First they gave all the water away for free to big ag, and now they're doing the same with the power.

Well, I think some of those hardworking Americans would be happy to pay some of those $2 because otherwise all the SaaS services and other services, platforms, and tools running in datacenters wouldn’t be accessible to them.

Or did I read this wrong and somewhere it said only datacenters running inference or training for LLMs?

That's smart. Do they do it with roads also? That's a big one near me - developers buying hundred acre farms on unpainted 2 lane country roads and jamming in 2000 houses. Then inevitably the road becomes unusable until the city or county gets around to addressing it.

Always wondered why the county didn't require the road work, or money for it, up front.

What a smart idea! As a home owner I approve of this way to keep supply out of the market (or at least make it expensive enough to prop my price up). Can we invent any more charges?

The “affordable” housing thing seems like such a misdirection. I can’t help but daydream that some moneyed interest somewhere fans those flames, as it looks like a dead end that can absorb endless fervor.

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.

Your post is largely false, and quite confused.

Grid upgrade costs are frequently socialized onto existing customers, especially for larger upgrades. Your central premise that interconnect charges cover everything is false.

It varies by jurisdiction in the US.

It doesn't even match what's in the article.

> "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.

[0] https://www.pjm.com/about-pjm

I find it hilarious nobody ever mentions texas w/r/t this issue. They already required new Large Load Interconect Studies- and paying the cost of new grid infra. And, the hufe influx of study reqiests lead to new laws introducing batching.

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.

That's great to hear that we have at least somewhat decent voltages. I thought America was still sort of piddling around with mostly 500kV and under power distribution.

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...

Comments like this are even more tiring. Everyone knows that there are moneyed interests in politics. But decisions on these issues are made at a local level and so are the most addressable by local political actions.

Because they like shopping on Amazon and watching Netflix?

Forcing all costs on to new entrants in a market is generally a bad thing for the market and causes it to not expand fast enough. Also they may just choose to not participate in the market at all. I.e they'll bring in a whole lot of natural gas generators, put them in the parking lot and call it good, which is not a good thing long term.

supply and demand. there is more demand, prices go up, the market allocates, it's the best way, no other way comes close to making the overall price level to be as cheap as possible.

Imagine a mortgage rate raising by 4%. Still unimpressive ?

Places I know that are getting them are generally seeing big time pay (relatively that is) for construction work and then dozens to a hundred of ongoing jobs once the work is done. That doesn't sound like much but it's huge for many of these communities.

Data centers pay taxes don’t they? That money presumably goes into funding government services which would necessarily raise the local GDP

Sounds probably about right in scale. 5-10x more employees per sqft for common industrial or manufacturing businesses.

But local negative impact on community is not remotely comparable to most industrial development. Everything from traffic, noise, pollution, etc. A few bad projects aside, these things are glorified warehouses typically sited in suburban industrial parks or the middle of nowhere.

It all really just comes down to the electricity needs they demand. Otherwise it’s about as close to as free money to a community as you can get.

The most problematic thing to me with this whole deal are local tax abatements. Those should be outright illegal though for any development.

The fact datacenters are standing up extremely expensive on-site natural gas turbines due to the immense delays for interconnect.

Pretty much no facility operator wants to also pay for and operate their own power plant. They are small and expensive to operate compared to combined cycle natural gas or other sources, and lack of access to a wider grid means even more additional expenses like a additional on-site redundancy.

If they could simply pay for grid interconnect that is ready by the time facility construction is completed they would do so, in the vast majority of cases.

The money is in getting things online ASAP. Builders are effectively throwing unlimited buckets of money at all aspects of these builds at people who can get shit done fast. Power interconnect would be no exception.

I think folks have become numb to these huge numbers being thrown around in terms of how large this investment cycle/bubble is. Those numbers mean real things - like operators writing basically blank checks to jump the queue on networking equipment, wiring harnesses, etc. Those in the industry who are not these giant hyperscalers are kind of shut out of everything from cabling, network gear, HVAC, optics, etc. For any price - since our volumes are a joke compared to these huge contracts. There is a reason you see unprecedented margins for every company selling critical parts and equipment for these builds.

Heck, standard power cables have gone up about 8x in cost on us in the past 12mo. It’s been crazy to watch and hear from suppliers how they give insane quotes to these companies which get approved same-day.

It’s all a giant race, cost is currently not a primary concern if money can be used to speed anything up.

Elon (in)famously put gas turbines on pickup trucks to power the Colossus 1/2 datacenters because connecting to the grid was incredibly slow and there was limited supply. And got sued to remove them.

Absent regulation, every operator would happily do the same thing to make the problem go away.