[epistasis]

There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses.

However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone:

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...

A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices.

And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.

[bigbadfeline]

There's only one way to resolve this - datacenters to build their own energy generation, not connected to the grid, just local. Otherwise, they'll muddy the water to no end until they manage to saddle the rest of us with their energy costs.

[lotsofpulp]

The muddied water is just supply and demand. If a datacenter increases demand for electricians, natural gas, solar panels, copper, whatever else, then the price will have to go up. The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.

The demand is still there, connected to the grid or not. The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways (and less resilient in other ways), which is why the grid came about in the first place.

[bigbadfeline]

> The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.

That's not the question, we aren't discussing trivialities like what change of supply is necessary for satisfying increased demand, that's like discussing "is water wet" or "do you need more or less water to satisfy your thirst for water".

The real question is Who is going to pay for building the additional supply?

Residential and other prior customers have already paid the capex for the existing supply and now you want them to pay the capex for enormous amounts of new capacity which the AI corps convert exclusively into their own revenue.

The public is already paying through the nose for new semiconductor capacity because the same scam-geniuses cornered the RAM, GPU and related chips market and they are mercilessly scalping it too, again at the expense of the public.

> The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways

In a perfect world it can, in this world it makes things more unstable and far more unfair when large new consumers use it for their exclusive revenue extraction while pretending that the new capacity is somehow benefiting everybody instead of just them.

> The muddied water is just supply and demand.

Indeed, "just supply and demand" is the mud in the eyes.