This sounds really cool and all governmenty

> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

It is important to remember that clarifying the legal implications of "pledge" is entirely different than supporting and/or defending this instance of its usage.

One can do the former whilst repudiating the latter and remain logically consistent.

I'm not understanding why clarifying the legal implications is important if it's a smoke screen for everyone involved doing what they are going to do anyway. It seems more like a distraction away from the real problems.

What is the point of reading it? Pledges mean nothing.

It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.

We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.

This absolutely cannot backfire. /s

Good. I want more power plants built, especially ones that don't emit CO2.

You seem to be missing the point that they should be public utilities.

Tech companies are exceedingly good at giving things away for free to get all the "market share" and then monetizing.

What’s wrong with this?

Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.

Why would adding a new supplier to the market cause the price of power to go up?

Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".

The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.

I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.

Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.

I'm sure power plant building companies won't say no to more business

Grid overload if they produce too much base load.

Interconnection expenses.

Same issues as with mining and large industrial clients generally.

"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.

In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.

You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.

In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.

I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.

No they should not. They should donate that money to non-profit public utility operators instead.