What the grid looks like in different countries is very different. The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables, which is an inconvenience for adding capacity because that's around where you have to start really dealing with storage in order to add more.

In most other places the percentage is significantly less than that and then you can easily add more of the cheap-but-intermittent stuff because a cloudy day only requires you to make up a 10% shortfall instead of a 50% one, which existing hydro or natural gas plants can handle without new storage when there are more of them to begin with.

    > The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables
I was a bit stunned when I read this. Your estimate is very close for 2025 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...

I calculate about 43.5% was solar or wind. What is way crazier is the "bend in the curve" of production sources in the last 10 years. Look here at how fast solar and wind is growing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netherlands_electricity_g...

I don’t think the source of the electricity is particularly relevant to whether or not you have the transport capacity to add tens of megawatts of demand to the grid. The problem is generally not the supply but whether your local transformers have capacity left.

When you're talking about something that draws megawatts existing transformers are pretty irrelevant because you're going to run high voltage lines directly to the site itself and install new dedicated transformers on site.

What's more common is that they don't have the transmission capacity itself, but that one's pretty easy in this case too, because what that means is that you have an existing transmission line which is already near capacity with generation on one end and customers on the other. So then you just build the data center on the end of the transmission line where the generation is rather than the end where the existing customers are, at which point you can add new generation anywhere you want -- and if you put it near the existing customers you've just freed up transmission capacity because you now have new customers closer to the existing generation and new generation closer to the existing customers.