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Greenfielding new commercial construction? Absolutely, put it in now. Back in the 80s, a family member's residential construction business put in a fiber network for the power company in a front range city, and the one-time installation cost has paid for itself about a thousand times over, even allowing for updated runs and municipal gigabit fiber to the home in that neighborhood. Smart infrastructure investment is usually a good deal, even if it's pricey up front.
Just don't make me re-wire my entire panel box for solar/battery/EV deployment, when I have none of those things, just to finish my damn basement.
I’ll agree to a point, but I think for a lot of people looking to build for business this could easily end up making it cheaper and faster to find places that don’t mandate those future ready things. That’s cost disease in a nutshell. I don’t have the money to lay that cable under my parking lot to maybe possibly use it five years later. And if the barriers are high, I might well end up either just not building at all and taking my business elsewhere. Which ultimately reduces jobs in the area, tax receipts, and just general quality of life for residents who have to either pay the premium to shop locally in places that bent the knee and need to recoup the costs of charging stations for cars that nobody owns, or drive their gas powered cars an extra twenty miles to the next town where they can save cash on goods they need.
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Like I said, the devil is in the details. What constitutes "readiness?" I'm all for conduit and panel space, very much against ripping out existing anything.
Tons of the ticky tacky national builders give their customers panels that are already completely maxed out, such that in order to add an outlet without breaking code requirements you have to redo the entire box. It's smart to avoid that. Running heavy conduit up to the roof and out to the garage before you close the walls is trivial, after it's major surgery. That's smart policy. Putting thousands of dollars in wiring in is a mistake.
Even for conduit, the software concept of You Ain't Gonna Need It probably applies at scale -- depends on your assumptions as to adoption of course, but I'll be that the total cost of putting this everywhere is around the same OOM as the extra cost that would have been incurred by (say) spec-home buyers who end up using it.
Sort of a form of income transfer from low-end homebuyers who really want a low-end home to midrange folks who do end up upgrading things later.
This has always been a far too broad reactionary argument to tamper a tendency that goes too far. The wise engineer knows that there is a very small target of just enough helping yourself in the future without hindering yourself in the present. And I've only seen people develop a good sense of it through experience.
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At some point it gets complicated and we can split hairs. Are unit prices elastic to cost or primarily to demand? For the most part low end home buyers aren't actually checking things like electrical wiring, they're paying for ft^2 and location.
But the cost of putting conduit in a wall or under a parking lot is negligible. In any house I've renovated, I always run conduit between the major parts of the house, so as to at least be able to run a wire most of the way without cutting open any walls. Panel to the garage, panel to the attic, panel to the basement.
And the vast majority of them will never need that conduit -- so instead of just paying for sq. ft. and location, now they are paying also for the conduit that guys like you and @IGI-111 (and probably me, TBF) want. The builder doesn't put that stuff there for free.
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