> The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech’s datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses

Exactly opposite will happen. Reason is, when Big Tech is paying huge amounts of money to contractors to build those power generation facilities and service companies to service it, they will abandon servicing other facilities (remember how Micron dropped consumer RAMs last year because of enterprise demand) or require higher pay from everyone else

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Propelloni 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LOL, they just introduced QoS into the electricity grid.

	▲	Arubis 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That concept was effectively already available. Hospitals tend to have multiple grid hookups before falling back on local generation.
	▲	mikkupikku 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Always has been.

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thegreatpeter 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what’s the solution? No data center? Let the current landscape of power companies operate as is?

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throwaw12 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let's make some assumptions first:

1. DCs must be built anyway

2. You can't take away energy from households

(3). Highly preferred that you are not going to impact cost negatively to households (otherwise why we have this discussion)

based on these assumptions, solution I see is, BigTech subsidising energy costs for 10 years for nearby households (area will be geofenced, e.g. in the radius of 50km), subsidy will be based on the prices outside of that radius. e.g. if you everyone outside of closest DC pays 1$ and in the radius prices become 1.5$, 0.5$ will be covered by BigTech and they're also responsible & pay to setup the system to automatically include everyone in subsidy program, not like you need to apply

Also BigTech is not going to build the power generation plants, it must be built by existing processes to minimize impact on pricing

	▲	PunchyHamster 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Many problems with it: * power generation is not local in most of the cases. You'd be still fucking energy market to anyone outside it * power is also used by companies people actually want. Even if household power cost wont chance thanks to that approach, the price for power for every single business around will increase. * similarly any other manufacturing business will cost more. In essence, the AI boom will reduce profit margin of every single business that has electric power as significant cost in the production. Which is a lot of industries. "Making AI pay more for its useless power draw" is nice idea but it is pretty hard to realise. Unless we start outright denying connection to power grid but that's pretty dangerous political precedent to set.

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fulafel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Build and colocate the needed rewnewable (solar/wind/battery) capacity with the data centers and make them energy efficient by eg choosing cool locations.

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citrin_ru 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A higher tax on DC with the tax revenue invested into public electrical infrastructure and public power stations. With billions powered into AI they can out-price everyone out of resources they use - be it directly (high electricity rates) or indirectly (high prices for everything which is needed to expand power networks). But it will not happen of course.

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jfengel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Put some company stock in escrow. If they fulfill the promises, they get it back. If not the government keeps it, and uses it to build whatever needs to be built.

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veryemartguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. No data centers.