Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

My understanding, the last time rising electric costs came up, is that a large part of the cost increase was finally paying for the infrastructure maintenance that companies put off for a time. Is that no longer the case?

That is, it is specifically the transmission and distribution network that is driving costs increases. Per the crappy AI answer "Electricity distribution costs now often exceed the cost of electricity generation for U.S. utilities, with transmission and distribution (T&D) costs potentially comprising over half of a customer's energy bill, up from about one-third previously."

I should say, I have no problem thinking data centers may need to pay more. If only because they are probably able to. My assertion is just that it is misleading to pin them as THE reason costs have gone up. It is far more complicated than that.

View on HN

> Is that no longer the case?

Generally (but there are exceptions) in the US they have not gotten better. It's just that datacenter demand has eclipsed the effect of that.

> My assertion is just that it is misleading to pin them as THE reason costs have gone up. It is far more complicated than that.

It's not so much that they are the sole cause, but that their effects (especially on local scales) are 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than all other causes, so people focus on this matter.

Do you have numbers showing that data centers have eclipsed this? Quickly looking at search results on this it seems transmission/delivery is estimated to be half of a consumer's bill. Even the high estimate for increased costs from data centers has the increase at less than a quarter of the bill.

Not nothing. And if we can do things to reduce this, I'm game to do that. But I can't get behind the rhetoric that they are eclipsing other cost drivers.

One particular datapoint to watch is auction prices for production capacity as these are the most immediate market. Those have jumped, with PJM's +800% in 2024 and +22% (22% from 2024->2025, $28.92 -> $329.17 or +1038% total over 2023 -> 2025) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biggest-us-power-gri...

We (Well, the article does it for us as well) can identify that this market jump is driven primarily by increased demand rather than lower capacity, as the amount of capacity sold has increased. (Covering ~50% of the new demand)

These prices do not immediately translate into residential fees, there's a lot of financial engineering in between the auction and customer contracts (F in chat for the counterparty of the hedge), but at the end of the day you can't sell $500 of power for $5 so the increased cost will worm their way through to residential consumers eventually. One particularly annoying thing is that this isn't a consistent amount of time by region; Some people are seeing 3x electricity bills already, for others their power company may have more strongly hedged against price increases.

I confess I don't know how to contextualize this. The article says that PJM claims this should be a 1.5% to 5% increase in bills for folks. And it notes this is the first time capacity has been added in the last four auctions.

Is your contention that we a) not believe this will only have an "at most 5% increase" or b) predict that it will be more dramatic in the future?

I'm also curious where you are getting the 3x electric bills claim. The largest bill jumps I'm aware of were in CA and were largely related to fires. That and general grid upgrades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com