Or how about this framing (using your own numbers): for every dollar a datacenter is charged for electricity, regular hard-working Americans get charged $2.
The hill to die on might be the one behind your house that has a nice view of the illegal methane generators that these data centers are using, because they sure as hell aren't running on solar.
Well, I think some of those hardworking Americans would be happy to pay some of those $2 because otherwise all the SaaS services and other services, platforms, and tools running in datacenters wouldn’t be accessible to them.
Or did I read this wrong and somewhere it said only datacenters running inference or training for LLMs?
The thing people are pissed about is giving better rates to datacenters.
Compare this to most of Europe (and Texas if I understood correctly) where the detacenters buy their electricity from the same market as everyone else (in Europe the spot market or futures) meaning they effectively pay the same price as everyone else.
It’s when they do some back room deal with the local public utility to get 50% off and offload the real costs to the public when people get angry.
Is there an example of this happening? Isn't the problem that datacenters are drawing electricity at the market rate and driving the cost up, rather than paying a surcharge for the difference?
I don't think the mechanism is that different, and even if it was Europe, etc would have the same issue - data centers would still bid up the price for existing capacity, and the future capacity added to accommodate the dcs would be added at a higher marginal rate too because scarcity of new supply + base load nature of dc loads. So the problem will get worse before it gets better
Concrete examples? Quick google only shows small discounts for DCs relative to other wholesale industrial consumers, which could be partially explained away by the flat load, lack of stability concerns, no need for power factor correction hardware, etc. I think 'bidding up the market' is the dominant mechanism, here in Australia (spot market + futures) consumer prices are projected to increase 26%.
In Quebec, new data center will have to pay almost twice the price of what citizen are paying. it's 14 cents/kwh vs about 8 cents/kwh. Crypto center are set to pay 18 cents/kwh. That's the advantage of having a public utility.
True, I just left a hipster coffee shop in LA, and the liberals were whispering about their love of SaaS services, and their desire to socialize the costs of compute infrastructure.