[jonas21]

This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.

If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...

[Grombobulous]

I appreciate that you linked a paper to support your opinion on this matter, though I read the summary PDF a whole lot differently than you did. I’m not sure I’d blame renewables anywhere near as much as you did.

For one thing, energy demand hasn’t been increasing at the consumer level per capita. So you either have a growing population or growing commercial usage (like with data centers) or both driving energy demand.

Is there some literature that points to an idea that it’s faster to build a gas or coal power plant compared to a renewable one? My understanding is that solar is cheaper than gas, right? Even solar plus grid scale batteries are in a similar ballpark. And let’s not forget that other infrastructure like transmission lines and substations do not have any concept of renewable versus not.

The last thing I’ll point out is that we literally have to switch to renewables. There’s no long term versus short term, really, when we think about it. If we don’t make the switch we’ll actually put all of this planet in a lot bigger trouble than asking people to set their air conditioner thermostats a couple degrees higher.

[jonas21]

Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.

[Grombobulous]

Great clarification, thank you. I definitely did not get 53 slides deep.

[omnimus]

If you switch to renewables too quickly you will damage the investments in fossil energy sources that could be making big profits for decades to come.

[amluto]

If a jurisdiction switches to renewables too quickly, it damages the electorate’s tolerance for green policies.

[sheepscreek]

> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.

Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).

Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.

Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.

[infecto]

The county narrative is cherry picking imo and poor journalism. They are part of PJM which contains one of the largest data centers hubs. The PJM grid serves something like 67mm residents. PJM also uses an annual forward capacity auction to set prices and that is at least partly to blame in price increases. They are trying to forecast peak demand 3 years in advance to set a price for power plant owners to stay online in the event of needing that peak capacity. It’s poorly designed and why they have had such significant spikes there.

[FireBeyond]

That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.

"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.

So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.

(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).

[nonplus]

Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.

Can it handle it today? What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030? Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran? What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?

People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.

If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.

It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.

[infecto]

Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.

[nonplus]

If you want to pretend the only source of information on this subject is the linked article I'm sure you can find many users here to debate within your arbitrary parameters.

Same goes for proof, which I'm sure would exclude power flow models if they were available for said debate.

Edit: We can agree the article is not comprehensive, and doesn't have data PJM and utilities have not published.

[infecto]

Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.

[bryan_w]

> poor journalism.

404 media has never been interested in being good journalism, but rather driving signups to to their website by people who don't know what proper journalism looks like

[toomuchtodo]

So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.

It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.

> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.

It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.

(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])

[aftbit]

>It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable

This is because the argument that we didn't have the grid capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and residential solar was never sincere. You could tell because the followup was never "and we should invest more in the grid" but rather the reactionary "and that's why we can't use EVs."

The same people would be opposed to data centers, if not for the fact that the AI buildout is making them all rich.

[Kamq]

Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.

That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.

[toomuchtodo]

Agreed that in some situations, on some US electric grids (ISOs/TSOs), data centers are absorbing their electrical supply costs that would otherwise be externalities. This is good, I fully support this. This is not uniform unfortunately, and remains to be solved for in totality imho. I take no issue if we get to a point where the AI bubble pops and we're left with net new electrical infrastructure that continues to provide benefit decades into the future while the data centers sit silent (similar to the "fiber boom bust glut" at the turn of the century). I take issue with the AI bubble costs being pushed citizens already, broadly speaking, unable to make ends meet merely out of a desire to speculate (and no one can be sure how long this exuberance and hype cycle is going to last; as long as it lasts, humans who need electricity at a reasonable cost are at risk).

TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.

[baggy_trough]

Is there any reason to single out data centers, other than that they are the degrowther bugaboo of the year? Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.

[officeplant]

>Such a rule should apply to any industrial use such as a new factory, if it is to exist at all, which it shouldn't.

A factory produces tangible goods, and tends to get less hate because of that reality.

[legitster]

In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.

One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.

Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.

Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.

[smallmancontrov]

If data centers can outbid poor people, the poor peoples' air conditioning becomes the variable load. Nana sweats so that Zuck can tokenmaxx.

[CaliforniaKarl]

I'm surprised that the 404 Media article does not mention anything about this. At least, searching for the word "Clean" did not return any results.

[jollyllama]

Coal was made unprofitable by fiat and the plants were demolished (supply decreased).

Then, datacenters (demand increased, to put it mildly).

The explanation that one chooses for this is a function of one's other politics but the fact is, one has become a political rallying cry (opposition to demand increase) and the other (blame for supply decrease) has not, and this is the discussion we find ourselves in.

[nonethewiser]

The article is shit.

- electricity costs are rising

- there are many data centers

- claims data centers raise costs

- never actually shows how these new data centers are driving up electricity costs

Funny. They imply causation but never show it. If they had evidence that data centers caused this 25% increase, or a large percentage of it, dont you think they would show it?

Actually, you could write the exact same article but sub out data centers with the clean energy rollout.

[Legend2440]

I'm not surprised. 404 Media are anti-big tech and anti-AI activists. They are not shy about their agenda and do not claim to be unbiased.

[platevoltage]

I love tech, and I swear you Ai evangelists are making me anti-tech.

[dmix]

This is a popular social media take that is being pushed very hard by clickbait and doomposters, so it's not exactly going against the tide.

Social media is always trying to make things sound way worse than they are and journalists are always in a rush to latch onto those trending keywords, and artificially spin headlines vaguely connected to the topic. So if you only skim headlines it's easy to think something is a bigger problem than it is.

[elgertam]

As a Virginian, this is good information to have. I see a lot of ludicrous objections to data centers here (the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems and regardless the humidity here isn't evaporating water).

I've suspected that the energy regulations and the ruling party's close connection with Dominion Energy (the Governor recently attempted to fire the chair of Virginia Tech's board and replace him with the CEO of Dominion) have had an impact on power use more than data centers themselves.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> the most ludicrous being water consumption, when most of our data centers have closed-loop systems

Nb. Still many do not. Also, closed-loop systems use more electricity to operate, so it's not a cost-free solution.

[8note]

a different framing of this same information is that Dominion made dumb investment choices in the 2000s and 2010s, locking into electricity that has a fuel cost.

[dyauspitr]

This is the way. Build more data centers and mandate they are powered by solar+batteries/nuclear.

[sunshinesnacks]

Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.

In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.

[LeifCarrotson]

I work in industrial manufacturing and automation, several of my customers (those running steel foundries, aluminum die casting, plastic recycling and extrusion, and other power-intensive processes) represent a sizeable fraction of the utility usage in the small towns in which they're located.

They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.

Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?

[mrguyorama]

A lot of the problem right now is simply that new massive data centers are crying about being forced to.... pay their fair way.

They are mad that they aren't getting special treatment. They want to be treated better than the aluminum smelting plant.

[infecto]

It’s a hard to answer because each grid will treat it differently. My own experience when trying to track some of this data down, DCs are largely having to do the same and that’s why a lot of the buildout includes behind the meter generation to make up for it.

There is not a good picture in aggregate though so it creates all kinds of narratives.

[axus]

The gas-powered generators are what makes a data center unpleasant to live by.

[infecto]

Hyperbole if I have ever seen it. Absolutely there are specific outliers (x ai) but this is not the norm.

[officeplant]

Of the data center rollouts I've been contracted to do safety systems for, ALL of them have gas turbines as part of their power infrastructure on property. They don't solely have gas, but they are mixed Solar/Gas every time.

A few of them in the future pipeline swear they will have nuclear but I don't see that coming to fruition soon.

[esseph]

Depending on what an "AI datacenter" means, their loads don't fluctuate nearly as much as something like a smelter.

[sunshinesnacks]

I’m a few days late, but not sure why I got all the downvotes on this.

Many regions/markets have relatively stable retail rate structures, i.e., residential and most commercial customers don’t pay day-to-day and hour-to-hour electricity market prices. Their per-kWh and per-kW rates are adjusted on much longer time scales, like once a year.

So, big base load customers sign contracts in one year, resulting in better utilization of grid assets, so prices stay lower in the next year(s). But if those customers are not flexible (or are not on a rate structure that encourages them to be flexible), they could contribute to short-term capacity shortages this year. And that will have no impact on many rate payers’ bills, ant least not before rates get adjusted later.