What about a making it prerequisite? Demonstrate you have built the nuclear/solar/whatever capacity to cover your own energy before you're allowed to build a datacenter?

Solar doesn't work well with 24/7 demand requirements, provisioning enough storage to fully even out intermittency drastically raises costs (most battery storage systems are for only 2-4 hours).

Nuclear has extremely onerous regulatory requirements.

I think this is the wrong way to go.

Let them buy energy, but why aren’t utilities’ power rates more strictly regulated?

Residential rates should be locked in with inflation, allow business rates to increase.

But you've just killed domestic manufacturing and any retail balancing on fine margins.

The only way to remove additional grid demand (and therefore cost) is to simultaneously flood the supply. The DCs should absolutely pay for that.

That’s fine with me, the government can just mandate utility capacity build-out.

These are monopoly businesses where the government has full control over the policy of their operation.

I would generally make the argument that data centers aren’t any different than manufacturing or retail businesses. Their demand should be considered equal in terms of priority - the government shouldn’t be artificially choosing industry preferences unless it has very good reason.

Either you’re a business and you pay the business price or you’re an individual and you pay the individual price.

> nuclear

See you in 15 years I guess.

Many site are already building their own capacity, but doing it (unfortunately) with gas turbines.

>any promises will be ignored, avoided or dumped onto regular people the very moment the approval is granted

Doesn't seem too hard to force the datacenter to put up a bond for it, and then if the requirements/timelines aren't met the bond's seized.

it's exceptionally hard because energy is fungible

try writing the contract, say, requiring 500MW of new gas generation to be built locally to power the DC, which is grid connected

they'll then secretly write a contract to sell 500MW of gas generation on the open market, conditional on approval

at some price they'll find a buyer, at which point 500MW increase in grid capacity has been cancelled out despite them actually building the plant

and all it cost them was the difference in the contract price

Hmm not quite following: 500MW was created at connected to grid as required although delegated to 3rd party. And the DC uses that power. So what's the problem?

500MW doesn't get built on the other side of the country when needed as the power has been sold

so there's a lag, but at this kind of scale you don't really care