I don't understand. Did we not already have that rule?
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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No, electricity bills have been skyrocketing all over the US because electric companies have been passing the costs incurred by AI data centers onto the nearby residents. The AI companies don't want to pay for it.
Not just pay for their own power, TAX THE FUCK OUT OF THEM.
They're in a hurry because there's a FUCKTON of cash in it, we need to TAX them like we ACTUALLY KNOW THAT.
Or in other words, as the cons would say - Schiff and other Democrats are extremists.
This country is completely dysfunctional.
That's shit.
We need it to be renewable power.
if they have to pay for it, so will they.
Please don't let this blasphemy go. They're using your fresh water, at your expense, for THEIR benefits. For AI clankers who cant fix an Excel sheet properly.
Even better, they are using OUR money to put everyone they possibly can out of work.
Why aren’t they paying for their own power?
They're not paying for additive demand. If grid updates or plant expansions cost $1b then that's distributed across all customers equally based on their consumption. So let's say there's 1m customers and the utility spread the costs over 10 years... $100 more per customer assuming equal consumption across.
Schiff is proposing the data center itself is saddled with the $1b and all other customers bills are held flat.
Free market bro. People have a market and you just show up and take what ya want.
After you’ve already made a billion.
Because it's cheaper to bribe officials to make the locals pay for it.
We can’t afford the pedophile class anymore
Fuck it. Make them use renewables as well.
I'd say make them fund the creation of power plants that will produce 200% of their 24 hour usage in 24 hours.
They shouldn't just make what they use. They should be improving the communities where they operate.
One step further.
Data centers must provide more clean energy to the grid than they remove.
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How is this not the default?
We are doomed, what a bunch of clowns
Pay!? Make them BUILD 2x the capacity they need and give the rest away to the grid. Don't let them get away with using money to escape the social consequences of their choices. The responsibility to ensure they have no impact should be forced to be theirs and theirs alone.
Write laws that make them cease to exist if they don't do this.
Given we have the technology, any new construction should be required to be environmentally neutral at a minimum, ideally with ongoing improvement.
If they need to use millions of gallons of groundwater? Great, go fucking wild, but directly fund managed aquifer recharge projects to replace that groundwater at an equal or greater rate.
Increases in resource consumption should be covered entirely by the data center plus improvements to benefit the community.
No longer should big business be used as a means to siphon the value of labor and natural resources and concentrate it for selfish use by the worst of humanity.
Data Centers should be forced to pay to return the cost of power by consumers to normal. So as Datacenters buy power at the going rate, increasing price, they will also subsidize consumers to the point that power costs are the same as if there were no Datacenter.
Also, LLMs are worthless and will burn life away from this planet.
How about pay for ALL the power?
Nah, I think we should give them all the power. All at once.
I don't get it. Why aren't they already paying for their power? Why is this bill necessary? It sounds like common fucking sense to me.
So who's paying for their power now?
"common sense" doesn't mean legislation isn't necessary, what kind of logic is that?
They do pay for their power. The bill would require them to pay for grid upgrades that their usage makes necessary.
Well yeah, but my question was: why does this need a bill at all? By default they should pay for their own shit.
At least my provider, when they need to build a new plant or do capacity upgrades, they get the PSC to give them blanket increases in service charge or kWh-rate, on the basis that everybody contributes to the higher demand. Now we've got single customers claiming they want the full output of two or three power plants, and why should I pay the mortgage on those plants for 20 years? When the data center will be gone in 5?
The grid itself is public property serviced by contractors using public funds. Datacenters will overwhelm that grid without extreme improvements.
So unless they're forced to pay for it, citizens will foot the bill.
I really hope this gets passed, but it sounds like something Trump's buddies would be against.
We are.
Same should go for any utility.
Right now a data center will come in and demand the power grid be expanded. They will bribe local officials whovwill then allow the electric company to massively increase rates to cover the new infrastructure the data center needs. Its pretty much the same as how the water service is handled.
Do water too.
If I’m not sharing the dollars, I’m not paying for the volts.
Or the stuff that transmits/makes the volts.
But data center owners will sue and it’ll go to the SC and they’ll rule corporations are citizens and therefore tax payers pay.
It amazes me that they don’t. You’d think it would be ideal in fact so they can be self sufficient.
It's way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they're going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).
I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.
And water too! Especially if they waste it!
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