I attribute this to selection bias, they aren't building datacenters in areas with inelastic grids.

My fiat job before going full-time Bitcoin was working on grid systems for the utlity co, in one of the most expensive (the?) states in the country for electricity.

Geographically we should be a great spot for datacenters, but they aren't going up here....

Because it's not just about adding baseload supply, during my time there was peak solar panel money laundering, hundreds of millions being spent to destroy cattle pasture to put in those unsightly pieces of shit... all in the name of getting costs down.

What happened to those panel fields? Many, particularly the biggest, sat unproductive (still sit?) for YEARS because the grid head end couldn't handle connecting them.

There's SCADA and transmission etc to consider, you could air drop a bunch of SMR's here and it wouldn't matter because the grid is so decay'd they couldn't be switched on. Base load is just one of many bottlenecks.