[anubistheta]

It's important to ground the increase in raw numbers.

The total revenue for electricity generation was $514b in 2024. So this was a 4-5% increase in costs. And if it is being invested in better generation and our aging infrastructure, that seems fine.

[khriss]

Sure, but why should regular people pay for the upgrades needed to power data centers? The tech companies can surely afford that easily given their record profits for the past decade?

[fsckboy]

supply and demand. there is more demand, prices go up, the market allocates, it's the best way, no other way comes close to making the overall price level to be as cheap as possible.

[blackqueeriroh]

Because they like shopping on Amazon and watching Netflix?

[beepbooptheory]

But like, just hypothetically here, what if they don't? Isn't that the framing here?

Like, don't get me wrong, if we want to start talking about more centralized organization of the economy that operates on the calculated total benefit it provides to people in general, I am personally all for that. But something tells me that is not quite the argument you are wanting to make here, right?

[raydev]

Consumers are already paying Amazon and Netflix directly.

[mlindner]

Forcing all costs on to new entrants in a market is generally a bad thing for the market and causes it to not expand fast enough. Also they may just choose to not participate in the market at all. I.e they'll bring in a whole lot of natural gas generators, put them in the parking lot and call it good, which is not a good thing long term.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Why would any reasonable governing entity (I understand we live in a world where there are not many of these) allow you to run a bunch of natural gas generators in a parking lot?

[blackqueeriroh]

Probably because there are laws that exist

[mlindner]

Because xAI does? I wasn't making a hypothetical.

[gravypod]

Forcing all costs into externalities is also not ideal. Right now, some state's systems, force residential consumers to pay for new infrastructure for new demand while only minimal costs are paid by the new customer.

[blackqueeriroh]

All or minimal costs? You’ve provided two contradicting statements here.

[gravypod]

When people ask for a commercial service hookup there is usually a charge to bring transformers and service lines to the building. This is a constant cost based on the load. The infrastructure to run the service lines out to a new commercial district are usually borne by the residential rate payers. It's how utility monopolies work in any of the states I've worked in.

So, you could think of it like this:

New customer: 100k-500k. Existing customers: 5% rate hike or 1M-100M/year in increased payments.

Per customer this may be minor but there are many customers.

The problem has been we have no system for proactive construction of new generation. Note: up until recently in the US demand has been mostly flat. We have been building significantly more power efficient systems so utilities did not know we would see a massive demand spike.

China somehow was able to harden against this and continued to improve infrastructure.

[NewsaHackO]

The fact they gave a raw number instead of a percent of a quantity that is a change hinted that this was the case. $23B is more impressive than 4%.

[mrcode007]

Imagine a mortgage rate raising by 4%. Still unimpressive ?

[NewsaHackO]

It's funny that you don't realize you are doing the same thing; you are giving the absolute change like the article is doing; you are just doing the change in the rate instead of the underlying quantity. A 4% change in my rate if the original rate is 4% would be a 100% rate rate change, which of course is substantial.

[tqi]

Mortgage rates have gone up 8% just since February.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

[ahtihn]

So the rate goes from say 4% to 4.16%? That's still unimpressive.

If you mean from 4% to 8%, then that's actually raising by 100%

[pibaker]

> So this was a 4-5% increase in costs

…spread over an entire country.

I can't find anything breakdown in the article. But from what I have heard, you either live somewhere with a high concentration of new data centers and see a massive price increase of as much as 50%, or more likely you don't see any increase at all.

[9cb14c1ec0]

Or you live in Maine with no datacenters and see massive price increases anyway, because God forbid we actually had a reasonable energy policy in the state.

[stevelini]

>> if it is being invested in better generation and our aging infrastructure

If.

[Sparkle-san]

It's 4-5% increase when averaged out across the population. Some have personally faced much larger increases.