Chaset: Data center grid expansion is overhyped due to regulatory bottlenecks
Nick Chaset · Catalyst Live at SF Climate Week · May 1, 2025 · at 17:36
At SF Climate Week, Nick Chaset and Mike Schroepfer debate whether AI and data center electricity demand growth will translate into rapid physical power infrastructure delivery.
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“There's only so much connection capacity in the system and the ability to sort of expand connection capacity is reliant on utilities who are then in turn reliant on the regulatory commissions to give them authority to build new things. And the timescales at which they operate are so designed to be slow timescales. It's not necessarily that the utilities fall. I'm sure the utilities would love to put more capital to work faster. But they just are not allowed to do it by their regulator, and they have to go through a rate case, and so the idea that we have Tens of gigawatts of capacity. They're somehow going to bypass these planning processes that have been in place for decades I think is a reflection of, like, maybe a lack of understanding of, like, how utilities build things and how regulators evaluate how and when things get built.”
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