Comment by jonas21
2 hours ago
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.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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])
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.
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.
Do you have evidence that they are the problem. The research suggests otherwise. From some of the regional grids I have looked at the bigger problem has been lack of continued investment in transmission and generation. Even now I see so much push back for solar farms. People are their own worst enemy.
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.
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The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
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