Would have liked a text version. And that would save energy too.
replies(5):
If there is a sudden increase in demand/supply issues due to large corporations they should be the ones to subsidize the bill. I'd argue in the communities this affects they should be forced to cover for everyone who lives in the area for materially making their lives worse.
Not to mention utility companies should be forced to be transparent in the pricing/deals they make with tech companies. They are likely just luring them in with a deal and passing off the rest to their customers so they still don't lose out in the short term. They want the best of both worlds - still making all the same profits short term by passing on to customers while getting the long term lock-in for these data centers.
https://earthjustice.org/experts/mandy-deroche/how-much-do-w...
GW is already a measure of rate of energy use. You can talk about GWh per day (which is really just another way of saying 0.041 GW), but GW per day is only sensible in the context of a ramp in power consumption.
Assuming the original source of that number didn't incorrectly conflate GWh into GW, that puts your comparison as underestimating the energy usage 24-fold.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bil...
Clarity on the wording here. They should be the ones _paying_ the bill, not subsidising it. It's not subsidising if they're the consumer of the marginal product.
Not if you put your data-center right next to the power station.
No person can do anything except fund Zuckerberg's next island purchase and laugh about how they’re using LLMs to vibe code their next unreleased hobby app.
It is truly sad that we are selling out our quality of life for short term gain for tech corporations.
Much like corporations venue shopping municipalities for tax discounts, we need a Federal ban on these corporate subsidies at a Federal level to put us all back on a fair playing field.
Watts are Joules per second, you'd only measure "watts per day" as a rate of change of power supply, not absolute power supply.
Also, 5GW / 170000 homes ≈ 29kW/home, even the USA isn't that heavily supplied with electricity.
(My home in Germany is very efficient, 0.5 kW average, including heating and cooling as well as all devices).
Just to give perspective 5GW would power about 10 Million H100s or about 5 million G200. Completely farcical, won't happen.
> […] Applying a new data set for country-level energy prices since 1960, this study evaluates the effects of energy prices on economic growth in 18 OECD countries by controlling for other important macroeconomic conditions that shape economic activity. Mean-group estimates that control for cross-country correlations are used to emphasize average responses across nations. Averaged across all nations, results suggest that a 10% increase in energy prices dampened economic growth by about 0.15%. Moreover, some evidence exists that this response may be larger for more energy-intensive economies.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01409...
Though an interesting graph for Sweden on GDP growth and energy use:
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-gdp-decoupling
Basically large tech companies have the deep pockets to push up prices at electricity auctions. But why bid in public when you can do those deals in private. That's the first problem. All that needs to be out in the open.
What really irks me is that the market is so manipulated that we can't do anything about it. Think about NEM 3.0 vs 2.0. Putting data centers in their own rate class does make sense as the first step.
PJM is a shitshow though.
But is is no question: the Apple Silicon chips sip power. If you're looking to minimize watts consumed, a MacBook Air is still on top (or bottom), even if OS X has many pain points too.
I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. This has nothing to do with socialism. Corporations profiting from externalities and pushing costs onto regular workers is just capitalism. If you have a problem with it, maybe you have a problem with the inevitable concentrations of wealth and power which result from capitalism.
Public utilities can't do the same? Moreover if the implication is that large tech companies are somehow getting great prices at the expense of residential users, what does that mean for the electric generators on the other end of this transaction? Why are they leaving money on the table by selling to large tech companies for cheap?
1. The bill shown for July 2024 was for about $100, which includes $65 of supply charges.
2. The bill for July 2025 was for about $129, with supply charges of $84.
3. Despite actual usage being lower for July 2025, the total cost increased by 29%.
The point being raised is that energy costs are higher for individuals because the cost of building infrastructure to support data centers is being subsidized by individuals. Even if her bill was for $65, it is inconsequential to the main point. I don’t understand why people make comments like yours other than to muddy the waters and obfuscate the issue. Or truly failing to understand what is being communicated due to some bias or ideology. A sad microcosm of what passes for discourse in our time.
What is the value of the bottom-half of income earners being able to pay for heating and cooking?
Only upside I see out of this huge demand for electricity -- hopefully nuclear will clear the deck on using coal, gas and diesel. If we can build and operate nuclear again we can level our long term cost of power. Combined with renewables its a good combo.
Other than that - power prices will always be derivative to the price of natural gas.
These companies are regulated and can only charge for the costs they incur plus a flat profit on top of that of 10% or so.
The datacenters give allow them to justify building a lot more capacity to serve them. That increases costs, which means that 10% added for profit is now a bigger number and they can give bigger returns to their shareholders. But those profits are extracted from the existing customers who now see higher bills to cover the costs of expanding capacity to serve the datacenters.
It's a question of aligning incentives.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
[2] https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...
I accept that data centers generate more load for a system. Which will make the overall system need more maintenance, which is something that others paying into the system will also have to support. But, I'm not clear on why this is a hidden cost.
Consider, if people get the new housing developments that they want, that would also add load to the system. This larger energy system will be more expensive to run, which will lead to higher costs. Adding houses would probably be even more expensive in the transmission maintenance costs associated.
Any model you do that tries to prevent this is essentially rent stabilization for early members. And that has a pretty good track record of not being a good idea.
Blaming tech for using power is regressive, the real issue here is bad energy policy.
If I live in an area that is trying to attract data centers by giving them sweetheart deals, my electricity bill is going to go up by more than my share in inference usage since those data centers will be used by people all over the globe.
In scenario 2, the corporation does not externalize costs and raises their prices, offsetting costs by passing them on to their customers. The people paying the additional cost are those who know the price of what they are buying and willingly engage in the transaction for the good or service.
Do you understand why scenario 2 is bad and scenario 1 is less bad?
The untapped energy savings is, IMO, getting people to run their climate control less. We should toughen up a bit, tell our brains that 50F-80F is the comfortable range. (Depending on humidity and your workload).
Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
In this case, the government has written laws in a way that indirectly transfers wealth from consumers to large corporations.
Saying that such laws are "inevitable" in any conceivable capitalist system is unfalsifiable and adds little to the discussion.
I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
On the gas side, we’re both forcing ratepayers to spend billions on conversion from low to high pressure gas mains AND prohibiting new gas service.
The environmental lobby is so dumb and ineffective - the public will be demanding that coal come back.
Vogtle is the wake-up call needed to get nuclear manufacturing/talent going again. I hear you but I think you are taking the wrong lesson.
I will add -- if indeed prices stay at Vogtle then yes Nuclear is dead. That said there's no way thats the new pricing going forward.
This is not a real definition. Saying "most people" use the term to mean what you want it to mean in this argument is ridiculous.
Capitalism is a system of private ownership of capital. We live under that system. Anything you see that happens now is the result of that system because it's the one that exists.
There is no such thing as "crony capitalism". What came before crony capitalism? Was it regular capitalism? Did regular capitalism turn into crony capitalism? Or — more likely — is it all one continuous process and system of accumulation?
Nuclear is only a fraction as expensive as the regulations around it. My company has a division that deals with the nuclear industry, and I really cannot overstate how incredibly intense they are.
Imagine your company issued laptops and required 14 different "live scanner" security apps running with twice daily full system scans. Now be a productive dev on that system. Would you be surprised if every project runs far over budget and far over timeline?
Streets are generally paid for by taxes, which are categorically different than corporate profits. In theory taxes are under democratic control. If you don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law. You have no control over the governance of a private corporation, but it can still pass its costs on to you via externalities (in the absence of regulations preventing it from doing so).
> Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break?
What are you even talking about? What is the externality here? The wages you presumably pay your cleaning lady are hers to do with as she wishes.
Adding capacity isn't free either, in particular on environmental costs and/or additional risks. We haven't been trying to reduce consumption for a few decades now just to be cute, the tradeoff just wasn't worth it.
There is a reason that Griddy (variable rate wholesaler for consumers) had to be killed in Texas. The popular narrative is that they "fucked" their customers over in 2021. The reality is that anyone who had been using their variable rate system for more than 12 months (and made any attempt whatsoever to respond to demand signals) had easily compensated for the $9/kWH crunch that lasted merely ~72 hours. Most of their other customers who I talked to had no problem with the situation. There was a deliberate PR campaign (likely by the other retail electricity providers in the market) to make it seem like an unbelievably impossible situation for a normal person to cope with. Now it's illegal to have wholesale rates for consumers in Texas. We've gone two steps in the wrong direction.
“Capitalism” is a term coined for the dominant system of the industrialized West in the mid-19th Century and is defined by the specific orientation of property rights in that system around the private and marketable ownership of the non-financial means of production (the “capital” in “capitalism”), and the way in which the system was fundamentally structured around—and institutions within it, including government, invariably served the interests of—the owners of that capital, who formed its ruling class, displacing the landed hereditary aristocracy of the preceding systems.
While the dominant politico-economic systems of the developed world have evolved somewhat since then, with modern mixed economies having structures in place mitigate some of the adverse impacts the original system for which thr label “capitalism” was created for has on the vast majority of the population that is not major capital owners, it retains the basic property structure and resulting class heirarchy of the original “capitalism”, and neither it nor the original tended tof eatite annabsence of regulation of commerce.
> I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
The commanding and undue influence of capital on all of society, government and otherwise, is literally the feature for which critics of the then-dominant system coined the term “capitalism” to refer to that system. It doesn’t need an extra qualifier for that.
Texas paid bitcoin miner Riot $31.7 million to shut down during heat wave in August: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/texas-paid-bitcoin-miner-rio...
Two of the biggest bitcoin mining companies in the world are battling it out in a Texas town of 5,600 people: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/31/bitcoin-mining-giants-bitdee...
Cryptocurrency Mining in Texas: https://earthjustice.org/feature/cryptocurrency-mining-texas Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37516498
If I live in an area that is trying to attract [steel mills] by giving them sweetheart deals, my electricity bill is going to go up by more than my share in [steel] usage since [that steel] will be used by people all over the globe.
Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
AI is booming so are household utility bills
It's a matter of scale and efficiency. Housing also adds (full-price) customers new taxpayers. A major problem with housing development is that low density (e.g. single-family zoned suburbs) are net-negative contributors. (But this effect is primarily seen with infrastructure like roads)
> Any model you do that tries to prevent this is essentially rent stabilization for early members.
The problem with datacenters is twofold:
1) It's a demand-shock. Because of the rapid rollout of datacenters, energy production and transmission capacity simply can't scale up. This causes prices to spike locally.
2) 'Industrial' electricity like this tends to pay very cheap rates, leading to residential electricity customers subsidizing them. Especially as such industry tends to be given high tax & other incentives.
> Any model you do that tries to prevent this is essentially rent stabilization for early members. And that has a pretty good track record of not being a good idea.
A question here is whether or not we're in a datacenter construction bubble. (To anyone who says we're not: Nvidia's stock price has soared more than Cisco's during the dotcom bubble.)
If you're in charge of a major electricity company, are you going to sign off on major expansion investments right now, knowing that it will take 5-10 years?
A lot of these datacenters are not owned and operated by Big Tech itself, but instead disposable companies like CoreWeave. If there's a bubble, it'll pop, and these companies will just go bankrupt. The power purchase agreement'll be worthless then.
Taxes, why are individual and corporate taxes and structures different?
Both are doing work and generating income?
Why do corporations get to deductions and do so much tax magic that individuals don't?
why don't we charge them both with the same laws, and structures?
Cause corporates generate jobs? Isn't that unfair to the people born individuals...
I don't think anyone is saying there should be stabilization of electricity prices. But costs for grid improvements for industrial, data center or AI usage should be on the said companies.
They are using that resource to generate a profit.
While people in residential homes are just living their lives, you are comparing cost of essential commodities to production inputs...
We make taxes on poorer people less as well for the same reason.
But yes if someone is saying electricity prices should be stabilized for early consumers that's definitely unfair. But I didn't see or read that here.
https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County
"Loudoun County is home to one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world through which much of the world's internet traffic passes every day. The industry has helped to diversify Loudoun County's economy, which has included bringing new jobs and revenue streams to the county over the past 14 years that have helped to keep real property tax rates relatively low."
Coal is down, but there has never been more natural gas generation in the US: https://www.epa.gov/power-sector/power-sector-evolution
That is completely opposite of the truth. The ability to buy a contract is what allows power generators to get loans to build at good rates. Everyone wants someone else to take on the risk, when you buy a contract for power at some rate in the future you are taking on the risk that prices could go down. The generator then goes to the bank and can show that even if competition forces prices down they still are going to get that much from the contract and thus can pay off the loans.
Power is complex and I just touched the surface of the truth.
Nuclear regulatory environment is overly prescriptive. You need nuclear safety but you also can't use regulatory as a mechanism to shutdown all development - which has been the defacto case for the last 40 odd years.
Agree faster timelines are necessary -- we also need to see if this AI thing is real real or if its in over its skis a little bit. At this particular moment it feels like it might be selling more than it is offering - and thereby the energy demand won't materialize in the way that they assume...
Noting -- that the financial backers for energy products aren't all cash cows like tech companies -- they need to see real return on projects before they put up the necessary large amount of money and public-private partnerships given the risk on putting projects together like that.
Trump-licans - the party of mean and stupid and self-destruction.
The UK is in the exact same boat with Hinkley C -- initially licensed in 2012 with a budget of £18 billion, construction starting in 2016 and a completion date in 2025. Now we're looking at £50 billion in cost with 'best case' start dates in 2030. All of that to generate electricity at over $0.20/kwh wholesale.
Data Centers do not work like this. They don't generate any new sales taxes, they don't really generate much in the way of new jobs, and they often don't even pay property taxes at all (our biggest data center here, for example, got a sweetheart deal on a massive property tax exemption -- they literally don't have to pay any property tax at all)
Data Centers also don't pay standard price for their power -- they get 'industrial' power rates (locally here, our industrial power rate is much lower than what a home would pay for equivalent kwh usage, even after factoring in transmission differences).
If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.
I think the part the bugs me is how over-hyped AI is, and there's a fear that all this electricity is being used as part of fundamentally unsustainable business models that will not prove sustainable long term. If that's the case, and we're overbuilding data centres what's going to happen to those buildings once the bubble pops?
If we’re looking at choices a person can make, every choice is multiplied by millions when applied to the entire population of a country, so the 1W differences are swamped by the equally scaled 10W differences.
And coal: https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
Individuals can do deductions if they're a sole proprietorship. The requirement in general is that the expense is used for a business purpose. Buying a laptop for personal consumption isn't tax deductible, but buying it for your consulting business is.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/tech/science/environment/data-...
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/MDOPC/bulletins/3ea...
https://www.thebanner.com/economy/maryland-energy-cost-virgi...
I should have said that rent stabilization may work out some day. Just it is not my expectation that it will, as it has a record of not. As such, I would expect some inflationary pressure on utility rates.
That is, it is specifically the transmission and distribution network that is driving costs increases. Per the crappy AI answer "Electricity distribution costs now often exceed the cost of electricity generation for U.S. utilities, with transmission and distribution (T&D) costs potentially comprising over half of a customer's energy bill, up from about one-third previously."
I should say, I have no problem thinking data centers may need to pay more. If only because they are probably able to. My assertion is just that it is misleading to pin them as THE reason costs have gone up. It is far more complicated than that.
> Taking this into account, blaming AI companies for jacking up electricity prices in this context makes as much sense as blaming airlines for jacking up oil prices.
I'm not sure if "blame" and "jacking up" are the right words here. AI technology is demanding power quicker than it is being added to the grid and add so there is going to be tension. Now if tech companies start buying the grid operators and power, I'm more inclined to start blaming the tech companies themselves, but for now I still place broad energy failures squarely with the government.
Why? An industrial feed to a data centre is the company dealing with a single customer contact, to a single location, probably bulk-buying up front. That's very different to serving 500 houses with very variable demand.
The tradeoff is that Utilities can upgrade their systems and improve uptime thanks to the higher base load. It's up to the utils to negotiate well against the big data players.. good luck on that with politicians breathing down your neck to secure a big win.
It’s literally the governments job to build out the infrastructure for society to thrive. Don’t blame technology for getting better, blame the government for not doing their job.
Tennessee (for example) has fairly cheap electricity because the TVA uses a lot of hydroelectric, and since we have a ridiculous amount of rain and violent thunderstorms each year, every decade or two they build another hydroelectric dam and create a new lake, which generates more hydroelectric power (and a moderate increase in tourism/recreation). We don't have buried power lines (excepting in a very few places) but we've got a ton of redundant power substations and multiple transmission paths (because storms). The TVA and Corps of Engineers are kinda hardcore here otherwise the valley would flood about a quarter of the year and be sitting around in the dark for another quarter of the year.
Maintenance of the power transmission lines is paid for by the electrical customer as a part of paying for the electricity itself. This actually scales just fine. If your local electrical utility is not doing it this way, someone needs to explain to them how proper accounting works.
Calling a "hidden cost" is just a convenient way to say "We're making this up because we feel like it's right and we don't intend to show any proof."
Agree that Cuomo decommissioning the plant was DUMB.
The effect has a name: the Averch–Johnson effect, named after the Harvey Averch and Leland Johnson paper: "Behavior of the Firm Under Regulatory Constraint"
Fun stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averch%E2%80%93Johnson_effect
If we’re looking at the things we can do to reduce our individual consumption, it absolutely makes sense to prioritize the things which are large relative to our other individual contributions, first.
they are; but Big Tech isn't paying the cost to add that capacity, because it's getting volume discount prices to attract them in the first place. So the utility has to raise prices on everyone else to cover the cost of adding the capacity.
so essentially, all the other consumers are subsidizing the extra power needed for the data centers (instead of the data centers paying for it)
Generally (but there are exceptions) in the US they have not gotten better. It's just that datacenter demand has eclipsed the effect of that.
> My assertion is just that it is misleading to pin them as THE reason costs have gone up. It is far more complicated than that.
It's not so much that they are the sole cause, but that their effects (especially on local scales) are 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than all other causes, so people focus on this matter.
Not nothing. And if we can do things to reduce this, I'm game to do that. But I can't get behind the rhetoric that they are eclipsing other cost drivers.
We (Well, the article does it for us as well) can identify that this market jump is driven primarily by increased demand rather than lower capacity, as the amount of capacity sold has increased. (Covering ~50% of the new demand)
These prices do not immediately translate into residential fees, there's a lot of financial engineering in between the auction and customer contracts (F in chat for the counterparty of the hedge), but at the end of the day you can't sell $500 of power for $5 so the increased cost will worm their way through to residential consumers eventually. One particularly annoying thing is that this isn't a consistent amount of time by region; Some people are seeing 3x electricity bills already, for others their power company may have more strongly hedged against price increases.
more information here: https://www.chelanpud.org/about-us/events-calendar/event/202...
Is your contention that we a) not believe this will only have an "at most 5% increase" or b) predict that it will be more dramatic in the future?
I'm also curious where you are getting the 3x electric bills claim. The largest bill jumps I'm aware of were in CA and were largely related to fires. That and general grid upgrades.
On the gas side, Trump's one BBB greatly increased the caps on natural gas exports.
The reality is that the companies extracting NG are not going to be giving it to Americans, they're going to sell it abroad and rake in way more money.
Which would maybe be fine... if we also weren't currently (and severely) artificially limiting the supply of renewables. Um, oops. There's nothing left.
All of our lobbies are fucking stupid.
Of course it depends on the computer, but if we're talking laptops or corpo computers it's like 25 - 50 watts. Supercomputers, like those used for AI, are different of course.
The money part doesn't ring true given the current US political climate. That's not the president you elect when your future looks bright.
> society to thrive
Does society thrive on AI though ? And is the technology better ?
Those are real questions. My answers would be no, we have better use for our resources. If we need to sacrifice for something, at least be it worth it.
Just as you can build your own power plant (solar, wind) if you don't like the electricity prices of your provider... That works in theory, in practice you will have to pay...
Should we all pretend that half the French nuclear fleet was not offline at the height of the energy crisis? A large portion of the european energy crisis came from the French nuclear power not delivering.
A large renewable buildout should be ongoing in France but wasting money on dead-end subsidies for new built nuclear power seems to be what the French people and politicans wants.
We're seeing a huge number of closures coming in the next decades and the politicians can't even agree on the bonkers large subsidy program for the first 6 EPR2 reactors. Maybe targetting some new power on the grid by 2040? If we're lucky with the construction timeline, at a cool cost of ~20 cents per kWh excluding subsidies.
I'd go further than common, I don't know any major data center built in the last 6 years that didn't get them. 36 out of 50 US states give away public money to privately owned data centers right now (see https://www.naiop.org/research-and-publications/magazine/202... )
It's not always property taxes (sales tax and/or use tax and/or waived utilities costs are also common). But property taxes are also waived in various cases.
> Most data centers almost certainly pay property taxes, as well. It is still a deeded plot of land, after all?
Not always -- they often waive property taxes too.
I'm told Nevada, West Virginia, and Wyoming all have waivers on property taxes for data centers specifically, and at least 12 other states (including Illinois, New York, Texas, and many others) also waive property taxes for data centers through indirect means.
Locally here, data centers get to skip out on paying 100% of their property taxes for 10 to 20 years. They do this by getting a county to label their property as a 'Renaissance Zone' (more commonly known as an 'Enterprise Zone').
Rules for that also vary. As one example, Connecticut has 'Enterprise Zone' distinction as well, but theirs is only an 80% tax abatement, and only for 5 years.
As you might imagine, this quickly becomes a race to the bottom, on which state is willing to give away the highest amount of public money to these private companies. See https://goodjobsfirst.org/enterprise-zones/ for more details.
I'm reminded of places like Alabama that would do massive incentives to Mercedes to build a production plant in the state. Again, I know many that opposed on principle, but they were a touch off balance when it came to the benefits that the state was getting from the plants.
And I agree it can be a bit of a race to the bottom, as it were. As things are, there is little to no evidence that that is the case. Building any large industrial building is a large construction project that alone will generate plenty of tax revenue to justify pushing off many taxes. Would it be even better for the localities to not? Yeah, but only if they could still get the build.
The easy way to justify why corporations get to deduct their spending, is it encourages corporations to spend. Something that a for profit company would not necessarily do otherwise. With the obvious note that spend sent to people is taxed as income for that person.
Now, I agree that this gets super odd when people also make an odd "corporations are people" argument.
As for my assertion that this is effectively arguing for price stabilization. The entire thing hinges on the complaint that costs have been going up. Which, of course the price of a good that has increasing demand is going up. I'm not sure how to read that other than an appeal to price stabilization for early consumers.