[pegasus]

I feel the same. When those large datacenter projects were being considered, the necessity for building new power lines should have been included in the ask. Instead they built the centers, then "notice" the system is straining and stick the public with the bill and local communities with the consequences. Classic "privatize profits and socialize risks".

[AnthonyMouse]

Every consumer of electricity had to have power lines installed to their building in order to get electricity. They all then pay in proportion to how much electricity they use. The electric bill of a data center is large. It already includes the cost of building and maintaining power lines and generating power and everything else, because they all do, since that's what electric bills pay for.

In general the problem is the power company, having received a large new customer and therefore a lot of new revenue, who wants to stuff it in their pocket instead of using it to upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand.

[sokoloff]

Isn’t the entire point of this power line project to “upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand”?

[AnthonyMouse]

People are looking for any excuse to complain about data centers right now. Building transmission lines is bad because you're taking peoples land; not building transmission lines is bad because there isn't enough existing capacity. The first one is obviously preferable but when you're looking for an excuse it works out either way.

What the complainers (i.e. the media companies) actually want is for the AI companies to stop letting people use AI to answer questions they used to read media articles to answer.