More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:
Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.
In an ideal world this should incentivise more people with single family homes and capital to invest in Solar + batteries and even with tariffs I am sure the breakeven time will still be less than 10 years (also after accounting for the fact that utilities will not be paying a lot for your electricity though time of use pricing and batteries may help a bit)
Leaking gas pipelines cause a disproportionately large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. It's much more efficient and environmentally friendly to pipe gas to a combined-cycle gas turbine power station and then move the electric power to people, than to run an electricity grid anyway and also thousands of miles of aging and leaky gas pipelines so that people can burn gas inefficiently in their homes (with most of the heat wasted into the room and out the window/fume-hood).
It's good for the price of things to increase when demand increases. We don't want outages instead of price increases, and we don't want costs to increase independent of demand.
This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to solar + battery + ( EV, heat pump water heater, induction stove) and disconnect from grid. Grid disconnects will cause costs to rise even more, a virtuous cycle.
>Earlier this year, the utility that serves both Thomas and Salvi, Florida Power & Light, applied for a rate increase that would have boosted bills for a typical South Florida resident by about 13% over the next four years.
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.
Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
For context:
$0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany.
The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line.
"To compete globally, we must expand energy production and reduce energy costs for American families and businesses."
https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-wright-acts-unleas...
How is the consumption fees moving compared to grid fees? In Sweden, grid fees has increased significant, while consumption fees is actually one of the lowest on a 5 year history.
Grid fees is what pays for grid stability and transmission, which has increased in complexity and demand in direct relation to how much variability that wind and solar create in the grid.
We have been in aggressive, irrational, denial of alternative energy for my entire life but denying something doesn't make it not true. It is beyond obvious that wind, solar and battery technology are, even now, just starting to show their eventual potential and even at their current levels are far better solutions in many if not most cases than fossil fuel based options at industrial energy production (and many other uses too). We are on a hockey puck graph for all of them because they are inevitable and vastly better. The only thing our head in the sand push against these technologies is doing is ensuring that we will be decades behind China and the rest of the world in our ability to provide cheap energy to industry and emerging opportunities. You want manufacturing in the US? Create cheap energy sources. You say 'the sun only shines half the day' then build your factories to take advantage of peak availability. China knows this. They are putting so much solar into their grid that they will clearly get to a point where they have a glut of energy that will only go to one purpose, building amazing things for practically free. Meanwhile the US will keep saying 'See! This stuff doesn't work' as it actively sabotages itself just to prove the point.
There is a pending energy affordability crisis. There is no appetite to tell AI data centers no, the only solution is adding increasingly expensive MW to the grid. The cost of those extremely expensive MW will not be picked up by the big tech players alone. We will all subsidize them. We've spent the last 50 years hiding our head in the sand and avoiding infrastructure spending and now that the chickens have come home to roost we will spend the declining years of empire squeezing as much blood out of our peasants as we can.
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More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:
Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.
TL;DR - For July 2024 to July 2025, the inflation rate for "all items" was 2.7% while the rate for "electricity" was 5.5%.
"AI Data Centers May Consume More Electricity Than [Residents of] Entire Cities" (2024), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221756
"Meta data center electricity consumption hits 14,975 GWh" (2024), 60 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421627
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
Did these guys not get the memo?
Are electricity prices at noon climbing faster, or less fast, than prices at 6pm?
Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
Grid fees is what pays for grid stability and transmission, which has increased in complexity and demand in direct relation to how much variability that wind and solar create in the grid.