The panel is billed as an energy discussion and turns into an argument about who decides. Sridhar's observation is the one that carries: large refineries draw hundreds of megawatts and do not use the grid at all, generating on site because routing industrial demand through infrastructure built for everyone else never made sense — and upgrading that shared infrastructure for a single gigawatt-scale consumer is, in his word, bonkers. Around that sit the constraints that make it tempting. Grids in the United States and Europe are decades old, permitting runs to years even where it has been halved, and Busch's account of Sweden adding ten reactors' worth of unstorable wind capacity while consumption stayed flat is a precise illustration of why installed capacity is the wrong measure. Payne supplies the argument operators will use wherever power is scarce: AI infrastructure produces more economic output per electron than any other industry by an order of magnitude. Persuasive on its own terms, and about to be deployed in places where the competing use is a neighbourhood.
