Look, even if you think AI electricity consumption is overstated, this does not change the fact that residential and commercial business electricity demands have only grown over time and the US electrical grid is largely based on infrastructure built in the 1950s and 1960s, making it over 70 years old. We have a fundamental problem with our grid infrastructure, ANNND we keep adding sources of electricity to old infrastructure. Why is this problematic? Well, the best analogy I can think of is when you take an existing outdated website or application, and, instead of building it back correctly from scratch, you just keep adding new code on top of old code. This eventually leads to larger errors and problems on your website. Same goes for the electrical grid. This causes more outages and power strains on the grid. (charts via: Thunder Said Energy)