alt Hacker NewsWhat an absolute ecological disaster. If bubble there is, now would be a great time for it to pop.
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Alternatively the crisis can be used to accelerate right development - quickly build up solar farms and transmission lines. Both of these can be done quickly if there were a political will. Yet, that will is missing.
So, we're talking 40GW. Lets see what China does:
https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
"In the first two months of 2026, China added:
32.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity, down 18% from last year. 11 GW of wind power capacity, up 19% from last year. 20 GW of thermal power capacity, up 414% from last year. 1.2 GW of hydro power capacity, down 36% from last year. 1.2 GW of nuclear power capacity. "
Edit: to the proponents of nuclear - i think nuclear is very damaging to society as it promotes corrupt crony-government capitalism instead of market forces.
By that logic almost any kind of economic development is an ecological disaster because it uses power.
This is a defeatist EU attitude that leads to the worse outcomes. Expensive power and a failing economy.
There is money now for a huge investment boom, which is what is happening in the US and China. With EU failing completely.
And especially terrible for the communities that have to live with gas turbines or other local power generators as neighbors. Noise and air pollution constantly [1].
But fuck them, they are poor people so we don't care about them /s .
Additionally, people against data centers are accused of being paid by China [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus... [2] https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...
As an (eastern) European this is to me a greater concern than the Russian invasion in terms of availability of gas for the winter, considering how so many of those places run on gas turbines.
Putin only has a certain amount of the resource on tap and sells it to someone eventually. Meanwhile data centers will eat up whatever you throw at them at any price, especially that in principle they don't need to be connected to the grid, so I imagine setting up their power supply must take months at the longest.