This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.
If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
I appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did.
For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.
Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.
jonas21 21 hours ago [-]
Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.
Grombobulous 19 hours ago [-]
Great clarification, thank you. I definitely did not get 53 slides deep.
22 hours ago [-]
omnimus 22 hours ago [-]
If you switch to renewables too quickly you will damage the investments in fossil energy sources that could be making big profits for decades to come.
amluto 22 hours ago [-]
If a jurisdiction switches to renewables too quickly, it damages the electorate’s tolerance for green policies.
sheepscreek 1 days ago [-]
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).
Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.
Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.
infecto 1 days ago [-]
The county narrative is cherry picking imo and poor journalism. They are part of PJM which contains one of the largest data centers hubs. The PJM grid serves something like 67mm residents. PJM also uses an annual forward capacity auction to set prices and that is at least partly to blame in price increases. They are trying to forecast peak demand 3 years in advance to set a price for power plant owners to stay online in the event of needing that peak capacity. It’s poorly designed and why they have had such significant spikes there.
FireBeyond 23 hours ago [-]
That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.
"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.
So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.
(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).
nonplus 20 hours ago [-]
Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.
Can it handle it today?
What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030?
Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran?
What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?
People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.
If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.
It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.
infecto 20 hours ago [-]
Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.
nonplus 19 hours ago [-]
If you want to pretend the only source of information on this subject is the linked article I'm sure you can find many users here to debate within your arbitrary parameters.
Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.
Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.
infecto 18 hours ago [-]
I’ve linked analyses explaining why PJM’s forward capacity market has been a major driver of recent retail rate increases, not just in this one county.
If you disagree, point to the analysis or data. Suggesting I’m “pretending” doesn’t address the argument. The article cherry-picks one county while largely ignoring the broader PJM pricing mechanics affecting millions of customers. Do better. Between pricing mechanics, input cost inflation and yes increase in demand has impact but not like the article likes to weave it.
infecto 20 hours ago [-]
Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.
bryan_w 20 hours ago [-]
> poor journalism.
404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like
legitster 22 hours ago [-]
In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.
One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.
Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.
Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.
smallmancontrov 22 hours ago [-]
If data centers can outbid poor people, the poor peoples' air conditioning becomes the variable load. Nana sweats so that Zuck can tokenmaxx.
CaliforniaKarl 23 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised that the 404 Media article does not mention anything about this. At least, searching for the word "Clean" did not return any results.
jollyllama 21 hours ago [-]
Coal was made unprofitable by fiat and the plants were demolished (supply decreased).
Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).
The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.
CrimsonRain 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
22 hours ago [-]
nonethewiser 23 hours ago [-]
The article is shit.
- electricity costs are rising
- there are many data centers
- claims data centers raise costs
- never actually shows how these new data centers are driving up electricity costs
Funny. They imply causation but never show it. If they had evidence that data centers caused this 25% increase, or a large percentage of it, dont you think they would show it?
Actually, you could write the exact same article but sub out data centers with the clean energy rollout.
22 hours ago [-]
Legend2440 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not surprised. 404 Media are anti-big tech and anti-AI activists. They are not shy about their agenda and do not claim to be unbiased.
platevoltage 22 hours ago [-]
I love tech, and I swear you Ai evangelists are making me anti-tech.
dmix 22 hours ago [-]
This is a popular social media take that is being pushed very hard by clickbait and doomposters, so it's not exactly going against the tide.
Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.
elgertam 23 hours ago [-]
As a Virginian, this is good information to have. I see a lot of ludicrous objections to data centers here (the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems and regardless the humidity here isn't evaporating water).
I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair of Virginia Tech's board and replace him with the CEO of Dominion) have had an impact on power use more than data centers themselves.
BugsJustFindMe 21 hours ago [-]
> the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems
Nb. Still many do not. Also, closed-loop systems use more electricity to operate, so it's not a cost-free solution.
8note 22 hours ago [-]
a different framing of this same information is that Dominion made dumb investment choices in the 2000s and 2010s, locking into electricity that has a fuel cost.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.
It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.
It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.
(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])
aftbit 22 hours ago [-]
>It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable
This is because the argument that we didn't have the grid capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and residential solar was never sincere. You could tell because the followup was never "and we should invest more in the grid" but rather the reactionary "and that's why we can't use EVs."
The same people would be opposed to data centers, if not for the fact that the AI buildout is making them all rich.
Kamq 1 days ago [-]
Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
Agreed that in some situations, on some US electric grids (ISOs/TSOs), data centers are absorbing their electrical supply costs that would otherwise be externalities. This is good, I fully support this. This is not uniform unfortunately, and remains to be solved for in totality imho. I take no issue if we get to a point where the AI bubble pops and we're left with net new electrical infrastructure that continues to provide benefit decades into the future while the data centers sit silent (similar to the "fiber boom bust glut" at the turn of the century). I take issue with the AI bubble costs being pushed citizens already, broadly speaking, unable to make ends meet merely out of a desire to speculate (and no one can be sure how long this exuberance and hype cycle is going to last; as long as it lasts, humans who need electricity at a reasonable cost are at risk).
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
infecto 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cduzz 1 days ago [-]
In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
phil21 1 days ago [-]
Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.
The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.
Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.
To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.
infecto 24 hours ago [-]
Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason.
We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
cduzz 24 hours ago [-]
I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
samothrace 21 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "AI dioxin"? Google turns up nothing for data centers releasing dioxin.
cduzz 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
coryrc 22 hours ago [-]
You mean boomers have been voting against any and every infrastructure investment besides more roads while they lived off the investments of their parents and grandparents? Worse generation in American history.
>Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge jump in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
Thank you this. Super helpful. There were so many articles and most of them did not mention price I skipped through it aggressively.
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
infecto 1 days ago [-]
I only skimmed because what I saw was either no evidence or low. They to touched on demand but not immediately the correlation to price which is hard to connect without supply and other mechanics that go into different electric grid geographies. This feels very similar to the water argument or the anti-solar farm crowd. Lots of emotions and not as many facts. I am going to lean on the original research link.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
No worries, voters are engaged so I am not concerned. Data centers are a third rail in politics at the moment. I encourage politicians and lobbyists to voice their support so we know who they are, as elections have consequences.
Why would anyone be worried? I was asking for actual science behind your claims. If you cannot it’s ok, just cements my thinking similar to the water claims people like to make. It’s the modern hysteria.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
My mental model of HN is there is a subset of forum participants who either don't believe the impact data centers are causing, or simply don't care. I’m not here to change hearts or minds (mental models are rigid, humans are emotion vs data driven); only to share data, and consume data.
I believe the data shows data centers to have an outsized impact on the costs discussed. Others may disagree, but the facts are the facts, especially if we're asking schools to conserve power while serving data center loads (per this post and related thread). That is not a fact in support of "data center power consumption is not of material concern, and does not require potential regulatory intervention." Quote the opposite (again, imho). If data centers do not have enough power, the solution is simple; force them to load shed and operate dynamically based on the remaining power available to them until more power is brought online.
infecto 1 days ago [-]
Again, show one critical research paper that draws a solid link towards data centers and price increases. You linked to so many articles, many of which just spoke on demand increases. I absolutely believe that in some grids, data centers have driven some of the increase but you claiming that data centers are the only problem reads like those folks scared of solar farms being built.
Just because you want to believe it does not make it true. You are claiming it’s 100% the reason and I am suggesting it’s probably part of it but unclear if it’s 5% or 90%.
barney54 1 days ago [-]
So far, the data are clear--data centers are not increasing electricity rates. Those are the facts. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/the-numb... This may change in the future, but so far, there is no statistically significant correlation.
Not only that, but states with increasing electricity consumption have lower rates. So it's possible data center will lead to lower rates.
> IER is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. The Institute's CEO and founder, Robert L. Bradley Jr., is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and Energy & Climate Change Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. He has written eight books, including Energy: The Master Resource; Climate Alarmism Reconsidered; and Edison to Enron.
> Overall, we rate the Institute for Energy Research as Right Biased due to its strong advocacy for fossil fuel expansion and deregulation, aligning with free-market conservative energy policies. We rate its reporting as Mixed for factual accuracy, as it does not always align with the consensus of science by selectively presenting data that favors fossil fuels while downplaying or omitting information on climate change and renewable energy viability. IER is a nonprofit organization that does not fully disclose its funding sources. However, past reports indicate financial ties to fossil fuel interests, including donations from ExxonMobil and groups associated with Charles Koch—a key funder of climate-skeptical and free-market advocacy. While the institute claims to support “energy freedom,” its funding sources suggest a strong alignment with the fossil fuel industry.
(I've forwarded your IER citation to a data science practitioner in the energy space to decompose, more to come)
Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")
No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")
> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.
> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.
> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.
> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.
(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)
infecto 1 days ago [-]
Those read more like policy pieces. Correlations but not strong causation.
Brookings misses out on of the key failures in PJM which is how those terrible 3 year forecasts are causing issues with rates.
Again interesting from a policy perspective but they don’t reach your claim of data centers being the entire problem for retail energy rates.
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
Please tell me the mental model you have that you believe you can plug a 1GW load into an existing power network and not increase prices?
Do you think that distribution infrastructure required would be free? Do you think markets respond to new demand with new supply instantly?
The market incentive to increase generation is higher prices.
Data center investments, in terms of the energy they will require, far outstrip generation planning and buildout, and by a huge margin.
When you have a demand/supply equilibrium, and you drastically increase demand, what happens to the price?
infecto 24 hours ago [-]
I am not suggesting that data centers or any load growth for that matter have no impact on prices but rather challenging the idea than data centers are the primary/only reason certain regions have had price increases. Most of the shared links focus on PJM which imo has a flawed auction model that requires 3 year forecasts that nobody would expect to get correct. But it makes for sensational journalism because you can show pictures of data centers up against homes.
I have yet to see any strong research showing a correlation to data center growth and price increases. If you have any beyond a gut feeling I would love to read!
baggy_trough 22 hours ago [-]
Is there any reason to single out data centers, other than that they are the degrowther bugaboo of the year? Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.
officeplant 21 hours ago [-]
>Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.
A factory produces tangible goods, and tends to get less hate because of that reality.
dyauspitr 22 hours ago [-]
This is the way. Build more data centers and mandate they are powered by solar+batteries/nuclear.
sunshinesnacks 1 days ago [-]
Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
LeifCarrotson 1 days ago [-]
I work in industrial manufacturing and automation, several of my customers (those running steel foundries, aluminum die casting, plastic recycling and extrusion, and other power-intensive processes) represent a sizeable fraction of the utility usage in the small towns in which they're located.
They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.
Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?
infecto 1 days ago [-]
It’s a hard to answer because each grid will treat it differently. My own experience when trying to track some of this data down, DCs are largely having to do the same and that’s why a lot of the buildout includes behind the meter generation to make up for it.
There is not a good picture in aggregate though so it creates all kinds of narratives.
axus 23 hours ago [-]
The gas-powered generators are what makes a data center unpleasant to live by.
infecto 22 hours ago [-]
Hyperbole if I have ever seen it. Absolutely there are specific outliers (x ai) but this is not the norm.
officeplant 21 hours ago [-]
Of the data center rollouts I've been contracted to do safety systems for, ALL of them have gas turbines as part of their power infrastructure on property. They don't solely have gas, but they are mixed Solar/Gas every time.
A few of them in the future pipeline swear they will have nuclear but I don't see that coming to fruition soon.
infecto 20 hours ago [-]
And is that datacenter bypassing air quality regulation and backing up to a housing development? Most/all of the construction I have tracked meets air quality guidelines and fairly remote but I know that is not always the case!
officeplant 1 hours ago [-]
>air quality regulation
This is texas, they can't even form regulations that don't different between counties, or figure out zoning laws in Houston.
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
A lot of the problem right now is simply that new massive data centers are crying about being forced to.... pay their fair way.
They are mad that they aren't getting special treatment. They want to be treated better than the aluminum smelting plant.
esseph 23 hours ago [-]
Depending on what an "AI datacenter" means, their loads don't fluctuate nearly as much as something like a smelter.
scottndecker 1 days ago [-]
If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.
hakunin 1 days ago [-]
Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.
iamtheworstdev 21 hours ago [-]
hahah that is so wonderfully malicious compliance
mk_stjames 21 hours ago [-]
That's not 'malicious compliance'...
it's 'Jevonsian insanity'.
burnte 1 days ago [-]
Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!
imhoguy 1 days ago [-]
Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.
skeeter2020 1 days ago [-]
not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
shagie 1 days ago [-]
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
While that is an interesting issue to deal with, I was totally lost at the concept of not saving before going home. I can't go five minutes without saving, and you were willing to leave the "room" without saving? That's just one of those things so outside my normal that I got lost in thinking about it especially as matter of fact as it was recited. You live in a different realm my friend.
fluorinerocket 1 days ago [-]
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
conductr 1 days ago [-]
How about just forget about this thread and don’t let it be a major annoyance. It’s a very minor annoyance. It would be a more widespread debate/discussion if so many people were upset by it. At the least, just admit you’re in the minority that are so upset by it and then just live with it anyways.
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
dylan604 23 hours ago [-]
Potholes are much more than just an annoyance. They can damage your car. Not sure where you live that potholes are mere annoyances, but where I'm from they can be quite large. To the point calling them potholes is stretching the definition. My mom used to joke that she wanted to throw in some water and a loaf of bread into some of them in case someone fell in. They can pop a tire, bend/crack a rim, and they can definitely break steering rods.
The easier thing to do with motion timers would be to only enable them not during work hours. All of the other logic you want to program in them is something easily done today, but definitely not as long as they've been around.
$3.86 million claim from a pothole. I'm normally pretty skeptical of damage claims, but that is a pretty nasty pothole.
conductr 19 hours ago [-]
Potholes aren’t really the core of the annoyance, just like the lights, it’s the control mechanisms around them. Potholes are going to occur yet there’s no proactive repair response. Massive potholes you’re describing rarely show up over night, and it’s very likely many city employees drive over them daily (trash trucks, police, code compliance, water services, etc).
dylan604 17 hours ago [-]
Oh, see, you must be a city slicker. I grew up in the country where city employees absolutely did not drive over the roads daily if weekly if monthly. In fact, I didn't even live in a city as the area was just unincorporated county land, so there were no city employees. Every now and then, sheriff deputies might roll through.
The country roads that met up to the "big" 2 lane FM where I grew up were all posted 20mph. I remember one evening when my mom got pulled over because the deputy said she was swerving so much that she had to have been drunk. My mom looked at him and politely told him "you swerved around the same potholes I did". My mom never drank.
Also, you really seem stuck on trying to tell me what is annoying or not to the point you are now annoying me
lostlogin 23 hours ago [-]
I work in a smart building.
Apparently it’s good for hormone health and circadian rhythms to have lights that don’t immediately respond when you press the button, suddenly turn up at 7am when they decided it was ‘daytime’ and turn off unexpectedly as you finish up a late shift.
A light switch that doesn’t respond immediately might be the most frustrating technology life.
Liftyee 24 hours ago [-]
Smarter device would just require a little more cost. Current devices can work with no code, just analog electronics.
conductr 23 hours ago [-]
If you’re a cost conscious manufacturer, I think you could do it very cheaply these days (cents/unit). The problem is most manufacturers would turn this into a full blown AI capable smart device to justify charging a lot more.
fluorinerocket 23 hours ago [-]
I am certainly in the minority and I do live with it.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
There's something to be said about having lights on in a room that is not occupied the entire time the lights are on. Before LED lighting, it was a decent attempt at reducing unnecessary lighting.
emsign 1 days ago [-]
"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."
GuestFAUniverse 1 days ago [-]
And the rest has AI. All is fine. /s
sokoloff 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
You dropped the time component from the first, so yes, the result is incomparable.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
Dr_Emann 1 days ago [-]
I don't think so, "while vacant" is an infinite amount of time, if you look infinitely far into the future.
sokoloff 1 days ago [-]
Assume that each workstation is lit by 100W of lighting and is vacant 18 hours per day (to make the math easy).
I claim that's 75W of power that could be reclaimed by turning off a 100W load 75% of the time. Explain how you get to energy or how I dropped time, please.
cwillu 24 hours ago [-]
2400 watt hours in a day, being reduced to 600 watt hours.
If you're not going to be charitable in interpreting comments, then perhaps this isn't the venue for you.
sokoloff 24 hours ago [-]
Uh... Watt-hours per day reduces to Watts in dimensional analysis, which is of course my original point.
kube-system 23 hours ago [-]
The statement was rhetorical, not a precise engineering analysis.
zamadatix 1 days ago [-]
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
preinheimer 1 days ago [-]
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
jimmydddd 1 days ago [-]
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
mwigdahl 1 days ago [-]
Was that tech guy a crypto miner by chance?
whimsicalism 23 hours ago [-]
> passing those costs on to other rate payers.
You are describing the normal process of purchasing things and how prices work. There is no nefarious passing on.
We should redistribute money from the wealthy to households, but I'm not sure if rate price controls beyond what already exists is the correct way to do it. The real issue with these data centers is tax jurisdiction shopping.
Tangurena2 1 days ago [-]
My state almost passed one such bill this year. Lobbyists got it put in time-out until this year's legislative session ran out.
nonethewiser 23 hours ago [-]
Isnt that what virgina did in the new rate class this article mentions? Data centers have to enter long term contracts with minimums (regardless of usage) to help power companies plan ahead.
Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
Tangurena2 1 days ago [-]
My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!
The lobbyists are just doing their jobs well. It's the Senate that isn't. Blame the people who you pay taxes to purely to be impartial.
8note 22 hours ago [-]
lobbyists alao disbenefit from bad policy, and their clients will lose out worse when the population is much more pissed off.
these are still physical assets that can be destroyed in a riot
jlarocco 24 hours ago [-]
There's no reason not to blame lobbyists as well. A lobbyist saying "it's just business," doesn't excuse them for being assholes.
philipallstar 21 hours ago [-]
Their job is to represent their company. It's like calling a defence or prosecution lawyer an asshole for taking their client's side. It's the judge's job to be impartial, not theirs. And it's the regulator's job to be impartial, not the lobbyist's.
bryan_w 19 hours ago [-]
You're assuming these people know what a lobbyist does beyond the edgey cynical definition they learned about when they were 13.
xuhu 23 hours ago [-]
A comparison made by some Solaris guy comparing a tech magnate to a lawnmower springs to mind.
24 hours ago [-]
morkalork 1 days ago [-]
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.
mywittyname 1 days ago [-]
Most people don't have AI subscriptions. A lot of the most fervent detractor hate AI to the core and refuse to use it as much as possible.
Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.
slg 1 days ago [-]
Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".
Legend2440 23 hours ago [-]
Most consumers are willingly using AI. But they're using the free versions.
ChatGPT is the #1 most popular app on the app store, with nearly a billion weekly active users.
genewitch 1 days ago [-]
i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!
platevoltage 22 hours ago [-]
The day I'm force to pay for it, I'll stop using it.
dguest 23 hours ago [-]
Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.
platevoltage 22 hours ago [-]
What if we never signed up?
kibwen 1 days ago [-]
Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.
Legend2440 23 hours ago [-]
There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.
This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.
kibwen 21 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.
Havoc 22 hours ago [-]
It's kinda crazy that data centers aren't on some sort of ringfenced scheme.
This whole just throw it on the grid and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane
dmix 22 hours ago [-]
> and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane
These companies are investing heavily in new energy development?
> Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the deal, Meta already had over 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in its renewable portfolio.
> Stargate AI partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group was reported by Bloomberg to be powered, at least in part, by solar. SB Energy, which is part of SoftBank’s portfolio, is expected to develop solar installations backed by grid-scale batteries.
> Meta closed out the month with another massive solar deal, this one with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra. The contract was for 595 megawatts of capacity.
> Meta continued its streak in February, investing in a 505-megawatt solar project with Cypress Creek Renewables, which is developing the massive installation in Coleman County, Texas — about 150 miles northwest of Austin.
> Microsoft entered the fray in February, too. The company has long been a buyer of renewable energy to power its operations, and added another 389 megawatts of solar in a deal with EDP Renewables North America.
> Amazon also made a big purchase, backing a hybrid project on the Iberian Peninsula that includes wind, solar, and pumped-hydroelectric storage. The deal included 476 megawatts total, of which 212 megawatts are solar.
> Outside of the U.S., data center operators have also been investing in solar. In India, CtrlS built its own 125-megawatt facility in two phases, the first half of which was finished in June 2024 with the second completed in early February. In South America, Telecom Argentina agreed to buy electricity from a 130-megawatt solar farm developed by MSU Green Energy.
> Microsoft added another three solar developments in March, again focusing on the Midwest. The projects span Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri, and they’re being developed by AES. Together, they will provide Microsoft with 475 megawatts of capacity, adding to its considerable 34-gigawatt portfolio.
> Cisco got in the game with a 100-megawatt deal with X-Elio, a solar developer owned by Brookfield, an asset manager that has bet big on renewables. The power purchase agreements see Cisco buying capacity from two different Texas solar projects.
> Meta added another 200 megawatts of solar to its portfolio in March in a deal with RWE. The solar farm will be built just southeast of Austin.
> In Italy, data center operator Data4 signed a 10-year deal with utility Edison Energia to buy power from a 148-megawatt solar farm northwest of Rome.
That was all in 2025^
There's also been big investment in nuclear and natural gas
All that generation capacity is great, but you need to get the electrons to the datacenter. And in most jurisdictions the transmission part of the grid is a shared cost. Mostly...there is technically some obligation to pay for upgrades but it doesn't really work.
e.g.
>Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills
It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
>It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
Just like all developments since collective ideas went out of fashion...
jabroni_salad 1 days ago [-]
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
frantathefranta 1 days ago [-]
404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).
nonethewiser 23 hours ago [-]
Like just stating a bunch of facts and implying causation. Never showing causation.
You could basically write the same article but swap data centers for clean energy upgrades.
- rationing request anecdote
- clean energy law dictating cleaner power
- unexamined claim clean energy is increasing prices nationally
- state there is a 25% price increased
Its
- “A” and “B”
- claim “A” causes “B”
- restate “B”
Did I show “A causes B”?
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.
bryan_w 19 hours ago [-]
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but
Really makes you think: should you really support efforts like this when there are better and more honest groups out there? (Cough EFF *cough)
philipwhiuk 1 days ago [-]
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
toast0 1 days ago [-]
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
khuey 1 days ago [-]
This is suburban Richmond, not a "small rural county".
BenjiWiebe 23 hours ago [-]
Just to compare it to my rural county:
Henrico county: pop 345,000, 237 sq miles, 1455 population per sq mile
Marion county: pop 11,600, 954 sq miles, 12 pop/sq mi.
So it might be a small county but it sure ain't rural!
1 days ago [-]
skywhopper 1 days ago [-]
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that.
https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
helterskelter 2 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of WorldCom. One employee said they knew something was up when the company was posting huge profits but the CEO was sending out emails with progressively more extreme electricity saving measures.
rdtsc 1 days ago [-]
The ~spice~ inference must flow.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
culi 1 days ago [-]
It is also often a violation of the Clean Air Act but we don't have good regulation in place to actually hold them accountable
kube-system 23 hours ago [-]
And SCOTUS just today made a ruling that will increase money in politics, so it's not going to get better any time soon.
excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance
arlattimore 1 days ago [-]
I'm confused as to why they've allowed the data center power drain (which they knew was going to happen) to cascade into consumer power prices. Surely they should be charging consumers their existing price and charging the data centers an increased price based on their massive usage.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
Hardly seems fair or right.
whimsicalism 23 hours ago [-]
This is just what happens with a demand shock in any context.
shimman 1 days ago [-]
You're confused why neoliberals want to give out more corporate welfare over helping citizens material needs?
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
arjie 1 days ago [-]
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
Quinner 1 days ago [-]
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
larkost 1 days ago [-]
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
whimsicalism 23 hours ago [-]
Why should we subsidize sprawl & economically unsustainable areas to live?
That said, this is only part of the picture. The other big part is that California has very aggressive tort law and CA juries basically view PG&E as a giant piggy bank.
downrightmike 1 days ago [-]
public infrastructure should be owned by the public
culi 1 days ago [-]
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
cmiles8 1 days ago [-]
Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”
Tangurena2 1 days ago [-]
Enron managed to mangle/free-marketize California's electricity system. Utilities have to purchase electricity at market prices on an exchange that Enron built.
butterfi 1 days ago [-]
I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
I'd imagine your normal Colo facility uses a lot less power than an AI data center.
malshe 1 days ago [-]
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
I pay over $0.51/kWh in electricity thanks to PG&E.
eskatonic 1 days ago [-]
Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s
1 days ago [-]
cdrnsf 1 days ago [-]
Unplug the data centers instead.
square_usual 1 days ago [-]
This is insane reporting. Their own article says the data center buildout happened in 2017. The article they link about it says the same thing. And so rate changes now - in 2026, nearly a full decade after those DCs were built out - are somehow the fault of the measly 37 datacenters there? They don't even say that outright - they're just insinuating this from the title and wording in the artcile to be sneaky about it. This is garbage! They just put "$current_thing bad" in the headline and nobody's really checking that they're straight up lying by omission!
ineedasername 21 hours ago [-]
>37 data centers and there are plans to build 17 more, including plans to convert hundreds of acres of _Civil War battlefields_ into data centers.
Those poor battlefields. How rarely it is that anyone thinks of their needs.
Legend2440 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's kinda silly to block development on a patch of ground forever because someone fought over it two centuries ago.
markvdb 1 days ago [-]
Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
“Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight. Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.
$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
JohnFen 1 days ago [-]
True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.
jeffbee 1 days ago [-]
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
malshe 1 days ago [-]
Maybe the county could just ask its employees to work from home so that its office electricity bill goes down to zero. A win-win solution!
Ritewut 23 hours ago [-]
This is back to the propaganda that people need to recycle because big companies dont want to clean up after themselves.
nok22kon 1 days ago [-]
a few years from now they will advise people to stop eating so much, since they need the farmland for data centers
Maybe it would help remove useless and harmful tech from schools. Books don't need batteries.
galleywest200 22 hours ago [-]
Seems AI use at younger ages has detrimental effects. Let’s remove that from schools while we are at it.
gadflyinyoureye 5 hours ago [-]
I'm all for that. Start to add tools as the brain can work.
testing22321 21 hours ago [-]
Remember when the grid couldn’t support EVs
? , but amazingly it CAN support Data centres…
Pepperidge farm remembers
jeffbee 1 days ago [-]
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
gedy 1 days ago [-]
We can't leave money on the table for all those below average prices - so let's raise them all to the average... oh wait
genewitch 1 days ago [-]
Is this why median is usually better when discussing things, since the median may not change at all or may go down in this circumstance?
obviously the average goes up in this circumstance...
ck2 1 days ago [-]
"ai" bubble burst cannot come soon enough
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency
whall6 23 hours ago [-]
Can someone more up to speed explain to me why with Virginia’s proximity to one of the largest natural gas reservoirs in the world in West Virginia, they don’t just build new power plants to keep up with electricity demand?
Rendered at 18:16:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.
If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.
Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.
Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).
Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.
Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.
"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.
So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.
(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).
Can it handle it today? What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030? Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran? What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?
People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.
If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.
It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.
Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.
Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.
SemiAnalysis: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/are-ai-datacenters-inc...
LBNL: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
If you disagree, point to the analysis or data. Suggesting I’m “pretending” doesn’t address the argument. The article cherry-picks one county while largely ignoring the broader PJM pricing mechanics affecting millions of customers. Do better. Between pricing mechanics, input cost inflation and yes increase in demand has impact but not like the article likes to weave it.
404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like
One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.
Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.
Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.
Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).
The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.
- electricity costs are rising
- there are many data centers
- claims data centers raise costs
- never actually shows how these new data centers are driving up electricity costs
Funny. They imply causation but never show it. If they had evidence that data centers caused this 25% increase, or a large percentage of it, dont you think they would show it?
Actually, you could write the exact same article but sub out data centers with the clean energy rollout.
Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.
I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair of Virginia Tech's board and replace him with the CEO of Dominion) have had an impact on power use more than data centers themselves.
Nb. Still many do not. Also, closed-loop systems use more electricity to operate, so it's not a cost-free solution.
It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.
It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.
(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])
This is because the argument that we didn't have the grid capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and residential solar was never sincere. You could tell because the followup was never "and we should invest more in the grid" but rather the reactionary "and that's why we can't use EVs."
The same people would be opposed to data centers, if not for the fact that the AI buildout is making them all rich.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.
Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.
To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.
We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
Gartner Says Data Center Electricity Consumption to Grow 26% in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665985 - June 2026
Nobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662607 - June 2026
Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637512 - June 2026
Datacenter boom keeps dirty coal plants alive in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465092 - June 2026
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447122 - June 2026
A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439 - June 2026
Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401477 - June 2026
The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366144 - June 2026
Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361555 - June 2026
Tracking at:
https://aidatacentermap.org/
https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
The article says
>Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge jump in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEHF01
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
‘Cost Me the Election’: Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash - https://www.newsweek.com/cost-me-the-election-data-centers-t... - June 25th, 2026
Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-se... | https://archive.ph/MMot6 - June 24th, 2026
Where Republicans and Democrats stand on AI data centers - https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/where-republicans-and-democrats-... - June 12th, 2026
Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183512 - May 2026
I believe the data shows data centers to have an outsized impact on the costs discussed. Others may disagree, but the facts are the facts, especially if we're asking schools to conserve power while serving data center loads (per this post and related thread). That is not a fact in support of "data center power consumption is not of material concern, and does not require potential regulatory intervention." Quote the opposite (again, imho). If data centers do not have enough power, the solution is simple; force them to load shed and operate dynamically based on the remaining power available to them until more power is brought online.
Just because you want to believe it does not make it true. You are claiming it’s 100% the reason and I am suggesting it’s probably part of it but unclear if it’s 5% or 90%.
Not only that, but states with increasing electricity consumption have lower rates. So it's possible data center will lead to lower rates.
> IER is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. The Institute's CEO and founder, Robert L. Bradley Jr., is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and Energy & Climate Change Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. He has written eight books, including Energy: The Master Resource; Climate Alarmism Reconsidered; and Edison to Enron.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-energy-research...
> Overall, we rate the Institute for Energy Research as Right Biased due to its strong advocacy for fossil fuel expansion and deregulation, aligning with free-market conservative energy policies. We rate its reporting as Mixed for factual accuracy, as it does not always align with the consensus of science by selectively presenting data that favors fossil fuels while downplaying or omitting information on climate change and renewable energy viability. IER is a nonprofit organization that does not fully disclose its funding sources. However, past reports indicate financial ties to fossil fuel interests, including donations from ExxonMobil and groups associated with Charles Koch—a key funder of climate-skeptical and free-market advocacy. While the institute claims to support “energy freedom,” its funding sources suggest a strong alignment with the fossil fuel industry.
(I've forwarded your IER citation to a data science practitioner in the energy space to decompose, more to come)
Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")
No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")
FERC Complaint: https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filelist?accession_number... ("20251125-5275_2025-11-25 IMM Complaint re Data Center Loads-AS FILED-1.pdf")
Brannon, Ike and Wolf, Samuel, The Impact of Data Centers on Energy Demand and Market Prices (November 11, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5017484 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5017484
> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.
> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.
> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.
> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.
(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)
Brookings misses out on of the key failures in PJM which is how those terrible 3 year forecasts are causing issues with rates.
Again interesting from a policy perspective but they don’t reach your claim of data centers being the entire problem for retail energy rates.
Do you think that distribution infrastructure required would be free? Do you think markets respond to new demand with new supply instantly?
The market incentive to increase generation is higher prices.
Data center investments, in terms of the energy they will require, far outstrip generation planning and buildout, and by a huge margin.
When you have a demand/supply equilibrium, and you drastically increase demand, what happens to the price?
I have yet to see any strong research showing a correlation to data center growth and price increases. If you have any beyond a gut feeling I would love to read!
A factory produces tangible goods, and tends to get less hate because of that reality.
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.
Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?
There is not a good picture in aggregate though so it creates all kinds of narratives.
A few of them in the future pipeline swear they will have nuclear but I don't see that coming to fruition soon.
This is texas, they can't even form regulations that don't different between counties, or figure out zoning laws in Houston.
They are mad that they aren't getting special treatment. They want to be treated better than the aluminum smelting plant.
it's 'Jevonsian insanity'.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
The easier thing to do with motion timers would be to only enable them not during work hours. All of the other logic you want to program in them is something easily done today, but definitely not as long as they've been around.
$3.86 million claim from a pothole. I'm normally pretty skeptical of damage claims, but that is a pretty nasty pothole.
The country roads that met up to the "big" 2 lane FM where I grew up were all posted 20mph. I remember one evening when my mom got pulled over because the deputy said she was swerving so much that she had to have been drunk. My mom looked at him and politely told him "you swerved around the same potholes I did". My mom never drank.
Also, you really seem stuck on trying to tell me what is annoying or not to the point you are now annoying me
A light switch that doesn’t respond immediately might be the most frustrating technology life.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
I claim that's 75W of power that could be reclaimed by turning off a 100W load 75% of the time. Explain how you get to energy or how I dropped time, please.
If you're not going to be charitable in interpreting comments, then perhaps this isn't the venue for you.
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
You are describing the normal process of purchasing things and how prices work. There is no nefarious passing on.
We should redistribute money from the wealthy to households, but I'm not sure if rate price controls beyond what already exists is the correct way to do it. The real issue with these data centers is tax jurisdiction shopping.
https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/dominion-energy-rate...
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb593.html
these are still physical assets that can be destroyed in a riot
February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...
April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.
ChatGPT is the #1 most popular app on the app store, with nearly a billion weekly active users.
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.
This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.
This whole just throw it on the grid and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane
These companies are investing heavily in new energy development?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he...
> Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the deal, Meta already had over 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in its renewable portfolio.
> Stargate AI partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group was reported by Bloomberg to be powered, at least in part, by solar. SB Energy, which is part of SoftBank’s portfolio, is expected to develop solar installations backed by grid-scale batteries.
> Meta closed out the month with another massive solar deal, this one with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra. The contract was for 595 megawatts of capacity.
> Meta continued its streak in February, investing in a 505-megawatt solar project with Cypress Creek Renewables, which is developing the massive installation in Coleman County, Texas — about 150 miles northwest of Austin.
> Microsoft entered the fray in February, too. The company has long been a buyer of renewable energy to power its operations, and added another 389 megawatts of solar in a deal with EDP Renewables North America.
> Amazon also made a big purchase, backing a hybrid project on the Iberian Peninsula that includes wind, solar, and pumped-hydroelectric storage. The deal included 476 megawatts total, of which 212 megawatts are solar.
> Outside of the U.S., data center operators have also been investing in solar. In India, CtrlS built its own 125-megawatt facility in two phases, the first half of which was finished in June 2024 with the second completed in early February. In South America, Telecom Argentina agreed to buy electricity from a 130-megawatt solar farm developed by MSU Green Energy.
> Microsoft added another three solar developments in March, again focusing on the Midwest. The projects span Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri, and they’re being developed by AES. Together, they will provide Microsoft with 475 megawatts of capacity, adding to its considerable 34-gigawatt portfolio.
> Cisco got in the game with a 100-megawatt deal with X-Elio, a solar developer owned by Brookfield, an asset manager that has bet big on renewables. The power purchase agreements see Cisco buying capacity from two different Texas solar projects.
> Meta added another 200 megawatts of solar to its portfolio in March in a deal with RWE. The solar farm will be built just southeast of Austin.
> In Italy, data center operator Data4 signed a 10-year deal with utility Edison Energia to buy power from a 148-megawatt solar farm northwest of Rome.
That was all in 2025^
There's also been big investment in nuclear and natural gas
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c748gn94k95o
All that generation capacity is great, but you need to get the electrons to the datacenter. And in most jurisdictions the transmission part of the grid is a shared cost. Mostly...there is technically some obligation to pay for upgrades but it doesn't really work.
e.g.
>Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills
It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
[0] https://www.ucs.org/about/news/billions-dollars-unreported-d...
Just like all developments since collective ideas went out of fashion...
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
You could basically write the same article but swap data centers for clean energy upgrades.
- rationing request anecdote
- clean energy law dictating cleaner power
- unexamined claim clean energy is increasing prices nationally
- state there is a 25% price increased
Its
- “A” and “B”
- claim “A” causes “B”
- restate “B”
Did I show “A causes B”?
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.
Really makes you think: should you really support efforts like this when there are better and more honest groups out there? (Cough EFF *cough)
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
So it might be a small county but it sure ain't rural!
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that. https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
Hardly seems fair or right.
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
That said, this is only part of the picture. The other big part is that California has very aggressive tort law and CA juries basically view PG&E as a giant piggy bank.
Those poor battlefields. How rarely it is that anyone thinks of their needs.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough.
1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...
Pepperidge farm remembers
obviously the average goes up in this circumstance...
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency