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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...

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How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay.

This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.

Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards.

Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then

Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.

Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes. China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"*

* "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc, while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China

Competition is for losers.

I don't see why residents in Oregon would like to compete with big tech dollars for utility services. It is a losing endouver when you are far from the printing presses.

So I guess "fair" is adjusted for access to capital?

A nice idea I've seen is that residential households pay a low amount per kilowatt-hour they consume until they reach some determined minimum "amount of energy this household needs to maintain a basic standard of living", and after that residential users go onto market rate.

Anyone using that energy to make a profit - that is, run a business - pays market rate from the start.

Seems simpler to just use a power law formula to calculate the price for a buyer.

Which is a policy, but the issue there is:

1) The explicit idea there is to push costs onto businesses that are higher than the market equilibrium.

2) That pressures businesses to leave Oregon and less energy infrastructure will be built.

To be fair, I don't think that is a bug - Oregon is probably doing it on purpose. But that isn't fair, it is just anti-industry/anti-business policy. It is entirely possible (probable, even) that on net the people of Oregon will be worse off after they've been given a dose of "fairness" since there is good reason to believe that in the long term more capital investment is better for the residents. They'll be getting a generous amount of welfare, but they'll need it because investment in power production would be down.

Also, if that is the policy there is an interesting debate question of why the "fair" price shouldn't be $0 under the use threshold. Without market signalling it is just picking a random number anyway, may as well pick $0. But that level of welfare might do so much economic damage that people wouldn't stomach it, revealing some problematic aspects to the entire approach.

If the alternative - that people pay an absolute fortune just to make their own houses liveable - comes out worse, seems like a good option to me. The Great God market isn't magically going to make ordinary people's lives better and the USA, despite appearances to the contrary sometimes, isn't meant to be a Dadaist art project in which everyone dedicates their lives to seeing what happens when you let "the market" do anything it likes.

I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation.

Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes?

I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.

> "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said

[citation needed]

The article did go on...

> According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour

But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.

Be that as it may, they use up a lot of power and are pushing demand ahead of supply, which can only mean higher prices:

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-d...

This was predicted far before the latest datacenter investment craze.

It’s what happens when a generation of people decide to stop building electrical capacity. Writing has been on the wall for decades and the AI craze was the final tipping point. It will be scapegoated of course.

I’m highly skeptical that these are great investments overall, but the fact the answer isn’t “use this money to help subsidize rapidly expanding grid capacity” is indicative of the unseriousness of society today.

Ideally you use this newfound demand to build out capacity and if the demand goes away due to it being malinvestment - at least you have a bunch of shiny new grid capacity that was half paid for by stupid venture capital money.

It doesn't detail it in the articles and it's quite hard to find details without looking at a specific bill or a specific provider, but for my provider in NYS, the cents/kwh for electricity cost does not include transmission costs or the fee for being connected to the grid. Those are separate line items that cover the cost of the lines and infrastructure for the community. On a more arguable note, even if you only use "one big line" to connect, you're stil part of the grid and should be shouldering some of the burden to maintain that grid and not just your line.

It’s not really disingenuous as distribution from a local substation to individual customers is cheap in most cases. When you start talking 10,000+ homes on say 1 acre lots they collectively use a lot of power in a fairly small area.

Most of the distribution costs occur on the other side of a substation due to efficiency losses with long distance transmission etc. A data center located next to a power plant has some advantages, but still needs power when that power plant is offline.

If power use is an issue during heat waves, it means the construction of solar capacity was messed up somewhere in the process.

In Poland/EU during summer we have electricity surplus, not deficit.

It just depends on how the electricity is spent. If you have lots of electric heaters and no air conditioning in your country, then the demand is high in winter and low in summer. But if it's the other way around then the demand peeks during heat waves.

Our current solar capacity / peak generation is roughly enough to cover ACs if we had 90% (like US) generation, not 10%. On top of that we have other sources which we need anyway for winter.

Oregon was very slow do adapt solar due to poor regulation and other reasons. It even says so in the article.

There is a standing charge which supposed to cover distribution cost and per kWh price which is supposed to cover the energy itself. Almost 50% of my bill is the standing charge (I don’t know how high it’s for PGE though).

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