Okay but this is a policy choice. It doesn’t have to be that way.
All those costs go into the price of the houses built there.
And this is also part of why building "affordable" houses rarely happens. All the infrastructure costs the same whether the houses cost $100K or $1 million.
Always wondered why the county didn't require the road work, or money for it, up front.
You know what you do if you want an affordable car? You buy used. I think most people understand Ford is never going to build another a car that costs $10k brand new, and the last new car near that price barely sold because it was so stripped.
When everything is built huge you don’t end up with homes that are cheap to heat, cool, or maintain. That’s why building affordable houses is actually a real issue.
What’s really dumb is the average number of people living in a house has tanked over time but the median new home just keeps getting larger. In an efficient market you’d expect new homes to match what buyers want, but regulatory capture has severely distorted the market.
So if you have a big family or multigenerational needs then often you have to do significant remodeling or sell anyway.
Do you really need a conspiracy by "moneyed interest" when the general public is perfectly happy to support similarly bad policies like rent control?
And the car analogy is n9t fitting, unless we talk about cars bundled with the parking spot. But then they would not depreciate that much, and the banger with a parking spot in Manhattan would cost more than the Ferrari that could only park in shitsville.
But in reality neither has to depreciate, just stop growing at these insane rates. Below the cost of inflation, until the average worker can afford a home again.
Grid upgrade costs are frequently socialized onto existing customers, especially for larger upgrades. Your central premise that interconnect charges cover everything is false.
But, if it turns out to be a reward, people will revolt that for-profit company is making excess profit from something as basic as utilities.
$18B to provide redundancy and not have to require schools and local government to limit electricity use and provide a bit more slack in the powergrid is a burden that all the users get to share. Lucky them. Yes, all users benefit, but lucky break for those datacenters, getting all that redundancy for power, without a $500M/ea bill.
It's not a huge power multiplier (P = VI, so linear), but in principle I do love the idea that if you are going to have these massive transmissions lines we ought use the conductor well, at good high voltages.
China has been doing 1MV and 1.1MV lines for a while now, which is so excellent to see. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
> "concluded that expected power demand from data centers was _a_ primary reason for $23 billion in customer price increases "
Also, it's weird that he describes PJM as "the organization that monitors the PJM market" when they describe themselves as "a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity" [0]. So are they monitors of the market or are they the market themselves?
I don't know... maybe I'm being picky, but the article just seems off. The whole bit about how data centers could maybe game the system by using less power during peak times also doesn't make sense - that's when they also have the highest demand. Pointing to cryptominers just makes me think he doesn't get what they do, which is basically arbitrage. Of course they stop when power costs go up, it eats up all of their profits and they can simply start back up when the costs go down.
You also had the de-industrialization of the US happening at the same time, which also took pressure off the transmission grid.
We basically had a few things offset population growth to allow us to use our grandparents electric grid investments for far beyond their expected lifetime. We’ve finally just caught up after a free ride over the past 4-5 decades.
I overall agree with you strongly, just surprised that more efficient lighting would have that much impact on grid demand.
I will note- the actual generation is left to market economics. I have much more faith in that working out equitably than regulating the grid. Even so, they've had significant consumer level grod connection fee increases- which I think reflects the end of various easy houshold effeciency gains (eg: incandecent -> CFL -> LED, P4 -> 14th gen, and HVAC. mainly lighting) and privatized profits more than anything.
A data center can easily outbid them on the electricity market and drive prices through the roof for a few years, but also is free to simply turn off if it doesn't like the rates.
And I mean this as in, local government ostensibly representing the community are also the land owners and contractors selling to developers, who can't be voted out of office until next year at the earliest and whose contracts and permits can't be revoked by a subsequent administration.
How exactly are you supposed to stop that?
Plus it feels like one party is getting flexible when it comes to corruption in their leaders. It's not as disqualifying as it was 15 years ago.