[dalyons]

absolutely agree with that. However, its not so much the capability, its the cost. In 2026 big projects cost a lot more, whos gunna pay for it? In the 80s we all paid for it, but we roughly all benefited as we got more and more electric capacity and day-to-day use cases. Today, it looks like we are all gunna pay for it, but only the datacenter owners are going to benefit. That model is broken.

[jeffbee]

Well, I don't think the evidence supports that. According to two recent LBNL reports consumer prices are lowest in states with huge demand increases (Texas), and highest in states with shrinking demand (California). The existence of large consumers tends to amortize the cost of grid updates.

[dalyons]

theres tons of news articles going around about how datacenter installs are causing large local rate spikes. for eg: https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...

> That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

> director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and co-author of a March 2025 paper exploring how the public is funding Big Tech’s power-intensive facilities. “Utilities are building infrastructure, and then we all pay for it because that’s how the utility business model has always worked,” he says.

> Residential electricity costs are also rising because the rush of new hyperscale data centers wanting to draw power from the grid is spiking demand. That drives up prices for everyone, Peskoe says

[jeffbee]

There absolutely is a narrative out there, but it's mostly unfounded. Bloomberg ran a completely absurd article about how AI was causing voltage drops in Colorado. Totally insane stuff, some of their contributors are pushing an agenda.

This Dept. of Energy analysis, which was recently updated, makes a lot more sense. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...

[dalyons]

Interesting. Though their conclusions are pretty weak:

> In some cases, spikes in load growth can result in significant, near-term retail price increases. Results from recent capacity auctions in the mid-Atlantic region prove this point, with sizable impacts on retail pricing beginning in 2025 (e.g., Howland, 2025). The duration of such impacts remains unclear, however, and will depend on the ability to build new cost-effective infrastructure to serve new loads. In other cases, utilities have argued that load growth will reduce average retail prices, consistent with our analysis of recent impacts (e.g., PG&E, 2025). Overall, our results cast doubt on the simple view that load growth will necessarily increase prices over the medium- to longer-term. Emerging evidence from 2025 suggests near-term impacts that can be either positive or negative; medium- to longer-term effects are uncertain.

Basically says “Maybe it makes retail more expensive, maybe it doesn’t”

And quite frankly I no longer fully trust the DoE. Politically captured by the trump administration, and directed to lie about renewables. Probably the folk writing this study are still trustworthy, but sadly I have a seed of doubt now.