Everyone else has to pay the price that data centers are willing to as well. And they can afford quite high prices before having margin troubles - likely much higher than what we as residents want to pay for energy.
This is on the assumption that supply will continue to remain constrained, excess energy usage, might as well be the investments necessary to shift to more Solar Panels and renewable energy storage, high compute intensive workloads can be executed anywhere, higher energy usage, might as well incentivise optimising AI, Research and Other Compute-intensive training workloads to shift to day time, when solar power peaks, and process everything during that time. The capabilities that this unlocks are tons, driving more investment into advanced battery tech, solar tech, etc.
Higher Consumption also drives investments to generate Higher Supply and hence future surplus and improvements in standard of living.
Yes, you are right in that. However we are not yet seeing much uptake in very flexible compute that works only during high energy production. And while I would love to see it, I am not sure we will anytime soon. One reason is capital costs of the compute equipment - if one only runs 25% of the time (daily solar peaks) - then it takes 4x as long to pay back the equipment. And we are still improving energy efficiency of compute a lot over time, so upgrading the equipment often is very beneficial in terms of TCO. Longer payback times is in conflict with that.
Higher Consumption also drives investments to generate Higher Supply and hence future surplus and improvements in standard of living.