Data centers cutting power to homes, driving homeowners to solar and batteries
electrek.co
electrek.co
There are a few types of natural monopolies here. Deregulation only works when the underlying incentives of the market are compatible with the intended goals of the system. It took a strong top-down mandate to get this country wired up [0]. What now seems to be growing is a perverse incentive where utilities would rather sell bulk electricity to industrial customers (easy) rather than the tedious work of maintaining lots of last-mile infrastructure to bespoke customers. But it's exactly those unenumerable small-marginal-use customers where the big distributed-value generation lies!
With a proper mitigation of this perverse incentive, we would see new generation (perhaps even solar and batteries) getting deployed by the builders of the data centers, paying the true cost of their construction rather than externalizing it onto existing grid users.
There is no amount of regulation that can keep this level of moral bankruptcy in check. Full stop.
What do you see as a specific type of retaliation? DIY attacks on datacenters that are using too much power? That seems relatively easy to defend against until one gets to the level of improvised explosive drones (ala what recently happened in the Middle East), and even that feels only a few years out until they can be defended against.
[0] or at least they think so, modulo how big of an overinvestment bubble we've got
And those utilities are mandated by building codes so they have benefited from many developers who foot the bill for their infrastructure. The local jurisdiction and private property is undoubtedly littered with easements for their power distribution. This was OBVIOUSLY done under the context of a social contract that they would supply power. No one thought to codify that because no one envisioned someone could be that immoral.
I’m obviously not going to suggest specific forms of retaliation on the internet. But I will say that the people in power are overplaying their hand. They’re telegraphing exactly how they intend to treat you the instant they think they have the benefit of technological superiority and autonomous security.
In that case though, I actually still disagree, but again I must refuse to elaborate. I will only say that in an asymmetric conflict, creativity disproportionately favors the underdog.
The crux of the matter here seems to be that the masses of individuals need the civilization-reliant power grid much more than an individual data center. And by the time we're considering direct attacks on datacenters, they'll most likely already be off the grid (nuisance noise might still be a motivation though, or general anti-tech sentiment). So we're really just talking about defending a facility from things like drones, which is a generally hot topic these days regardless.