No. Industrial vs consumer use is night and day. Industrial has much higher draw of resources and should pay more as a result especially when total capacity needs to increase specifically for them.
The reason an industrial use uses x times more than a consumer is because the industry is selling products and services to x consumers. You can't compare them 1:1.
Well the industrial should charge more to cover its costs instead of offloading the cost of its goods to consumers? Why does Walmart get to utilize food stamps or hyperscalers get to drain all the energy? Thats a massive public subsidy for a private corporation.
In the end the consumer pays. Why should the consumer pay tax on the fossil fuels used to bring them AI but not on the fossil fuels used to bring them to work? That's the inconsistency.
Yes it is but there are 2 items at issue:
- if we are concerned about environmental externalities (as we should be IMO) then we have to ask if current taxes were designed to price those externalities or if they were just designed to pay off infrastructure. As far as I understand, it's the latter, so if we want to ensure polluters pay, whether they operate an AI data center or an Acura, we might need to charge more. Importantly this need not be tax - it can just be something immediately refunded to all citizens, so you end up with a scenario where people who use a lot are paying people who use little.
- the original poster seemed to feel that some gas consumers should pay much more than others. If we do policy based on vibes, this makes sense. Big = bad vibes = pay more. But IMO vibes are a very bad basis for good policy and will just make things worse.
It's not vibes if you use numbers. Have the first 10 kWh be free, the next 100 are charged at $0.10/hr, the next 1000 at $0.20/hr and go up from there. (Whatever numbers actually make sense.) If the factory only uses a house's worth of electricity, they pay the same rate. If a house uses a factory's worth of electricity, they also pay the same rate as the factory would.