No Stupid Questions

I’d like to remind everyone the infrastructure act in 2022 set aside craploads to build out electrical transmission infrastructure. Not that they could have made a difference yet but that money allocated by Congress got pulled back by the executive branch.

Remember that next time your rates go up - we could at least be distributing power across larger areas to effectively increase supply, while also giving more opportunity for power generation to connect.

And since I live in New England, fuck taco Don Quixote in particular for his senseless war against wind turbines - these were like the only new power generation we had about to come online

Oh! Planet Money just did a really good episode on this exact topic.

It’s complicated and I recommend a full listen to the episode, but the big two reasons are:

1. The cost of building out all the new infrastructure is partially paid for by the data centers, but the majority is paid by all customers.
2. The demand for electricity is growing much faster than supply can be built.

Those two, combined with the deregulation in most markets, has meant that the price for everyone is going up.

The electric companies have to build more generation and infrastructure to accommodate the huge demand from data centers. The electric companies tend to spread that cost among all customers.

Mine is going up 10% next year, got a letter from them. Data center coming soon even though not 1 person in town wants it.

FUCK THESE CORPORATIONS

Its supply and demand. The AI data centers are paying their electric bills, but at the same time they represent a significant increase in demand for electricity, so electric companies can raise their prices.

The same way you pay more for gas in summer or when the economy is doing well: demand is higher so prices go up.

When there is a finite amount of something and someone with more money wants it, it makes the price of it for everyone go up to make it so that some people can no longer afford to compete for the resource, making it available for the higher spender. (Yes there's also infrastructure being built, but they will out compete us for that too)

Same thing with land & property on it, the working class can't afford to buy housing now, because rich people want to use housing as an investment vehicle.

Food is another (though also tied to land ownership)

Ultimately it's the same problem across the board and the solution is generally a wealth tax to prevent densely concentrated capital from distorting the market.

Specifically for these companies, they're simply too big. They need to be broken up and need to be prevented from getting this size again. If they truly cannot be broken up, they should be nationalised.

Failure to address these issues will result in these companies and people holding a total monopoly on all the resources available. More expensive electricity is only the beginning.

This is the part where I tell you that residential electricity costs are higher to basically subsidize commercialized electricity!! This is how it's always been even without AI. Not defending it, I definitely think it's bullshit

Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?

It's this, but that's only part of the story.

Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.

Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers (whose existence has blown up all their capacity planning) more.

As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it's ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.

Here in Texas my rates tripled from last year. I spent more and didn't cool my house nearly as much this last summer

Conversly, accorsing to most of these responses it sounds like if your nearby data center were to mysteriously vanish, your electric bill would go down.

Why would the companies pay the bill? What are we gonna do, not have electricity or go use the other company that either doesn't exist or is raising rates for the same reason? Folks like you are just now noticing that this whole system is a scam, but unfortunately the time for action was 30 years ago.