Comment by drfloyd51
19 hours ago
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Everyone would be singing their praises.
Oregon just passed a law saying data centers will pay more for electricity than normal people, and the math says that everyone's rates will be going down.
So, again, I think it depends on whether you live in a red or blue state.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/04/data-centers-utility-...
that seems odd, do other industries pay a higher rate for electricity or is this specifically targeting data centers?
"HB 3546 creates a new classification for data centers, cryptocurrency and other large industrial energy users using more than 20 megawatts, or 20 million watts of power, to pay for their share of electricity use and costs."
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...
>Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
demand goes up + supply remains steady = price goes up.
Why should supply stay steady?
You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
Putting up everyone’s prices is a hard impact on a community.
> You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
they want to, hence all the natural gas turbines. However, and this is pretty funny, you don't just order those using doordash or turn up a knob like on AWS. It takes years, if not decades, for those things to get manufactured, delivered, installed, and on line. He who shall not be be named here mentioned in a interview how all these software guys are going to get painful lesson in hardware when they start trying to build behind the meter power generation.
>Why should supply stay steady?
i'm not saying it should. but it takes time to bring new power generation online.
>You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
agreed
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Also infrastructure costs might be billed differently between industrial vs retail.
(And the marginal cost on infrastructure isn't necessarily paid be the people increasing the demand)
In the short term (assuming no point fixes help soften the shock).