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.
I appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did.
For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.
Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.
Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right 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.
That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.
"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.
So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.
(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).
Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.
Can it handle it today?
What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030?
Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran?
What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?
People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.
If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.
It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.
Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.
If you want to pretend the only source of information on this subject is the linked article I'm sure you can find many users here to debate within your arbitrary parameters.
Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.
Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.
I’ve linked analyses explaining why PJM’s forward capacity market has been a major driver of recent retail rate increases, not just in this one county.
If you disagree, point to the analysis or data. Suggesting I’m “pretending” doesn’t address the argument. The article cherry-picks one county while largely ignoring the broader PJM pricing mechanics affecting millions of customers. Do better. Between pricing mechanics, input cost inflation and yes increase in demand has impact but not like the article likes to weave it.
Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.
404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like
In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.
One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.
Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.
Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.
Coal was made unprofitable by fiat and the plants were demolished (supply decreased).
Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).
The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.
- never actually shows how these new data centers are driving up electricity costs
Funny. They imply causation but never show it. If they had evidence that data centers caused this 25% increase, or a large percentage of it, dont you think they would show it?
Actually, you could write the exact same article but sub out data centers with the clean energy rollout.
This is a popular social media take that is being pushed very hard by clickbait and doomposters, so it's not exactly going against the tide.
Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.
As a Virginian, this is good information to have. I see a lot of ludicrous objections to data centers here (the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems and regardless the humidity here isn't evaporating water).
I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair of Virginia Tech's board and replace him with the CEO of Dominion) have had an impact on power use more than data centers themselves.
a different framing of this same information is that Dominion made dumb investment choices in the 2000s and 2010s, locking into electricity that has a fuel cost.
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])
>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
This is because the argument that we didn't have the grid capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and residential solar was never sincere. You could tell because the followup was never "and we should invest more in the grid" but rather the reactionary "and that's why we can't use EVs."
The same people would be opposed to data centers, if not for the fact that the AI buildout is making them all rich.
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.
Is there any reason to single out data centers, other than that they are the degrowther bugaboo of the year? Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.
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.
Of the data center rollouts I've been contracted to do safety systems for, ALL of them have gas turbines as part of their power infrastructure on property. They don't solely have gas, but they are mixed Solar/Gas every time.
A few of them in the future pipeline swear they will have nuclear but I don't see that coming to fruition soon.
And is that datacenter bypassing air quality regulation and backing up to a housing development? Most/all of the construction I have tracked meets air quality guidelines and fairly remote but I know that is not always the case!
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
While that is an interesting issue to deal with, I was totally lost at the concept of not saving before going home. I can't go five minutes without saving, and you were willing to leave the "room" without saving? That's just one of those things so outside my normal that I got lost in thinking about it especially as matter of fact as it was recited. You live in a different realm my friend.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
How about just forget about this thread and don’t let it be a major annoyance. It’s a very minor annoyance. It would be a more widespread debate/discussion if so many people were upset by it. At the least, just admit you’re in the minority that are so upset by it and then just live with it anyways.
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
Potholes are much more than just an annoyance. They can damage your car. Not sure where you live that potholes are mere annoyances, but where I'm from they can be quite large. To the point calling them potholes is stretching the definition. My mom used to joke that she wanted to throw in some water and a loaf of bread into some of them in case someone fell in. They can pop a tire, bend/crack a rim, and they can definitely break steering rods.
The easier thing to do with motion timers would be to only enable them not during work hours. All of the other logic you want to program in them is something easily done today, but definitely not as long as they've been around.
Potholes aren’t really the core of the annoyance, just like the lights, it’s the control mechanisms around them. Potholes are going to occur yet there’s no proactive repair response. Massive potholes you’re describing rarely show up over night, and it’s very likely many city employees drive over them daily (trash trucks, police, code compliance, water services, etc).
Oh, see, you must be a city slicker. I grew up in the country where city employees absolutely did not drive over the roads daily if weekly if monthly. In fact, I didn't even live in a city as the area was just unincorporated county land, so there were no city employees. Every now and then, sheriff deputies might roll through.
The country roads that met up to the "big" 2 lane FM where I grew up were all posted 20mph. I remember one evening when my mom got pulled over because the deputy said she was swerving so much that she had to have been drunk. My mom looked at him and politely told him "you swerved around the same potholes I did". My mom never drank.
Also, you really seem stuck on trying to tell me what is annoying or not to the point you are now annoying me
I work in a smart building.
Apparently it’s good for hormone health and circadian rhythms to have lights that don’t immediately respond when you press the button, suddenly turn up at 7am when they decided it was ‘daytime’ and turn off unexpectedly as you finish up a late shift.
A light switch that doesn’t respond immediately might be the most frustrating technology life.
If you’re a cost conscious manufacturer, I think you could do it very cheaply these days (cents/unit). The problem is most manufacturers would turn this into a full blown AI capable smart device to justify charging a lot more.
I am certainly in the minority and I do live with it.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
There's something to be said about having lights on in a room that is not occupied the entire time the lights are on. Before LED lighting, it was a decent attempt at reducing unnecessary lighting.
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!
Their job is to represent their company. It's like calling a defence or prosecution lawyer an asshole for taking their client's side. It's the judge's job to be impartial, not theirs. And it's the regulator's job to be impartial, not the lobbyist's.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".
Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.
Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.
There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.
This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.
ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
You are describing the normal process of purchasing things and how prices work. There is no nefarious passing on.
We should redistribute money from the wealthy to households, but I'm not sure if rate price controls beyond what already exists is the correct way to do it. The real issue with these data centers is tax jurisdiction shopping.
Isnt that what virgina did in the new rate class this article mentions? Data centers have to enter long term contracts with minimums (regardless of usage) to help power companies plan ahead.
Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)
> Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the deal, Meta already had over 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in its renewable portfolio.
> Stargate AI partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group was reported by Bloomberg to be powered, at least in part, by solar. SB Energy, which is part of SoftBank’s portfolio, is expected to develop solar installations backed by grid-scale batteries.
> Meta closed out the month with another massive solar deal, this one with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra. The contract was for 595 megawatts of capacity.
> Meta continued its streak in February, investing in a 505-megawatt solar project with Cypress Creek Renewables, which is developing the massive installation in Coleman County, Texas — about 150 miles northwest of Austin.
> Microsoft entered the fray in February, too. The company has long been a buyer of renewable energy to power its operations, and added another 389 megawatts of solar in a deal with EDP Renewables North America.
> Amazon also made a big purchase, backing a hybrid project on the Iberian Peninsula that includes wind, solar, and pumped-hydroelectric storage. The deal included 476 megawatts total, of which 212 megawatts are solar.
> Outside of the U.S., data center operators have also been investing in solar. In India, CtrlS built its own 125-megawatt facility in two phases, the first half of which was finished in June 2024 with the second completed in early February. In South America, Telecom Argentina agreed to buy electricity from a 130-megawatt solar farm developed by MSU Green Energy.
> Microsoft added another three solar developments in March, again focusing on the Midwest. The projects span Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri, and they’re being developed by AES. Together, they will provide Microsoft with 475 megawatts of capacity, adding to its considerable 34-gigawatt portfolio.
> Cisco got in the game with a 100-megawatt deal with X-Elio, a solar developer owned by Brookfield, an asset manager that has bet big on renewables. The power purchase agreements see Cisco buying capacity from two different Texas solar projects.
> Meta added another 200 megawatts of solar to its portfolio in March in a deal with RWE. The solar farm will be built just southeast of Austin.
> In Italy, data center operator Data4 signed a 10-year deal with utility Edison Energia to buy power from a 148-megawatt solar farm northwest of Rome.
That was all in 2025^
There's also been big investment in nuclear and natural gas
All that generation capacity is great, but you need to get the electrons to the datacenter. And in most jurisdictions the transmission part of the grid is a shared cost. Mostly...there is technically some obligation to pay for upgrades but it doesn't really work.
e.g.
>Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills
It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
Just to compare it to my rural county:
Henrico county: pop 345,000, 237 sq miles, 1455 population per sq mile
Marion county: pop 11,600, 954 sq miles, 12 pop/sq mi.
So it might be a small county but it sure ain't rural!
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that.
https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
I'm confused as to why they've allowed the data center power drain (which they knew was going to happen) to cascade into consumer power prices. Surely they should be charging consumers their existing price and charging the data centers an increased price based on their massive usage.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
You're confused why neoliberals want to give out more corporate welfare over helping citizens material needs?
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
Why should we subsidize sprawl & economically unsustainable areas to live?
That said, this is only part of the picture. The other big part is that California has very aggressive tort law and CA juries basically view PG&E as a giant piggy bank.
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
Enron managed to mangle/free-marketize California's electricity system. Utilities have to purchase electricity at market prices on an exchange that Enron built.
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
This is insane reporting. Their own article says the data center buildout happened in 2017. The article they link about it says the same thing. And so rate changes now - in 2026, nearly a full decade after those DCs were built out - are somehow the fault of the measly 37 datacenters there? They don't even say that outright - they're just insinuating this from the title and wording in the artcile to be sneaky about it. This is garbage! They just put "$current_thing bad" in the headline and nobody's really checking that they're straight up lying by omission!
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
“Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight. Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.
$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency
Can someone more up to speed explain to me why with Virginia’s proximity to one of the largest natural gas reservoirs in the world in West Virginia, they don’t just build new power plants to keep up with electricity demand?
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-...
I appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did.
For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.
Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.
Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.
Great clarification, thank you. I definitely did not get 53 slides deep.
If you switch to renewables too quickly you will damage the investments in fossil energy sources that could be making big profits for decades to come.
If a jurisdiction switches to renewables too quickly, it damages the electorate’s tolerance for green policies.
> 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.
That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.
"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.
So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.
(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).
Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.
Can it handle it today? What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030? Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran? What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?
People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.
If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.
It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.
Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.
If you want to pretend the only source of information on this subject is the linked article I'm sure you can find many users here to debate within your arbitrary parameters.
Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.
Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.
I’ve linked analyses explaining why PJM’s forward capacity market has been a major driver of recent retail rate increases, not just in this one county.
SemiAnalysis: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/are-ai-datacenters-inc...
LBNL: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
If you disagree, point to the analysis or data. Suggesting I’m “pretending” doesn’t address the argument. The article cherry-picks one county while largely ignoring the broader PJM pricing mechanics affecting millions of customers. Do better. Between pricing mechanics, input cost inflation and yes increase in demand has impact but not like the article likes to weave it.
Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.
> poor journalism.
404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like
In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.
One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.
Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.
Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.
If data centers can outbid poor people, the poor peoples' air conditioning becomes the variable load. Nana sweats so that Zuck can tokenmaxx.
I'm surprised that the 404 Media article does not mention anything about this. At least, searching for the word "Clean" did not return any results.
Coal was made unprofitable by fiat and the plants were demolished (supply decreased).
Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).
The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.
The article is shit.
- electricity costs are rising
- there are many data centers
- claims data centers raise costs
- never actually shows how these new data centers are driving up electricity costs
Funny. They imply causation but never show it. If they had evidence that data centers caused this 25% increase, or a large percentage of it, dont you think they would show it?
Actually, you could write the exact same article but sub out data centers with the clean energy rollout.
I'm not surprised. 404 Media are anti-big tech and anti-AI activists. They are not shy about their agenda and do not claim to be unbiased.
I love tech, and I swear you Ai evangelists are making me anti-tech.
This is a popular social media take that is being pushed very hard by clickbait and doomposters, so it's not exactly going against the tide.
Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.
As a Virginian, this is good information to have. I see a lot of ludicrous objections to data centers here (the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems and regardless the humidity here isn't evaporating water).
I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair of Virginia Tech's board and replace him with the CEO of Dominion) have had an impact on power use more than data centers themselves.
> the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems
Nb. Still many do not. Also, closed-loop systems use more electricity to operate, so it's not a cost-free solution.
a different framing of this same information is that Dominion made dumb investment choices in the 2000s and 2010s, locking into electricity that has a fuel cost.
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])
>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
This is because the argument that we didn't have the grid capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and residential solar was never sincere. You could tell because the followup was never "and we should invest more in the grid" but rather the reactionary "and that's why we can't use EVs."
The same people would be opposed to data centers, if not for the fact that the AI buildout is making them all rich.
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.
Is there any reason to single out data centers, other than that they are the degrowther bugaboo of the year? Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.
>Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.
A factory produces tangible goods, and tends to get less hate because of that reality.
This is the way. Build more data centers and mandate they are powered by solar+batteries/nuclear.
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.
The gas-powered generators are what makes a data center unpleasant to live by.
Hyperbole if I have ever seen it. Absolutely there are specific outliers (x ai) but this is not the norm.
Of the data center rollouts I've been contracted to do safety systems for, ALL of them have gas turbines as part of their power infrastructure on property. They don't solely have gas, but they are mixed Solar/Gas every time.
A few of them in the future pipeline swear they will have nuclear but I don't see that coming to fruition soon.
And is that datacenter bypassing air quality regulation and backing up to a housing development? Most/all of the construction I have tracked meets air quality guidelines and fairly remote but I know that is not always the case!
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.
Depending on what an "AI datacenter" means, their loads don't fluctuate nearly as much as something like a smelter.
If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.
Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.
hahah that is so wonderfully malicious compliance
That's not 'malicious compliance'...
it's 'Jevonsian insanity'.
Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!
Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.
not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
While that is an interesting issue to deal with, I was totally lost at the concept of not saving before going home. I can't go five minutes without saving, and you were willing to leave the "room" without saving? That's just one of those things so outside my normal that I got lost in thinking about it especially as matter of fact as it was recited. You live in a different realm my friend.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
How about just forget about this thread and don’t let it be a major annoyance. It’s a very minor annoyance. It would be a more widespread debate/discussion if so many people were upset by it. At the least, just admit you’re in the minority that are so upset by it and then just live with it anyways.
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
Potholes are much more than just an annoyance. They can damage your car. Not sure where you live that potholes are mere annoyances, but where I'm from they can be quite large. To the point calling them potholes is stretching the definition. My mom used to joke that she wanted to throw in some water and a loaf of bread into some of them in case someone fell in. They can pop a tire, bend/crack a rim, and they can definitely break steering rods.
The easier thing to do with motion timers would be to only enable them not during work hours. All of the other logic you want to program in them is something easily done today, but definitely not as long as they've been around.
https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/06/like-an-explosi...
$3.86 million claim from a pothole. I'm normally pretty skeptical of damage claims, but that is a pretty nasty pothole.
Potholes aren’t really the core of the annoyance, just like the lights, it’s the control mechanisms around them. Potholes are going to occur yet there’s no proactive repair response. Massive potholes you’re describing rarely show up over night, and it’s very likely many city employees drive over them daily (trash trucks, police, code compliance, water services, etc).
Oh, see, you must be a city slicker. I grew up in the country where city employees absolutely did not drive over the roads daily if weekly if monthly. In fact, I didn't even live in a city as the area was just unincorporated county land, so there were no city employees. Every now and then, sheriff deputies might roll through.
The country roads that met up to the "big" 2 lane FM where I grew up were all posted 20mph. I remember one evening when my mom got pulled over because the deputy said she was swerving so much that she had to have been drunk. My mom looked at him and politely told him "you swerved around the same potholes I did". My mom never drank.
Also, you really seem stuck on trying to tell me what is annoying or not to the point you are now annoying me
I work in a smart building. Apparently it’s good for hormone health and circadian rhythms to have lights that don’t immediately respond when you press the button, suddenly turn up at 7am when they decided it was ‘daytime’ and turn off unexpectedly as you finish up a late shift.
A light switch that doesn’t respond immediately might be the most frustrating technology life.
Smarter device would just require a little more cost. Current devices can work with no code, just analog electronics.
If you’re a cost conscious manufacturer, I think you could do it very cheaply these days (cents/unit). The problem is most manufacturers would turn this into a full blown AI capable smart device to justify charging a lot more.
I am certainly in the minority and I do live with it.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
There's something to be said about having lights on in a room that is not occupied the entire time the lights are on. Before LED lighting, it was a decent attempt at reducing unnecessary lighting.
"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."
And the rest has AI. All is fine. /s
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb593.html
The lobbyists are just doing their jobs well. It's the Senate that isn't. Blame the people who you pay taxes to purely to be impartial.
lobbyists alao disbenefit from bad policy, and their clients will lose out worse when the population is much more pissed off.
these are still physical assets that can be destroyed in a riot
There's no reason not to blame lobbyists as well. A lobbyist saying "it's just business," doesn't excuse them for being assholes.
Their job is to represent their company. It's like calling a defence or prosecution lawyer an asshole for taking their client's side. It's the judge's job to be impartial, not theirs. And it's the regulator's job to be impartial, not the lobbyist's.
You're assuming these people know what a lobbyist does beyond the edgey cynical definition they learned about when they were 13.
A comparison made by some Solaris guy comparing a tech magnate to a lawnmower springs to mind.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...
April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.
Most people don't have AI subscriptions. A lot of the most fervent detractor hate AI to the core and refuse to use it as much as possible.
Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.
Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".
Most consumers are willingly using AI. But they're using the free versions.
ChatGPT is the #1 most popular app on the app store, with nearly a billion weekly active users.
i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!
The day I'm force to pay for it, I'll stop using it.
Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?
Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.
What if we never signed up?
Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.
There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.
This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.
ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
Was that tech guy a crypto miner by chance?
> passing those costs on to other rate payers.
You are describing the normal process of purchasing things and how prices work. There is no nefarious passing on.
We should redistribute money from the wealthy to households, but I'm not sure if rate price controls beyond what already exists is the correct way to do it. The real issue with these data centers is tax jurisdiction shopping.
My state almost passed one such bill this year. Lobbyists got it put in time-out until this year's legislative session ran out.
Isnt that what virgina did in the new rate class this article mentions? Data centers have to enter long term contracts with minimums (regardless of usage) to help power companies plan ahead.
https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/dominion-energy-rate...
Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)
It's kinda crazy that data centers aren't on some sort of ringfenced scheme.
This whole just throw it on the grid and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane
> and residential consumers pick up the increased infra costs is insane
These companies are investing heavily in new energy development?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/data-centers-love-solar-he...
> Meta kicked off the year with a 200-megawatt solar deal with multinational electric utility Engie. The purchase went toward a solar farm near one of the company’s existing data centers in Texas. At the time of the deal, Meta already had over 12 gigawatts of generating capacity in its renewable portfolio.
> Stargate AI partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group was reported by Bloomberg to be powered, at least in part, by solar. SB Energy, which is part of SoftBank’s portfolio, is expected to develop solar installations backed by grid-scale batteries.
> Meta closed out the month with another massive solar deal, this one with Spanish renewable developer Zelestra. The contract was for 595 megawatts of capacity.
> Meta continued its streak in February, investing in a 505-megawatt solar project with Cypress Creek Renewables, which is developing the massive installation in Coleman County, Texas — about 150 miles northwest of Austin.
> Microsoft entered the fray in February, too. The company has long been a buyer of renewable energy to power its operations, and added another 389 megawatts of solar in a deal with EDP Renewables North America.
> Amazon also made a big purchase, backing a hybrid project on the Iberian Peninsula that includes wind, solar, and pumped-hydroelectric storage. The deal included 476 megawatts total, of which 212 megawatts are solar.
> Outside of the U.S., data center operators have also been investing in solar. In India, CtrlS built its own 125-megawatt facility in two phases, the first half of which was finished in June 2024 with the second completed in early February. In South America, Telecom Argentina agreed to buy electricity from a 130-megawatt solar farm developed by MSU Green Energy.
> Microsoft added another three solar developments in March, again focusing on the Midwest. The projects span Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri, and they’re being developed by AES. Together, they will provide Microsoft with 475 megawatts of capacity, adding to its considerable 34-gigawatt portfolio.
> Cisco got in the game with a 100-megawatt deal with X-Elio, a solar developer owned by Brookfield, an asset manager that has bet big on renewables. The power purchase agreements see Cisco buying capacity from two different Texas solar projects.
> Meta added another 200 megawatts of solar to its portfolio in March in a deal with RWE. The solar farm will be built just southeast of Austin.
> In Italy, data center operator Data4 signed a 10-year deal with utility Edison Energia to buy power from a 148-megawatt solar farm northwest of Rome.
That was all in 2025^
There's also been big investment in nuclear and natural gas
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c748gn94k95o
Think you're missing the point a bit there.
All that generation capacity is great, but you need to get the electrons to the datacenter. And in most jurisdictions the transmission part of the grid is a shared cost. Mostly...there is technically some obligation to pay for upgrades but it doesn't really work.
e.g.
>Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills
It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
[0] https://www.ucs.org/about/news/billions-dollars-unreported-d...
>It's a real privatize profits/benefit, socialize losses/costs type setup.
Just like all developments since collective ideas went out of fashion...
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).
Like just stating a bunch of facts and implying causation. Never showing causation.
You could basically write the same article but swap data centers for clean energy upgrades.
- rationing request anecdote
- clean energy law dictating cleaner power
- unexamined claim clean energy is increasing prices nationally
- state there is a 25% price increased
Its
- “A” and “B”
- claim “A” causes “B”
- restate “B”
Did I show “A causes B”?
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but
Really makes you think: should you really support efforts like this when there are better and more honest groups out there? (Cough EFF *cough)
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
This is suburban Richmond, not a "small rural county".
Just to compare it to my rural county: Henrico county: pop 345,000, 237 sq miles, 1455 population per sq mile Marion county: pop 11,600, 954 sq miles, 12 pop/sq mi.
So it might be a small county but it sure ain't rural!
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
The article didn't include the actual power rates. I think the applicable tariff is $3.316/kW of demand + 16.82c/kWh. https://www.scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch/DOCS/89pc01!.PDF
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that. https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
The ~spice~ inference must flow.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
It is also often a violation of the Clean Air Act but we don't have good regulation in place to actually hold them accountable
And SCOTUS just today made a ruling that will increase money in politics, so it's not going to get better any time soon.
In more ways than one: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance
I'm confused as to why they've allowed the data center power drain (which they knew was going to happen) to cascade into consumer power prices. Surely they should be charging consumers their existing price and charging the data centers an increased price based on their massive usage.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
Hardly seems fair or right.
This is just what happens with a demand shock in any context.
You're confused why neoliberals want to give out more corporate welfare over helping citizens material needs?
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
Why should we subsidize sprawl & economically unsustainable areas to live?
That said, this is only part of the picture. The other big part is that California has very aggressive tort law and CA juries basically view PG&E as a giant piggy bank.
public infrastructure should be owned by the public
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”
Enron managed to mangle/free-marketize California's electricity system. Utilities have to purchase electricity at market prices on an exchange that Enron built.
I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.
I'd imagine your normal Colo facility uses a lot less power than an AI data center.
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
I pay over $0.51/kWh in electricity thanks to PG&E.
Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s
Unplug the data centers instead.
>37 data centers and there are plans to build 17 more, including plans to convert hundreds of acres of _Civil War battlefields_ into data centers.
Those poor battlefields. How rarely it is that anyone thinks of their needs.
Yeah, it's kinda silly to block development on a patch of ground forever because someone fought over it two centuries ago.
This is insane reporting. Their own article says the data center buildout happened in 2017. The article they link about it says the same thing. And so rate changes now - in 2026, nearly a full decade after those DCs were built out - are somehow the fault of the measly 37 datacenters there? They don't even say that outright - they're just insinuating this from the title and wording in the artcile to be sneaky about it. This is garbage! They just put "$current_thing bad" in the headline and nobody's really checking that they're straight up lying by omission!
Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
This is back to the propaganda that people need to recycle because big companies dont want to clean up after themselves.
Maybe the county could just ask its employees to work from home so that its office electricity bill goes down to zero. A win-win solution!
a few years from now they will advise people to stop eating so much, since they need the farmland for data centers
archived; no ads no trackers: https://nonogra.ph/county-with-37-data-centers-asks-schools-...
That's nerve...
Do we scale back AI slop for a few days or pull power back from schools? Easy, kids can suffer, give them some ice water.
The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough.
If we took the money Accenture spends on tokens so that their staff can convert PDFs to presentations(1) we can probably fund a school or two.
1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...
Maybe it would help remove useless and harmful tech from schools. Books don't need batteries.
Seems AI use at younger ages has detrimental effects. Let’s remove that from schools while we are at it.
Remember when the grid couldn’t support EVs ? , but amazingly it CAN support Data centres…
Pepperidge farm remembers
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
We can't leave money on the table for all those below average prices - so let's raise them all to the average... oh wait
Is this why median is usually better when discussing things, since the median may not change at all or may go down in this circumstance?
obviously the average goes up in this circumstance...
"ai" bubble burst cannot come soon enough
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency
Can someone more up to speed explain to me why with Virginia’s proximity to one of the largest natural gas reservoirs in the world in West Virginia, they don’t just build new power plants to keep up with electricity demand?