Debt trickles down, money trickles up
To be clear, this is a generic supply and demand effect that isn’t specific to datacenters. It’s how any market works.
To be clear, the amount of data centers being built is directly affecting this, so the anger directed to data centers is more than justified
If they’re using those centers to generate revenue and they can afford to pay the electricity bill, there’s something off. My neighbors aren’t paying for my electricity.
I am not paying for the hood milk factories electricity, I am not paying for the John Hancock building’s electricity, I am not paying for the liquor stores electricity. Walmart and micky d’s are paying their own bills.
There’s no reason the common person should be paying for the electrical bill of another, especially when revenue of 200$ to 250$ per person per annual subscription services so… yearly. …
“Hey we’re making money off of you but you’re gonna pay for our store to exist…”
🤷🏻♂️ Someone is bribing the department of energy.
datacenters
where do you think the increased demand came from?
jfc
I mean, the country chose Trump, what are you expecting?
No, the country did not. Only a fraction of the populace is eligible to vote; a fraction of that fraction actually did vote, and roughly 50% of that fraction voted for Trump. He was voted in by a minority.
a majority voted that kid rapist or decided that it was okay whether a kid rapist with dictatorial tendencies was elected. So yes, you Americans decided he was the chosen one and happily put him there. Now is time to just pay the consequences. At least you had a saying on that, the rest of the world have to deal with a lot of the nonsense that rapist is creating to scam everyone and we didn’t have a saying.
If only my government would learn the lesson and never again trust any USA company/government for anything…
I don’t really get how the fig leaf of “due to data-centers” is even supposed to work.
They get more demand, so more revenue. Then the fixed costs of the business are spread over more revenue, which is supposed to make the prices better not worse.
I know the profit motive is just extracting whatever the market will bear, but could anyone still explain the reasoning they are trying to make customers believe?
Somewhere at the energy company is a person or small team responsible for that message. And those are regular people who also are getting fucked in the ass. Carefully crafted to keep their job (shifting the blame away from the utility slightly), while also letting everyone know who’s dick it is in their bumbum
probably need to build new power plants while the existing ones are in overdrive
they could handle that diffeently, bug fleecing regular joe is more fun
It can depend, also this little snippet doesn’t say if it’s energy or delivery. Some utilities really like expanding delivery because the projects are revenue, and they don’t make much, if any, on the delivery. But in some cases those delivery expansion projects have a long payback time, so they avoid them until they’re critical, and also lose if after building the demand they were serving goes down.
It also varies a ton by state (Texas being the most extreme example). As well as, someone noted below, how the energy purchase goes. In my state there’s an independent not for profit that is not the utility, and not the energy producer, that just coordinates purchase of power from the broader region (across multiple states). They’ll mix whats coming into the grid in the state going “call Ohio and buy XXYY megawatts for ZZ hrs from that coal fire joint”. The control room is cool as hell. They seem pretty ethically clean, but purchasing that power is a bidding process (like, real time), and your bid has to be competitive.
I don’t really get how the fig leaf of “due to data-centers” is even supposed to work.
It let’s them increase their extortionary price hike by more, and blame it on a different extortionist.
but could anyone still explain the reasoning they are trying to make customers believe?
That’s the neat part, they don’t have to bother with that!
Loobying is bribery.
Bro, what are you going to do about this? Share it on the internet? Sure yea will solve nothing.
Wow bro, you’re so smart. Clearly once someone posts something to the Internet that is the only action they are taking. And clearly posting to the Internet is only as effective at communicating the problem as putting up posters for thousands of people to read.
What should we do about it OP not knowing your super-smart insight here? Reply to their post about it?
I believe it’s time to start mass protests worldwide l, but hey, let our feature be destroyed.
See? Trickle down economics does work! With debt.
Don’t you have something like an energy board to protect your citizens against price hikes by power companies.
If we did, it would be populated by MAGAs who would take bribes to let the power company put ALL the costs on the residential consumers. Except for the wealthy neighborhood. They deserve a break, because they’re better.
Sounds like getting politically involved is a MAGA-exclusive thing in your country.
People with wealth have more time on their hands and are also more likely to have a mentality that they deserve what they have more than others. Many of them are obsessed with hierarchy whether they realize it or not, allowing them to dismiss the troubles of the commoners with talk of personal responsibility.
You don’t need wealth, just using your spare time getting involved is enough to boost the ranks.
WHY is everyone so ANGRY at This? It’s the EXACT same Thing that Happens when your Neighbors have a HUGE Power Hungry weekend! EVERYONE Pays an Increase INSTEAD of JUST your Neighbor! I’ve NEVER had to Pay MORE for a Bill when I’ve used MORE Energy! It’s ALWAYS Distributed to EVERYONE instead!
Privatized profits, socialized cost. That’s the “free market”.
I absolutely cannot figure this out. Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone? Why would a data center pay less? (I’m not asking anyone to justify the poor decisions of energy companies)
Fortunately, Oregon seems to have figured out how to handle this. This was in my feed, literally right under this post.
but reducing customers rate by 1.3% isnt that much, it should be 30%
Our rates haven’t gone up by much lately. The rates have kept more in line with the stupid inflation.
Same as with RAM prices. There is a limited supply and the datacenters are hogging it, possibly willing to pay extra because the entire bubble depends on MORE MORE MORE, or willing to bulk purchase the entire contingent in advance.
Now if you are a power supplier you find yourself in the comfortable position of being financially courted by the datacenter corps, and you have a captured audience of consumers who rely on you supplying them, who you can now justifiably bleed out, and if they cant pay you just sell it to the datacenter after all.
That is actually very sick behavior.
This is America.
To you or I, surely, but to an MBA it’s just business as usual.
Capitalism is essentially based on the concept that everyone doing whatever they believe is in their best interest will magically balance itself out and achieve the most-efficient outcome, instead of the most self-serving and greedy criminals and psychopaths colluding to exploit and deceive the masses, accrue the lions share, and enslave everyone else.
It’s basically a religiously-dogmatic mental illness that has no place beyond the 19th Century, but the criminals and psychopaths used their wealth to exploit and deceive the masses… so here we are. May the greediest psychopath win!
Definitely a smart move letting those power utilities be privatised, even a regulation forcing cost price power for residents would have been better than full privatisation. I’m so glad my state never got sucked into letting that happen here.
It may well be the same price for the data center too, but now that there’s significantly more load on the network and there’ve been no changes to network capacity the price is being adjusted to reconcile the new demand with existing supply.
As the other commenter said, they have a limited supply and are expecting us plebeians to be priced out and go without. It’s already happening: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/virginia-county-tells-workers-switch-002400860.html
Folks who are saying the price is going up because of demand are technically right but it’s kinda misleading. People get mad when they don’t understand their bills so I wanna add to that:
With more demand in the system, more distribution equipment is used and will need more maintenance. Your electric bill has fixed fees and usage fees. The fixed fees include the cost of capital upgrades, which cover these costs. It’s not a direct 1:1 cost for each connection, as the upstream feed capacity needs to increase too.
Cost per KW may go up too, it depends on the way your utility is set up. Time of day pricing is meant to encourage offsetting costs and sometimes large customers pay proportional to the contribution to peak demand.
It doesn’t help that this increase in demand comes when so much of the grid is old as fuck in north america. But we live in interesting times.
Data centers forcing grid upgrades is all the more reason their rates should be higher. They should be paying 100% of those capital upgrade costs, too!
Okay these are literally things that you can vote for you need to find out who regulates energy rates and get on their ass
they get a wholesale/bulk rate which is far cheaper than residential, we atually pay for any datacenter, business in the end.
Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone?
Perversely, no. Large industrial users often get a bulk rate that’s cheaper than the household rate.
Happy cake day, BTW.
Everyone on the power exchange. Consumers don’t pay the exchange price. They pay a premium to the company that transforms exchange power to household power on a virtual sheet of paper.
It’s more that everyone pays more including the data center even. It could also be related to non-generation costs such as building additional distribution infra which can be regulated as a shared cost even though the data center pays for all extra generation.
Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone?
Not sure why you’d assume this
People tend to like to imagine the world is fair and just.
Clout. Aura. Bargaining force. Call it whatever you want, really. Corporations are big, they have capital, capital is power. They can hire people to influence politics, pushing for people who are on their side to get elected by funding campaigns, and naturally bribe people on the down low.
Stick, along with the other people served by their provider, most likely don’t have the ability to pay people to lobby for them full time. Most people barely have the money to keep their personal economy going, and spend a significant portion of their time just making that happen. As a result, the corporations who are benefiting from this sit on all the power, because they can influence public opinion as well, painting their politics as beneficial to private individuals, even if that’s a complete lie.
That is why democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. Workers could band together and claim power, but they’re kept in situations where doing that just isn’t feasible.
Things won’t get better without some kind of revolution. The balance of power is tipped so far in favour of the corporations that no matter how much time or money workers spend (neither of which we have) trying to better things, they’ll never get even close to what the corpos can swing with.
If it’s anything like it is here in Victoria (Australia); the price per MWh is recalculated based on supply/demand on a 5 minute basis:
https://www.aemo.com.au/aemo/data/nem/priceanddemand/PRICE_AND_DEMAND_202607_VIC1.csv
That’s because when supply outruns demand, surplus electricity is basically worthless and wholesalers need to pay someone to take it - we have long stretches of time, even during winter, where our domestic solar production saturates the demand, resulting in our Feed-in tariffs (what homes get paid for surplus production) has dropped to 1c/kWh, except for certain edge cases).
The bulk of the cost incurred is due to peak-energy generation (gas turbine, I believe?) ramping up to cover peak evening times.
These costs are aggregated and amortised over total demand, to balance out people’s energy bills.
This has been a bit of a tangent, but I found this interesting when I first learned it, and just wanted to share!
Everything is worth what someone is willing to pay.
How the fuck should a loan program help paying for monthly recurring costs?!
Short term it pads the companies books a bit more by adding an asset on top of the revenue. Medium term it’s a perpetual impairment generator. The executives are just planning to cash out before the inevitable happens.
the more I’m debt you get the more you owe them,
Because in the summer people run the AC more than they can afford and rack up like $300 bills when their off-summer average would normally be like $70. The loan programs are more like a deferred payment plan where they will cap the individual monthly payment at $150 or something, and then just push the surplus onto other future bills. Then usually when you close the account you owe them a bunch of money still, and that’s when they start doing things like offering to set you up with loan services.
“Capitalism breeds innovation”
Meanwhile we have monthly installments for monthly installments.
It helps people who can still pay on average but have an unexpected cost which, due to higher bills, now pushes them into the red.
Well, in the past (and the present in many places) perpetual unrepayable debts were used as a way to implement slavery without calling it slavery. They call it debt peonage. You know, food for thought.
I guess they cover you for a while until you figure it out. It’s better than nothing ig.
In the corporate world, if you are taking on debt to fund operations, that’s an indicator that your business is circling the drain. The same applies to personal finance.
It’s really not. What it does is trap these people in endless debt. Now we don’t know any details about these loans, but there’s no way in hell the customers aren’t going to be paying fees and interest. A loan of $40 will be a loan of $100 the next month and so on. This is a way to make extra off of the people who have nothing.
That’s more than 1200% interest. Even loan sharks don’t do that.
That example is assuming you’ll accrue another $40 next month. The interest numbers are pulled from my ass to make a point.
A data center that has been burned down won’t need power
Isn’t sharing the bill while a small group profits exactly how capitalism works?
