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by saghm 2 days ago
Cynically, so that tech companies can get their power usage subsidized by the local population through their higher energy bills.
1 comments

That's easy enough to fix by charging datacenters at a higher rate than residential customers. Most electrical utility companies already have separate residential/industrial/commercial rates, specifically to prevent large-scale consumers from spiking small-scale consumers' prices.

Here in Nevada, NV Energy's in the process of getting state PUC approval for datacenter-specific “large-load electrical service agreements” specifically to ensure datacenters foot the bill for the infrastructure and generation buildouts needed to support them. Hopefully it goes through, since that seems to me like the exact right way to go about it.