So I do actually work for a utility that has a LOT of data centers being put in near it.

The plan, as it stands, is massive capital expenditure outlay (read: spending a ton of money).

We’re planning on adding 2-3 combined cycle natural gas plants, I don’t even know how many solar farms, and 3-4 battery storage facilities, along with significantly expanding our transmission grid (though we are trying to put a lot of the generating facilities near data centers to cut down on the need for transmission lines); basically almost doubling our generating capacity over the next 5 years.

Revenue to support this is supposedly only going to come from the companies themselves, and from what I can tell, the contracts were written in such a way that the companies are responsible for making minimum charge payments for 10-20 years even if they should default (but the companies themselves are Google and other similarly sized firms, so I’m not sure how well enforceable those will be should these firms really decide to cut bait…)

It makes me deeply uneasy; not to mention, most of the supplied power isn’t coming from completely green or renewable sources, and we are keeping our coal plants operational instead of phasing them out, which was supposedly the original plan before AI became so ubiquitous. And that is to say nothing of trying to get all of this shit, substations, transmission lines, and plants, in the ground in like a 5 year window, in an area that has been extremely low growth for longer than I’ve been alive.