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Data centers need electricity, utilities need years to build – who should pay?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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I would suggest requiring these datacenters to also invest in sufficient green energy to power them.
It is very interesting to me that we don't make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don't put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.
The thing that's breaking our systems here isn't that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.
I'm surprised we didn't make 'bring your own power' a rule before; I guess it's infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn't fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?