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Comment by preinheimer | Hacker News Reader

You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.

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Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.

Was that tech guy a crypto miner by chance?

> passing those costs on to other rate payers.

You are describing the normal process of purchasing things and how prices work. There is no nefarious passing on.

We should redistribute money from the wealthy to households, but I'm not sure if rate price controls beyond what already exists is the correct way to do it. The real issue with these data centers is tax jurisdiction shopping.

If "passing those costs on to other rate payers" is "the normal process of purchasing things" then the "normal process" is thoroughly and completely FUBAR-ed. That's a lot worse than some single, isolated case.

If I hire a local babysitter in my area and thus bid up the price of babysitters, is some babysitter cartel “passing the costs” on to other parents or are we describing the standard approach of how buying and selling things works

Your analogy is wrong, here's the right version: You hire another babysitter in the community but she needs a car to commute, then under the guise of "public utility", all other babysitter customers are obliged to equally share the cost of the car and insurance although it would be serving you exclusively. I can see why you'd want something like that and why corrupt economists would pretend it's a fair game.

We're talking about capital and interest expenses for the benefit of a single customer but paid for by all other customers too. And also about Billions of $$ of commercial risk shifted to the shoulders of the public.

My state almost passed one such bill this year. Lobbyists got it put in time-out until this year's legislative session ran out.

Isnt that what virgina did in the new rate class this article mentions? Data centers have to enter long term contracts with minimums (regardless of usage) to help power companies plan ahead.

https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/dominion-energy-rate...

Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)

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