Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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It is true.

> It increasingly looks like a coordinated effort to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers before widespread adoption of solar power shifts the balance.

That statement isn't wrong, but increased power prices on consumers through socializing the costs of privatized benefit data centers is the mechanism for this. Data centers are a tax on consumers via their electric bills.

Citations:

Data Center Demand Fuels Surge in Electric Costs - https://www.thesandpaper.net/articles/data-center-demand-fue... - October 8th, 2025

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec... - September 29th, 2025

How AI infrastructure is driving a sharp rise in electricity bills - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-ai-infrastructure-is-d... - September 5th, 2025

Data centers will cause higher electricity prices, study finds - https://www.axios.com/local/raleigh/2025/08/28/data-centers-... - August 28th, 2025

As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act - https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... - August 8th, 2025

CMU: Data Center Growth Could Increase Electricity Bills 8% Nationally and as Much as 25% in Some Regional Markets - https://www.cmu.edu/work-that-matters/energy-innovation/data...

https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report

Energy prices are also flat in Europe, due to renewables pushing out volatile fossil fuels.

Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)

Household electricity prices in 1st half of 2025: -0.5% - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/... - October 29th, 2025

Ember Energy: Decoupled: How Spain cut the link between gas and power prices using renewables - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/decoupled-how-spain... - October 2nd, 2025

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...

>The Economist has adapted a model of state-level retail electricity prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to include data centres (see chart 2). We find no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centres, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected. The same went for Georgia. In fact, the model found that higher growth in electricity demand came alongside lower bills, reflecting the fact that a larger load lets a grid spread its fixed costs across more bill-payers.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/30/the-data-...

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-centers-pjm-capacity-a...

> Data center load drove up revenue in the PJM Interconnection’s last capacity auction by $7.3 billion, or 82%, to $16.1 billion, according to the grid operator’s market monitor.

> Combined with PJM’s previous capacity auction, existing and forecast data center load resulted in $16.6 billion in capacity auction revenue, or about half of the $30.8 billion in revenue from the two auctions, Monitoring Analytics said in a report released Wednesday.

> “Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” the market monitor said.

> “The current conditions are not the result of organic load growth,” it stated. “The current conditions in the capacity market are almost entirely the result of large load additions from data centers, both actual historical and forecast.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJM_Interconnection

Additional citation:

AI Isn't the Only Thing Pushing Up Electricity Bills. (But It's Mostly AI) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45856862 - November 2025

Do any of these links actually show the exact method that datacenters are "socializing the costs" for energy production? They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would, and pay for their local interconnect to the grid. Why they should be on the hook for long distance transmission/etc. is unclear to me given that every user on the grid takes part of that and has enjoyed under-replacement electrical rates for decades. I have seen the typical local tax abatement deals which I totally agree need to be outright banned - but that's really the only thing that's jumped out at me. Otherwise it's largely opinion pieces parroting the same few background sources.

I'm not sure it's really a correct mental model to put 50+ years of lack of investment maintaining and expanding transmission and grid capacity onto the industry that laid that fact bare. From where I stand and the underlying studies/reports I've personally read the root cause always seems to be we're running out of power on a grid built by the Greatest Generation and more or less zero work has been put into expanding anything since. There were plenty of people sounding alarm bells a decade ago before the latest datacenter boom.

Then you get into NIMBY stuff, pie in the sky wishful thinking re: dispatchable vs. intermittent power generation, etc.

In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter. Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.

I certainly agree with the argument that the datacenters might not end up panning out as profitable investments for society, but I'm at least hopeful that when the dust settles we'll actually have augmented our electric grid and finally started to take that looming problem seriously. We might be left with something useful that lasts another 3 generations when all said and done.

We were going to get here either way with population growth and older power generation facilities not being replaced faster than they are reaching end of life. Datacenters simply brought it forward maybe a decade or so. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's energy investments.

> In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter.

Why do we want wealth when it is only going to the wealthiest? AI data centers benefit Big Tech, its employees, and its shareholders. So, who is "we"? I believe I can make the argument that the majority of Americans do not want this, only a privileged minority (ie those getting wealthy from this current hype cycle).

Poll: American voters don't want data centers built in their communities - https://www.thecentersquare.com/issues/energy/article_d5b564... - July 2nd, 2025

> Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.

No longer true.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling

If AI data centers want power, they should be charged a painful premium for it, paid out of the pockets of Big Tech building it. They have the resources, clearly, from the very obvious capital flows. Meta has issued its largest bond offering ever, $30B, for its Hyperion project in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Because when the bubble pops, we're all going to be left holding the bag ("socializing the losses"). We should not all have to suffer higher electrical prices for the benefit of Big Tech and their shareholders. They can pay up for the necessary power infrastructure if they want the gains they're chasing.

> They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would

Well yeah, you don't need to look further than Econ 101 and supply and demand. If demand goes up, prices go up.

The real problem is that the gains from the new demand don't end up fairly distributed, which is bad but not really directly related to the discussion.

And then supply goes up. In theory.

Americans have coasted too long on other people's infrastructure investment. It's basically run out. Time to pay the piper or watch our quality of life decline.

I firmly believe datacenters are simply the scapegoat de-jour. If this buildout hadn't happened it'd still be EVs or "air conditioning use in the city" like it was beforehand.

It's coming for us either way. At least this way there is an industrial user subsidizing a portion of grid modernization and energy generation tech.

I agree that wealth distribution is a problem. But I come from a "there needs to be wealth to distribute to begin with" standpoint. Degrowth isn't the way.

> And then supply goes up. In theory.

Supply goes up for a price and it's called capex, that cost wouldn't be there without new datacenters.

> Americans have coasted too long on other people's infrastructure investment. It's basically run out.

That's such an egregious inversion of the truth. It would be true if the companies building data-centers were building power plants and transmission lines which the population was allowed to use for the cost of operating expanses - after all capex and loans were payed off by these companies.

The reality is the exact opposite of that - the public is shouldering all of the capex and the new AI overloads want to pay for the opex only.

> Time to pay the piper or watch our quality of life decline.

They are even ready to issue threatening ultimatums if you disagree... as if agreeing would lead to a different outcome.

> Household electricity prices in 1st half of 2025: -0.5% - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/... - October 29th, 2025

This statement from the EU is not just irrelevant, it’s deliberately misleading. Claiming a modest –0.5% change after a staggering 40% price surge, while oil and gas prices remain near 2019 levels and solar and wind capacity has grown tenfold, feels like a slap in the face to consumers. And yet, you’re amplifying this technically true (but deeply deceptive) narrative because it conveniently props up a flawed argument.

If consumers want cheaper power, they should advocate for more rapid deployment of wind, solar, battery storage, transmission and interconnectors, demand response, and other technologies to make the price of fossil fuels irrelevant in their electrical costs. Data centers are not a component of cheaper energy bills, importantly. They are demand, and compete with consumers for electricity in the market. Fossil fuel prices are volatile; if you do not want to be exposed to volatile fossil fuel pricing, do not use fossil fuels in your electrical grid. It is unlikely fossil fuels get cheaper in the future, as they will be starved for investment. You cannot control the global fossil fuel market (with the primary suppliers being OPEC+ and the US), but you can control your domestic supply and demand for energy. Europe fossil gas prices are never going to go back down to pre-2020 levels as long as they rely on LNG imports vs supply from Russia, for example. The faster Europe pushes out fossil generation in its grid, the faster energy prices go back down (cost of solar at a certain points during the day goes to 0 once enough solar has been deployed; eventually, the cost of generation becomes a much smaller component of electricity prices, as the dominate factors become distribution and infrastructure to get generation to loads).

The above is crystal clear in the graphics in my citation above "Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs."

Additional citations:

EU expects to add record renewable capacity in 2025, industry sees headwinds - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... - April 10th, 2025

> EU countries are expected to add 89GW of new renewable energy capacity in 2025, including 70GW of solar and 19GW of wind, according to Commission projections shared with Reuters. The projections are based on industry data.

The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025

> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.

> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.

> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan. (my note: 4 years to add 4.6TW of renewables globally)

> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.

Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... - June 2025

(enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year, and we're fighting over ancient sunlight pumped from the ground; why? we already solved fusion, just at a distance using the sun and batteries; 1GW of solar is installed globally every 15 hours as of this comment)

All that stuff takes time to build out.

They could wave a legislative magic wand and stop subsidizing heat pumps and rooftop solar (and everything else hidden in the transmission and distribution fees on their bills) for the HN tax brackets and reap at least somewhat cheaper prices basically overnight.

What's a short explanation of the discrepancy in EU wholesale vs household electricity price changes, over the period 2019-2025?

Wholesale increased 30% YoY 2025 over 2024 but household didn't.

Realistically we should compare to 2019 (pre-Covid, pre-inflation, pre-Ukraine war).

Many individual EU govts implemented retail caps, (sales) tax cuts, and transfers. Where is this summarized at-a-glance, by country, by year? Anything better than:

eurostat: "Electricity price statistics" https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

"Winners and losers from the energy crisis: Policy lessons from the Iberian electricity market" - Fabra, Leblanc, Souza (2025) https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/winners-and-losers-energy-cri...

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