It seems that big money can overrule local government regulators at will.

Here in Nevada, (Warran Buffet owned) NV Energy already has approval for a "Demand Charge" that will increase rates for everyone, and further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid.

The regulators didn't even resist, but there has now been so much backlash that they're finally scheduling public hearings after the fact. The announcement doesn't even mention the Demand Charge by name, and many consumers aren't even aware they they're about to be screwed.

One of the more obscene things about this new charge is that people with PV arrays will pay a fee for demanding more power from their own grid-tied systems.

https://www.nvenergy.com/publish/content/dam/nvenergy/bill_i...

A lot of these rules happen at the regulatory level so lawmakers don't typically understand them in depth and get a lot of their explanations from utility lobbyists or the regulatory agency itself, if they even get involved or pay attention. The dramatic increases being directly linked to data centers is big enough for consumers to notice though.

That's why these independent counsels are pretty important such as the Maryland agency mentioned in this article. Since utilities at least on the distribution side are pretty much monopolies people have no choice but to pay the agreed rate.

They are killing themselves with this ignorance.

The pressure onto normal citizens will push and increase renewable energy build out (E-Car, Balcony solar/roof solar), to get away from these companies faster. Their utility will increase further, the pressure increases even more.

But people like Elon Musk are also very ignorant: He populates going into space to fix the energy topic, but apparently can't do math because it would be a lot cheaper to use batteries and solar and potentially also sell the heat the DCs produce instead of doing any of it in space.

It would even be easier to just buy something in new mexico, building out the energy infrastructure in a non livable area because latency doesn't matter that much with AI (not all use cases, but for that you have edge locations).

The richest and smartest people (excluding here elon musk) are not able to do a fast proper buildout? ... They could even just build a whole town with DCs and combine this with other energy intensive industries and sharing the prorcess heat reuse.

As a YIMBYist who can't afford a house where I live, I actively want big money to overrule local government regulators at will, because big money developers make their big money by building houses and local regulators are responding to the NIMBYist concerns of ordinary homeowners that result in insufficient housing getting built. A local government regulator fighting for the interests of local homeowners does not necessarily do what is in my own long-term interest, and I don't necessarily want them to win against big money.

> Here in Nevada, (Warran Buffet owned) NV Energy already has approval for a "Demand Charge" that will increase rates for everyone, and further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid.

Excess solar power generated by ordinary consumers is probably being priced correctly - excess solar power generation happens during the day when the sun is high, which means there's a glut of power because everyone with a solar panel generates a lot then. Solar power is scarcer and therefore more expensive when the sun is not shining bright, and this is not the time when customers are selling excess power back to the grid. Generous rates for buying power from customers were an effective subsidy to get people to install home solar panel systems, and that subsidy works less and less well as more and more power on the grid gets generated via solar panels and the difference in grid-wide power availability at different times based on the height of the sun becomes more and more important.

It's not obscene it's economics - supply and demand.

In power grid dominated by solar production the value of MWh of electricity is highest at night (because the supply from solar is zero), the value MWh of electricity is lowest at noon (because the supply from solar is maximal). So the residential grid-tied PV system is supplying power when the value of electricity is low and consuming power when the value of electricity is high.

Better solution than fix rates are digital smart meters which calculate using variable rates from electricity market.

The good thing about democracy is that you get screwed anyway and then you are made to feel like it was your fault.

> further reduce the ridiculously low amount of money that consumers get for selling their excess solar power back to the grid.

Batteries are cheaper every week.

Time to build kWh Victory gardens.

It’s not clear to me that the demand charge will cause bills to increase at all and, on its face, it makes sense to charge separately for peak power consumption as well as total energy consumption.

Friend of mine used to work in that space. He said there were people who were trying to do their job making sure the rate payers interests were being looked after. And people whose only interest was sucking up to the utilities in hope that they'll be rewarded by an offer to switch sides.

One more reason to go off grid