[givemeethekeys]

Why are consumers paying for electricity used by server farms? Why can't the electricity companies charge the server farms instead?

Where I live, the utility company bills you at a higher rate if you use more electricity.

[XorNot]

Because electricity prices are an auction, so increased demand is bidding up the price anyway.

You need strong residential consumer protections to avoid this.

[beeflet]

do you? maybe we just need more supply

[renewiltord]

The residential consumers also oppose that. Usually they try very hard to reduce it. E.g. Diablo Canyon NPP

[phil21]

Yeah. We have been turning off old plants and not bringing on-line new ones the entire time I've been alive now. At best we've perpetually been renewing licenses to grant operation of old plants well beyond their original design lifetimes. Anything new is fought tooth and nail by practically every local community. Even solar and wind brings out the NIMBYs in force.

Every recent "datacenters are evil" news segment/article these days has a section quoting a few local NIMBYs talking about how they are opposing more transmission lines in their area for various reasons. Then these same folks (usually literally the same person) is quoted as saying that they are "for" investing into the grid and understands America needs more capacity - just not here.

It's pretty frustrating to watch. There are actually large problems with the way many local communities are approving datacenter deals - but people cannot seem to put two and two together why we are where we are. If everyone vetos new electrical infrastructure in their community, it simply doesn't get built.

[triceratops]

How can residential consumers successfully oppose power plants but not server farms?

[Ekaros]

Are they paying for electricity used by server farms. Or are they just paying more profits for owners of electricity producers? Do server farms get electricity below market price?

Ofc, possible long term contracts and options are involved in some of these markets. But there the option sellers would bear the cost.

[justlikereddit]

This is a recurrent question and not just for servers.

In Europe it is constantly >"why does the households of half of Europe pay for German unwillingness to have a good power mix? Why should anyone want more cross country or long range interconnects if it drives up local prices?"

Say Norway with abundant hydropower, they should by all right have cheap power. But reality is not so in half of the country because they're sufficiently interconnected to end up on a common bidders euro market and end up paying blood money for the poor political choices of countries they don't even share a border with.

Addition: this also creates perverse incentives. A good solution for many of the interconnected flat euro countries would love enormous hydropower overcapacity to be built in Norway at the cost of the local nature. This is great for whoever sells the hydropower. This is great for whoever is a politician that can show off their green all-hydro power mix in a country as hilly as a neutron star. But this is not great for whoever gets their backyard hiking trails reduced to a hydro reservoir.

But hey we do it with everything else too, "open pit mines are too destructive to have in our country, so we'll buy it from china and pretend we're making green choice. Globalism in a nutshell: Export your responsibility.

[blueblisters]

> consumers paying for electricity used by server farms

wait what? consumers are literally paying for server farms? this isn't a supply-demand gap?

[MatekCopatek]

It's a supply-demand gap, but since the reasons for it are very apparent, it's completely reasonable to describe it as "consumers paying for [the existence of] datacenters".

[phil21]

I don't see how? It's much more reasonable to state "all electrical consumers are paying a proportionate amount to operate the grid based on their usage rates". This is typically spelled out by the rate commissions and designed to make sure one power consumer is not "subsidizing" the other.

In the case of your quoted article - taking it at face value - this means "everyone" is paying .02/khw more on their bill. A datacenter is going to be paying thousands of times more than your average household as they should.

I don't see a problem with this at all. Cheap electricity is required to have any sort of industrial base in any country. Paying a proportionate amount of what it costs the grid to serve you seems about as fair of a model as I can come up with.

If you need to subsidize some households, then having subsidized rates for usage under the average household consumption level for the area might make sense?

I don't really blame the last watt added to the grid for incremental uptick in costs. It was coming either way due to our severe lack of investment in dispatchable power generation and transmission capacity - datacenters simply brought the timeline forward a few years.

There are plenty of actual problematic things going into these datacenter deals. Them exposing how fragile our grid is due to severe lack of investment for 50 years is about the least interesting one to me. I'd start with local (and state) tax credits/abatements myself.

[chermi]

No, it's a lie. Consumers paying more because of data centers raising demand could be true, but that's not equivalent to them paying for the data centers' usage. The data centers also have to pay an increased rate when prices go up.

Data centers get commercial or maybe even industrial rates depending on their grid hookup and utilities love predictable loads. Those are lower than residential rates. If you're dishonest and don't understand the cost of operating a grid, you could say that's users paying for data centers. But then you'd need to apply it to every commercial/industrial user.

If the regular users were paying for data centers usage, why are so many of them going off-grid with turbines or at least partially on-prem generation?

The solution is more and cheaper energy.

[barbazoo]

Charge them more than individual consumers? Why? Let the market decide how much electricity should be. /s

[givemeethekeys]

Hehe. Well, if the market is no good for its participants, then at least there is a viable alternative for many of them.