I’m not sure there is a good alternative, but it is a problem. So many public infrastructure projects in the US are shot down or neutered because of short term issues outweighing long term upsides.
Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.
Also, electricity being publicly owned (as in: everyone within a town is a shareholder with 1 share of the public utility company with the ability to get information about its running, fire the board with enough votes, etc) would be great.
The common narrative is state-owned vs privately owned, but what about community owned? What if the people the utility directly affects were shareholders? They might be incentivized to actually upkeep it well and keep costs low.
And into this scheme when investment in new technology is needed, you then could have open meetings and plans on how the state / gov money is to be used, instead of going into the black hole of utility companies that are dramatically inefficient and corrupt.