who is actually signing off on these agreements to build it, knowing the bill goes to the locals? seems openly shady

stackskipton 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Varies on the project. As someone dealing with this locally, it varies how the project got approved. Almost all the approval is at local level, sometimes at state level. Feds getting involve is pretty rare.

A) Sometimes, it's existing datacenter that repurposed from "normal" datacenter to AI datacenter with power consumption skyrocketing. There generally is not a ton of approval in this case or power company came by asking for additional infrastructure approval and who the hell denies that.

B) Some areas classed datacenters as "industrial" use so they could be built without a ton of preapproval. Most counties have closed that loophole but existing permits may allow additional datacenters to be built.

C) Local officials approving things over desire of the voters. Alot of people don't pay attention to their local politicians despite them having most impact on their day-to-day life. Therefore, you end up with local politicians who will believe whatever they are told along with just plain overall corruption. Most of it legal.

Also, as someone who used to live in Capital Region, National Politics can suck out all oxygen in the room so local officials are even less likely monitored.

	▲	jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The industrial use also often comes with fantastically low rates as well. Virginia finally started saying folks using >25MW need to pay something more than the incredibly cheap rates they had been given. But generally data centers have often gottem marked as industrial, and it's been incredibly fantastically advantageous to do so.

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reactordev 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those closest to the beltway…

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bilbo0s 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Apparently not. Maryland residents didn’t sign any of these agreements in other states. Nor did their elected representatives. They were just presented with the bill to support the infrastructure in the other states because, you know, they’re so cool. And it doesn’t get any closer to the beltway than Maryland.

What’s crazy is the utility company admits that the infrastructure is for the growth in the other states. They admit Maryland won’t grow as fast. They concede Maryland needs less infrastructure. But still saddled Maryland residents with the extra bills for out of state data centers?

I mean, at least say it’s for Maryland. Just to make it look good? I don’t know? Make some kind of attempt to make it palatable.

I’m wondering if it’s just easier to pass the cost on to people in Maryland than it is in other states? Like is the regulatory environment with respect to this kind of thing more lax or something?

There has to be some kind of explanation. Because on the face of it, this just doesn’t look good. It makes ai and tech industry just seem like robber barons. And tech guys don’t need that right now.

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trollbridge 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of Ohio's bigger utilities (AEP) recently just got a new tariff passed with the PUCO that required big electric users (i.e., datacentres) to actually commit with hard money when they said they expected some large increase in demand.

The amount of power datacentres said they were going to use dropped significantly - well over half. So now the utility has far less it has to worry about in big time transmissions build outs.

All from making the people claiming they needed it put a modest amount of money forward. They have to pay $100k (for a 100-MW project) to do a load study. Then they have to agree that they will pay for the electricity they claim they're going to use, even if they end up not using it (i.e., the data centre doesn't get built out and they end up using 0.)

If their credit rating is not strong enough, they have to pledge security or else put up the money.

A lot of data centre operators wouldn't cough up the $10k or $100k needed for the load study. Everything got a lot easier.

	▲	3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Excellent move, and I am surprised it was effective at such a low annoyance price. The rumor is that many of the data centers have been shopping around in different utility markets, trying to assess where they could get the best/fastest build out. However, they are never informing the utility of sites which they will not develop. So some of these massive data centers may be getting double or triply counted for electricity demand projections.

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jfengel 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's for "the grid", of which Maryland is a part, so it supposedly derives some benefit.

And since the grid is being updated to accommodate new paying customers, Maryland will benefit from lower future prices. Right? Right?

	▲	trollbridge 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Uh, yeah. Yeah, future prices will be lower. That's sure how this worked out before!