to slow roll or stop such changes being made - once it becomes routine its much harder to stop as problems present.
What if they only ran the transmission lines behind their eyesore casinos?
There are plenty of other laws available to prevent various things from happening. The difference is that those need a government prosecutor to initiate a case rather than letting every member of the public file a nuisance lawsuit. Which they would do in your "someone trying to run HVDC through the Grand Canyon" scenario and any other sufficiently egregious case, but not do when someone is just trying to build a boring wind farm on some boring land they own.
https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/rethinking-l...
If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.
The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/84456/Town-Residents-Conce...
we're honestly screwed as a country, funny to see.
The prevalence of dirt roads in VT is an intentional policy decision.
The snow plow as two axles
Didn't describe that population at all. EMT, Nurses, college professors, generational farmers, trades people. The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.
Sure sounds like a service economy that feeds upon retirement and tourism money to me....(I know what they look like, I grew up in one)
>The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.
I don't care exactly who winds up holding the bag but when you drive from literally anywhere bordering Vermont into Vermont it's pretty clear what the level of investment in transportation infrastructure is. And this infighting over how some petty amount of truck traffic is gonna destroy a dirt road is exactly what's downhill of that under-investment.
And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.
The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station
Wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do much for enhancing biodiversity either, which is fine because their purpose is to generate electricity.
> The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant
Only by counting burning biomass as emitting new CO2 while not counting the CO2 it removed from the air from being grown.
Coal isn't part of the active carbon cycle. It would stay locked in the ground indefinitely if you didn't dig it up.
Moreover, that plant appears to get getting biomass as compressed pellets from sawmill scrap wood and sawdust, i.e. it's the refuse from trees that were already being logged to make lumber. If they didn't burn it then it would go into a landfill to rot and release the carbon anyway.
Sure they will get sawmill scraps if they can, but if built this will be by far the largest biomass reactor in the country. When I did the math there’s not enough available scrap in the entire country to power this thing.
They’ve explicitly stated that they need 5.5 million tons of timber from the surround 250 miles of forest annually.
>Burning them does the same thing as the second one, which was going to happen on its own.
Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
So yes better than coal but over the lifetime of anyone alive today it’s essentially the same thing, so it’s only really better than coal if you are looking 100 years into the future and if you stop doing cutting down existing trees at some point.
Which tracks since it's in England and they're getting pellets from the US, Canada and Europe.
> Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
But who is logging old growth trees for biomass?
In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
Moreover, you can always find that one asshat doing something ridiculous, but the world also generates a lot of scrap wood or cuts down a lot of trees just to clear the land. Burning them to generate electricity is never going to be large proportion of world power generation, but doing it to the extent that the trees were just going to rot anyway seems pretty hard to object to.
That’s not all that much unused wood scrap, so if you’re building a large biomass plant you’re going to end up harvesting timber.
> In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
In Europe maybe. In the US and Canada it’s very common to harvest timber from naturally grown forests (vs managed plantations) that are being cut primarily for the timber.
A biomass plant harvesting existing timber would only be better if the alternative were building a new coal plant.
This isn’t replacing anything though. We don’t need an extra 1.5GW, so if this project doesn’t go through the alternative will be that we continue moving towards more solar and wind.
There is more excess data center power demand than there is capability to build plants over the next 10 years, so if this plant isn’t built the likely result is 1 less data center and not releasing carbon from 5.5 million tons of timber per year.
I’d upgrading the grid made sense I assume National Grid and Berkshire Gas would do it.
On paper, sure.
In reality they'd probably have to secede from the state to do it.
Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years. The problem is that capex deployed to serve data centers is being paid for by households, not that it cannot be deployed.
Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are about as hard as anywhere in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear evidence of price increase there from their data centers while Virginia and the southern Bay Area saw 15–20%. The price increases track data-center demand, not energy-related permitting overhead.
The bill you cited would fix much of this, but it would do so via provisions forcing data centers to pay for the costs they cause, instead of forcing households to subsidize them.
If your point is “it’s policy,” fine. But the policy causing this is cost allocation, not permitting.
Data centers pay for electricity under the tariffs utilities charge them. To the extent their demand increases wholesale electricity prices, it's the normal consequence of additional demand competing for constrained supply. In no other market is it standard for the person outbidding to also pay for continuing to provide the service to the person who was outbid. The only reason there is much incremental grid cost is because utilities are legally required to continue serving their residential customers. It seems extremely reasonable for residences to share in some of these costs when getting electricity at a significant discount from market price.
The notion that 'households' are paying for data center electricity is just not what is happening. Maybe residences should get discounted electricity, but again this is a policy question and I'm not sure the best use of the marginal federal dollar.
> Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
Investment is not transmission built, I don't see how this disproves the well-documented countrywide transmission delays. If anything, it is an indication that we are transmission bottlenecked.
If you're the last house on your block to upgrade your home service to 200A in order to charge an EV, should you be cost allocated 100% of the distribution transformer upgrade that happened to be needed to service you? After all your neighbors were doing just fine until you wanted more capacity.
How about the new subdivision of 200 homes that requires a regional transmission line upgrade? Does that developer (and thus new - typically younger - homeowners) need to pay for the entire upgrade or should that be split over all the ratepayers? Utilities don't tend to upgrade lines to meet exact current demand - that upgrade is going to be spec'ed to be good for decades of additional growth so the next subdivision next door is going to be effectively getting a free ride.
I agree cost allocation needs to be fair. Part of that is the "last comer" is not the one to bear all the costs of needed upgrades. Otherwise things like rapid EV chargers in office parking lots would never get built.
Cost of generation kind of takes care of itself in a sane market. That's just called a power bill. If it's being priced in a way where one user subsidizes another that simply needs to be fixed. Typically those "subsidies" are going in the other direction though as constant 24x7x365 usage is much cheaper to service than rare correlated demand spikes residential users give you.
The transmission grid is a much harder thing to cost allocate fairly.
It's unsurprising that those communities see and reject this as a bad deal, that's politics working as intended.
Much of today's higher prices are attributable to the high cost of the permitting process. If you want the government to fix something, have them fix that.
Moreover, renewable generation isn't actually more expensive. LCoE for solar and wind is now something like $0.06/kWh, which is better than fossil fuels. That doesn't count the storage you'd need to use them for 100% of the grid, but we're nowhere near using them for 100% of the grid so that isn't relevant yet, and using them for e.g. 50% of the grid doesn't really require storage. Moreover, you can get a large storage sink "for free" by electrifying transportation, because then you have millions of large batteries that you can charge when cheap generation is available and let them stay at 60% rather than 90% when it isn't.
One problem is that they only produce when the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing, etc…. These can be ameliorated with batteries, but that still takes a significant additional expense.
The bigger problem is location. They’re only cost-effective if you put them in the right places, and that’s usually far away from where people want to use that power. Which means you need transmission lines. And those take as long or longer to permit and build as do nuclear or combined-cycle natural gas power plants. These things tend to be delivered in terms of 120 months, or more. Not 120 days, like the datacenter builders want.
There are no quick and easy solutions here. Sure, you can truck in jet engines to use them as generators, but then you have to fuel them, you have to deal with the exhaust and added pollution, you have to deal with the noise, you have to deal with all the extra water you’re going to need to run them, you have to deal with added risk of toxic spills due to all the extra fuel you have to have on-site, you have to deal with added risk of fires because of that fuel, you have to deal with the increased heat island effects of running those engines, etc….
And datacenter builders want to externalize all their costs. This is the one single fundamental problem with them and all other big businesses.
If we make the datacenter builders fully internalize all of their costs, then we won’t have these problems.
This is the irrelevant part when they're not the majority of the grid. We already have peaker plants to handle the differences in load throughout the day. They currently mostly run during the day and the early evening. You build a bunch of new solar and instead they'd mostly run at night, because the new solar takes the existing daytime demand plus the new daytime demand and the existing peaker plants take the new nighttime demand.
> They’re only cost-effective if you put them in the right places, and that’s usually far away from where people want to use that power.
This is not really true in the US. Solar doesn't work very well in Alaska because it's too far north, but it's fine basically anywhere south of the Canadian border, which is where essentially the entire US population actually lives. The average wind speed in every US state is enough to run a wind turbine.
There are some locations that are better than others, but better enough to build a thousand mile transmission line? That's almost a coin flip even before you consider what a liability it is to centralize power into a big exposed long-distance transmission line instead of just distributing the generation everywhere.
> Sure, you can truck in jet engines to use them as generators, but then you have to fuel them...
As a temporary measure, that's the trade off against short-term higher electric bills. As a permanent measure they're rubbish, but they're not needed as a permanent measure anyway.
> And datacenter builders want to externalize all their costs.
That's not what that means. You can't internalize demand for a commodity. All you can do is increase supply to meet the new demand.
They need a buffer to be able to fully and properly contribute to the grid. Without a buffer, solar and wind farms are already causing some problems. They can’t really grow much beyond where they are today, without adding a buffer. Sad, but true.
T. Boone Pickens is pushing wind as hard as he possibly can out in the Texas panhandle, and it’s getting harder and harder for him to do that, in part because much of that is done without a buffer. Granted, he’s also having to fight transmission line problems.
For solar to be effective from the perspective of the grid, it needs to be installed in a place that gets enough average sunshine. And that latitude line is way lower than the border between Canada and the US. You also have to take weather and climate patterns into account, because if you’re below that line but you get too much average cloud cover, then you’re still not cost-effective enough.
The only places where you can install solar panels without regards for those kinds of constraints, is where people don’t care how many panels they have to install, in order to get the amount of average power that they need. If you over-provision by enough, then you can install useful amounts of solar in otherwise considerably less than ideal sites. But then you’re also willing to pay a price and space premium that no grid operator would be willing to pay. Many homeowners might fit into this category.
And many places where you would want to install solar panels close to the consumers so that you can avoid long transmission lines, that land just isn’t available. Or not available at a price that any grid operator would be willing to pay.
This happens with solar in the summer because it generates more in the summer, and then if you build enough for the other seasons you have "too much" on many days in the summer. But storage doesn't help much for that anyway because you'd need storage that lets you store power from July to use in January.
And "too much" isn't a problem when it only happens a minority of the time. You'll have critics complaining if it happens at all, but that doesn't mean it's a real problem.
The real problem is "not enough", which is the thing that doesn't get really bad until you're trying to run the majority of the grid on it. If it's only half then the other half is reliable power sources, some of those are still peaker plants and then you have the option to run them during the day on the days when it's cloudy, renewable generation is sometimes low but it's hardly ever actually zero, and by that point you're at something like 80% coverage on the lowest generation days and can get the remaining 20% through variable pricing.
> For solar to be effective from the perspective of the grid, it needs to be installed in a place that gets enough average sunshine.
A solar panel generates ~50% more in Arizona (on the border with Mexico) than New York (on the border with Canada). That isn't totally negligible but but it's not so large as to make it unworkable.
> Many homeowners might fit into this category.
Naturally, because it solves two problems at once. First, no land cost because you're using what would otherwise be an empty roof. Second, no transmission cost because the power is consumed where it's generated.
This is an easy win for homeowners because even at the less advantageous latitudes, they'd be paying ~$0.10/kWh for their own solar while the New York power company is asking 28.6.
And there are still plenty of not just homes but also commercial buildings that don't have solar on their roof. Give every Walmart and Home Depot an incentive to install a support scaffold full of panels over every parking lot. Why pay for a lot of land when we haven't even taken the easy wins yet?
You're not thinking like a grid operator. They need to pay to keep those peaker plants operational, even if they're not being used. The more peaker plants that have to be kept offline for more of the time, the less attractive it is to buy the power from the solar or wind plants.
Until solar and wind can generate reliable amounts of power, day-in and day-out, 365 days out of the year, you will always need those peaker plants to take up the slack. But those renewable sources will never be able to do that. The best they can hope for is to overgenerate during the times that they are capable of doing so, and storing the excess somehow in another medium. That could be batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, or whatever. But they need that buffer if they are going to be a larger part of the grid.
> A solar panel generates around two thirds as much in New York (on the border with Canada) as in Arizona (on the border with Mexico). That isn't totally negligible but it's not so large as to make it unworkable.
It might not be enough to keep homeowners from installing solar panels in those kinds of environments, but it's definitely enough to keep large-scale power generation facilities from building there.
> And there are still plenty of not just homes but also commercial buildings that don't have solar on their roof. Give every Walmart and Home Depot an incentive to install a support scaffold full of panels over every parking lot. Why pay for a lot of land when we haven't even taken the easy wins yet?
I agree that parking lots and roofs of buildings are targets that look easy. But the incentives just aren't there. It's still just way too expensive, for not nearly enough ROI to make it happen. And I just don't see incentives of that scale coming, not even with the New Democrats.
In theory, I don't disagree with you with regards to where we should be going and what we should be doing.
But in practice, there is a huge difference between theory and practice.
But they are being used, every night. And then you can also use them during the day on the minority of days when it's cloudy.
> It might not be enough to keep homeowners from installing solar panels in those kinds of environments, but it's definitely enough to keep large-scale power generation facilities from building there.
Nope:
https://cleanview.co/power-projects/operating/solar-farms/us
You could easily confuse that with a population density map of the US. The main tell is that the dots are on the outskirts of the major cities rather than in them.
> It's still just way too expensive, for not nearly enough ROI to make it happen.
It kind of is happening. Nearly 100% of net new generation capacity in the US is renewables, with some new natural gas barely offsetting the gradual of coal to net to zero.
So it's way worse, aside from populist "but think of the poor!" it is also actively hurting entire economy, driving prices up everywhere.
Care to explain how that fraction counts as "outbidding"?
Meanwhile the thing they're outbidding you on is generation.
Also I’m sharing 99.99% of the distribution costs with my neighbors.
Completely the opposite. Consumers are charged more for distribution because distribution to consumers costs more per kWh to build and maintain. Distribution to sites with large consumption has a much lower cost per kWh, which those sites are already paying, which is why they pay less per kWh even with that cost already included.
> Also I’m sharing 99.99% of the distribution costs with my neighbors.
Your neighbors who are also consuming an average of ~1kW, so the ~20 houses on your mile-long suburban street are consuming ~20kW in total. A 100MW+ site which is a mile from the substation or power plant has distribution costs that are thousands of times lower per kWh, will generally be located close to them for exactly that reason, and may also be sharing the same lines with other neighboring commercial/industrial sites.
It’s the market that is being distorted by all the additional datacenters coming online and wanting to suck down all the power that the entire rest of the country needs.
That market distortion is what needs to be fixed. Datacenter builders need to cover ALL the costs of ALL of the additional infrastructure needed to support their operation, plus the standard daily OpEx once all the infrastructure is in place.
And they need to comply with all national and international laws regarding their operation, including adherence to Dark Sky rules for lighting in-site, ensuring that they don’t cause any additional noise for any of the surrounding area, ensuring that they don’t cause any problems with water pollution, and so much more.
That's not what the article is describing.
What's happening is that price is used suppress demand during the period between when demand increases and when supply responds. That isn't the cost of increasing supply, it's the cost of not having it already. Which is why you want to cause the period between the one and the other to be as short as possible.
> Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
The claim that supply is fixed is "false" in the sense that it isn't literally impossible to add new supply. It is, however, much more difficult than it could or should be, which makes the investment cost more and take longer than it otherwise would, and in the meantime people are paying higher prices.
Moreover, "17x" doesn't really mean anything when the base rate started so close to zero. We've been deterring these investments for far too long.
> Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear price increase there from data centers.
New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure which is why the price of electricity there is already high and then you don't get increased demand in the place with high prices since the high prices shift the demand to other locations.
That's not a useful strategy if you want lower prices since the prices there are only not going up there because they're already up there.
> Your comment doesn’t engage with the article’s central finding at all: who pays.
We need to distinguish two things here.
The first is, who pays for the actual long-term costs of increasing generation. But that's easy, because that cost isn't actually that high. It's equivalent to the normal pre-existing price of electricity. It might even be less because e.g. solar has gotten pretty cheap and to the extent that you add that, the average generation cost would even go down.
The second is, what happens during the period between when the new demand comes online and when the new generation comes online? But having new data centers "pay" that to keep the short-term price of electricity from going up is not possible, because having the short-term price go up is the thing that suppresses the short-term demand to keep it from exceeding supply. If the price didn't go up in the interim then the demand at the lower price would exceed available supply.
Which brings us back to, what you need is to bring the new generation online as quickly as possible.
This is the same as with roads. Roads are subsidized for corporations because damage is proportional to 4th power of weight (upto 9th power of weight on poor roads).
Almost all corporations in US are 'successful' on the backs of being subsidized by consumers in many ways.
There's plenty of reason to leave the problem in place. The current regime is corrupt, and energy scarcity benefits entrenched fossil fuel players who are cozy with the administration.
Congress has up until now given its endorsement to all of this. Will a new Congress care? Time will tell.
The issue isn't how difficult it is to provision new power, it's that no matter how cheap it will be and how unregulated it will be, datacenters will look to 1) skirt environmental law, and 2) arbitrage cheaper areas that end up being forced to split the price to increase production between the dcs and the locals.
Very large consumers should be required to pay for new production when it's obvious that only them benefit from it, there's absolutely no reason to split the bill with the locals, especially when datacenter have close to zero local economic benefits.
So scale that up and you could produce GW of power with solar batteries and throw in some wind and longer storage (gravity or hydrogen) and maybe a backup gas for like a rare week of no wind or sun.
And you can just keep scaling up. It is the AWS of power.
It's pretty simple: the more you use, the more you pay per unit.
And do we really think that giving corporations more power to make more money is somehow going to lessen the cost for consumers? Have you seen that play out that way in the past two years?
Why can't these rural areas just let this outside money build power infra at the drop of a hat?
Rules.
Who's rules?
Well it wasn't the town in the middle of nowhere that got screwed when steel mill closed or the glass cookware plant packed up for Vietnam who wrote the rules that's for sure...
Congress could fix this problem tomorrow. And in fact there is a bipartisan bill (BAAJA) that would go a long ways (although not all the way) towards fixing it. Now yes even if we fix these policies there would be a time lag on new generation being connected, but there is no reason to leave this problem in place.