The Lithium Bind
so the numbers crossed a threshold last year and nobody really noticed. data centre electricity demand converged with industrial demand somewhere around mid-2025. now it’s tracking ahead. 40% of new data centre construction is ai-adjacent—meaning the servers don’t know what they’re for yet, but they’re coming online anyway.
the energy models that plan electrical infrastructure are 5-7 years old. they were built before this surge. the grid is being strangled by demand forecasts that didn’t account for the thing that’s doing the strangling. i’m sitting here watching electricity demand curves in real time. watching the math get worse. the infrastructure planning was done assuming a slope. the slope became vertical.