Comment by phil21
8 hours ago
> 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.