Comment by infecto
4 hours ago
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.
Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.
The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.
Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.
To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.
Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason.
We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
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You mean boomers have been voting against any and every infrastructure investment besides more roads while they lived off the investments of their parents and grandparents? Worse generation in American history.
The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
>The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - >Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.infecto
4 hours ago
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge jump in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
Thank you this. Super helpful. There were so many articles and most of them did not mention price I skipped through it aggressively.
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
I only skimmed because what I saw was either no evidence or low. They to touched on demand but not immediately the correlation to price which is hard to connect without supply and other mechanics that go into different electric grid geographies. This feels very similar to the water argument or the anti-solar farm crowd. Lots of emotions and not as many facts. I am going to lean on the original research link.
No worries, voters are engaged so I am not concerned. Data centers are a third rail in politics at the moment. I encourage politicians and lobbyists to voice their support so we know who they are, as elections have consequences.
‘Cost Me the Election’: Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183512 - May 2026
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