Comment by threwrfaway
10 hours ago
How about an across the board $1/W hook up fee for new customers? Thats about the price of installed capacity per watt.
New house with 200 A panel an assumed 30% utilization rate? $3600.
New data center with 80% utilization rates at 100MW? $80 million dollars.
New 10 GW data center? That'll be $8 billion.
It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.
All projects have an interconnection fee.
Large projects will have a large load interconnection tariff that’s supposed to shoulder the costs of upgrading the infrastructure to support these new projects.
Data center discussions are weird right now because people assume these things don’t exist and propose them as solutions. They already exist.
The problem in the article is something different: The sites they’re talking about are designed to disconnect from the grid and use backup power when the voltage drops, which can be a problem because now there’s too much energy being supplied to the grid and not enough load to absorb it.
Linear progression is unfair, just like for taxation. If you're going to make a law like this, it should be something like nlog(n) so that the big players that abuse the system pay more than the little guy.
Now you made me wish for nlog(n) income tax as well.
We used to have something similar in France: solidarity tax on fortune (ISF), abolished by Macron at the height of the gilets jaunes movement in a big "fuck you" move.
Now it's much easier for wealthy elites to not pay taxes at all, as outlined in the past year with the Zucman tax debates (which elites opposed for daring to propose a 2% floor tax rate for those who don't pay 2%), and lately with the ministry of Finance Amélie de Montchalin lying to the members of parliament about the existence of a note produced by her own ministry showing that over 13000 millionaires pay effectively 0% income tax.
Texas has an independent energy grid, so are not exporting energy to them.
Yes, although, with enough datacentres, it starts to get linked to other grids via data i.e. it starts 'exporting' its energy via compute
Interesting when you start to take this insight seriously. You could imagine data centers becoming important military targets in the future if the US ever balkanizes. Beyond that, securing compute could become a part of everyday trade agreements.
As things industrialize further, a state's net compute flow might become a topic of campaign promises. We may later find correlations between states' access to quality compute and the educational/financial outcome of younger generations.
To be sure, my leverage and inertia with a $200/mo ChatGPT Pro subscription is already a lot higher than it is without. We're not talking about just chatbots anymore, modern agentic models represent a quantifiable increase in individual agency. Whether or not the job market implodes, I am able to make progress on things even while asleep or busy with something else. This kind of agentic capital has never been available to the working class before at scale.
States like Texas, with their independent grid, might find themselves in a favorable position in such a balkanization event, but past events have proved that ERCOT is not ready to operate a statewide power grid. I was in Texas during the '21 cold snap and it was brutal. I was using my gas stove for heat. If resources for compute suddenly became constrained, and compute was deemed a matter of security and economic survival, it would be a cutthroat environment for operators of Texas' existing 400+ data centers.
My rant was generally about what ought to be done to data centers.
In fact, I don't live near Texas. My state is having me finance a power line that will increase demand for our electricity.
> It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.
I don’t find anything outrageous whatsoever about building out transmission to strengthen regional interconnections. Lord knows we are decades behind the curve on this. If AI datacenters are what finally lets us maybe start to get a tiny bit ahead of the game I’m all for it. When the bubble pops there will finally be a bit of pressure off, and perhaps we can get back to a tiny bit of overbuilt capacity to cover for exceptional events again. And more reasonable projects maybe won’t be sitting in a decade long interconnection queue.
At some point we get to all collectively pay for our parents lack of investment in energy infrastructure. We have been living off our (great?) grandparents investments into the future and wide scale deindustrialization of the economy since I’ve been alive. At some point you run out of inertia.
Could always move to Texas if you hate the idea of your state ever possibly spending a dollar that benefits someone across the border. They islanded their grid pretty much precisely due to this attitude.
Watching the PJM and MISO interconnections over the past decade or so has been illuminating. It’s been a very slow moving disaster in the making that nearly no one is paying attention to.
As for your proposed solution I doubt anyone - including the datacenter operators - would argue since that is largely what tends to happen as it is. Just change utilization factor to capacity factor and sounds good to me!
> MISO
As a retail electricity customer, I vastly prefer whatever is going on in their operational context.
I live 10 miles from the "border" between ERCOT and MISO and I've got a lot of experience with both, particularly in disaster scenarios. ERCOT is a total shitshow when it comes to the edges. The fuel mix in MISO is pretty terrible for the environment, but it is also unbelievably reliable. The Mississippi River is not to be underestimated in its logistical impacts. The price of natural gas drives the daily fuel mix proportions, but it doesn't affect the available base capacity and its financial status (fully amortized for over a generation). If natural gas gets expensive in ercot and the wind isn't blowing, there isn't anything else to give. MISO has 2-3x the coal and nuclear capacity that ERCOT does.
Your math on the house seems off by a factor of 4? But 30% utilization seems high, as that would be a $2k/mo electric bill at 20 cents/kWh.
Reframing what you're saying, that would be a connection fee that worked out to just under 12 cents per kWh used for the first year, which seems both somewhat reasonable but also probably not going to move the needle much on the large deployments?
I guessed what the utilization factor for a house was, purposely going for a very high number to show that it wouldn't add too much to the house.
Note, In proposing a one time fee, on the capacity to generate power, not the energy.
Yes, but using the 30% utilization factor I get 200A * 240V * 30% = 14.4kW , meaning a $14400 connection fee rather than $3600 ? $3600 would be a 7.5% utilization factor.
And yes, I got the one time fee aspect. My point is that if you're basing this off of expected utilization (rather than say the size of the service regardless of how much energy is used), and that expected utilization is roughly correct, then that one time fee can be thought of as amortized cost per unit energy over a specified amount of time. And that cost isn't even that high if amortized over a year.