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Comment by dalyons

9 hours ago

absolutely agree with that. However, its not so much the capability, its the cost. In 2026 big projects cost a lot more, whos gunna pay for it? In the 80s we all paid for it, but we roughly all benefited as we got more and more electric capacity and day-to-day use cases. Today, it looks like we are all gunna pay for it, but only the datacenter owners are going to benefit. That model is broken.

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dalyons

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jeffbee  9 hours ago

Well, I don't think the evidence supports that. According to two recent LBNL reports consumer prices are lowest in states with huge demand increases (Texas), and highest in states with shrinking demand (California). The existence of large consumers tends to amortize the cost of grid updates.

  • dalyons  8 hours ago

    theres tons of news articles going around about how datacenter installs are causing large local rate spikes. for eg: https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...

    > That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

    > director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and co-author of a March 2025 paper exploring how the public is funding Big Tech’s power-intensive facilities. “Utilities are building infrastructure, and then we all pay for it because that’s how the utility business model has always worked,” he says.

    > Residential electricity costs are also rising because the rush of new hyperscale data centers wanting to draw power from the grid is spiking demand. That drives up prices for everyone, Peskoe says