[austin-cheney]

I oppose the data centers because they drive up utility costs and contribute to the instability of the local electrical grid. I get pain from them and no benefits. I really don’t want most of the unprofitable AI foolishness that is being forced on us.

[phil21]

What instability has been attributed towards datacenter - or even any - large 24x7 predictable load industrial consumers of electricity in your area?

The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!

[austin-cheney]

Grid instability, which includes an increasing frequency of brown outs. It’s the primary reason residential owners are heavily investing in solar panels.

If you don’t know where I live how can you know if my claim is true or not?

[phil21]

Because I have been monitoring this as a weird interest of mine now for 20 years or more. To the point of absurdity.

I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.

I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.

Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.

I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.

[austin-cheney]

I cannot speak for why everyone in the US buys solar. I can only speak for my local community.

If you want to find locations of grid instability focus on growth, both residential and industrial, that is radically out of scale compared to larger geographic averages. Otherwise, it seems like you are measuring using the wrong trends.

What’s crazy is that the grid instability was there before the explosion of data centers and the primary revenue generator of the much larger geographic region is energy transport/production.