[dgllghr]

As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.

Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.

[explodes]

This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:

We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.

We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.

We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.

AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.

[dgllghr]

So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)

[skybrian]

Could you share more about the rate increases? The newspaper articles I've seen seemed sketchy on how people were affected.