It's still a weird sanctioned monopoly. More places should get over their fear of public ownership.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
Throwing out the corporate management will probably save money simply because they're pointless middle men. They aren't making the decisions that truly matter.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.
It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.
Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.
Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.
You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?
Generation is pretty low intensity from an employee standpoint. I know you’re brainwashed to hate unions, but they have little to do with it.
The small operators are mostly vertically integrated in a small area, so they can deal with the capital buildouts and aren’t subject to as many swings in commodity cost. They often even own the utility rights of way, generating additional income and avoiding property taxes.
It takes alot of union workers and pensions to make up for the pay of one private CEO.
The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.
It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.
The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.
At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.
They do have better PR though.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
It has been said that public operation of infrastructure is the worst form of operation of infrastructure except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Kindly define "not well" compared to privately owned infrastructure.
The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.
I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.
This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.
The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.
There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.
I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.
No, anyone can't. That's the point. If the money is siphoned out of the lower class, then they have no capital (or free time) to start a business. They're barely getting by. It's a positive feedback loop in both directions (up and down). Rich get rich, poor get poorer (in general).
If you try hard enough you can always find an excuse for failure.
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.
There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.
then there are things like the town of Lunenburg having it's own power company https://www.townoflunenburg.ca/electric-utility.html
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.
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.
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
Also their stock underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years.
I'm not really a finance guy so probably I'm looking at it wrong, but that seems like some pretty bad price gouging.
Just tripled over the last 20 years from 6% to 18%?
Look at all the bullshit that passes for business as usual with Florida utilities -- political campaign donations, self-dealing, constructed overbilling by related subsidiaries, etc.
There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.
When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.
If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies
If "AI Datacenters" are part of the problem the answer is simple, charge them higer rates, high enough to motivate them to build their own generating capacity.
We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
> The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
This seems.... good?
Put it like this - would you prefer public employee's retirement scheme did Nnot hold shares in it?
Yes? Regulators should not financially benefit from doing or not doing their job.
It's a clear conflict of interest, in the same way post-regulator industry employment is.
I don't think it would seem good If the government were inclined to favor PG&E over consumers because "it's better for government employees", for example.
Sure they do; the wiggle room is referred to as profit
There are certain folks who, regardless of the issue, never fail to roll up their metaphorical newspaper, brandish it and hiss, "Gub'mint bad! Bad gub'mint!".
It's almost pavlovian. While some of those folks are likely sociopathic ancaps[0], the vast majority are just willfully ignorant people whose marionette strings are being pulled by the cynical scumbags intent on enriching themselves and the rest of the world be damned!
And more's the pity.
"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
After paying $15k (after subsidies) for a 40kWh battery, our battery is filled by roof solar and grid provided renewable energy, when needed, at very cheap rates (6c/kWh). I pay $1 a day for grid connectivity. Our total annual energy bill will be approximately $500 for the foreseeable future.
I'd previously looked into this and it sounded like a package was required - PVC + battery - whereas I've already got 10kW inverter + 12kW panels, and basically just want something around that size (40kWh).
Street pricing seemed to be around the $9k installed per 10kWh, so a) your subsidy options sounds spectacular - around 60% discount? - and b) payback for me would probably be around 8 years.
But if I switch vendors (Amber I think is what one of my friends is on) I can engage in something analogous to wholesale market activity, 10m bidding / sales, rapidly decrease the projected lifetime of my battery, but potentially be $-positive even through the winter months.
But all that feels like something the power companies here in AU are going to try to try to undercut / tax.
There are two providers (Globird and Ovo) I have been researching that provide 2-3 free hours of electricity per day between 11-2pm. That + solar would easily fill the batteries, so that power bill might drop even more.
You should get some quotes from battery/solar installers (no doubt you have heard of solarquotes.com.au). Prices have dropped a lot this year.
Yes, I've been through solarquotes.com.au a few times but haven't looked in earnest for some time. This is encouraging information.
I know my usage can easily be 15-20kWh in a day, and I can get a week of overcast though it's not common.
The 'free' electricity offers presumably are in return for a guarantee to feed-in to them outside sunlight peak, I suppose?
I assume the power providers have come up with ToU and FiT tariffs based on a LOT of data, so we here with our spreadsheets and one or two datapoints aren't likely to come out far ahead, but it sounds like break-even within a few years is feasible.
They don't expect to ever pay for electricity again - instead their biggest problem with Amber is what to do when they are overproducing. They got charged $2.50 the other day when they didn't curtail production and had to dump power into the grid!
There's 4 to 6 hours of peak renewable energy per day.
If you add more batteries, you increase power and energy at the same time and ratio: so for any practical home battery system you're cycling the cells daily, which means you your power for charging must match.
If you put more batteries on one inverter, then you're scaling a lot of other costs (BMS, bus bars and space) but you'll never actually be able to utilize that capacity - it'll sit idle most of the time because you can't get it in and out of the cells fast enough.
Figures depend on provider and plan, but sometimes cheap (as per parent's 6c / kWh), but during the midday to 6pm range it may be up to 60c.
So, grid rates aren't subsidised, but having a storage medium means you can arbitrage power quite easily.
https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
You can also view the breakdown of where the grid is sourcing energy from (i.e. what portion of the grid is supplied from solar pv etc at any given time).
I know that some big industrial users (large factories etc) can optimize/spin up production lines etc based on the spot price. Although I'm not sure if they use the same public AEMO data there might be a dedicated api or similar involved.
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
I bet the crew on the submarines is much more focused on what they are doing…
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?
Asking sincerely.
They didn't intentionally or exclusively targeting open source, the "# of patents" are very explicit KPI requirement for tech companies in China. Every team gotta grind patents as much as they can.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. It is the West that first turned patents into the weapon for big corps to fuck the rest of the world. Well now they're tasting it themselves
The "west" absolutely has a monolithic IP jurisprudence, rules codified by trade agreements and passed laws[1]. This has harmed open source in the past, such as the multi-decade, recurring issue where folk have the license to make use of the source code, but not the associated trademarks.
1. As evidence, I offer the great mobile patent wars of the 2010's, which played out similarly across multiple countries the suits were filed, except the home-countries where the scales were the scales were thumbed.
This isn’t about protecting knowhow or actually producing anything, but about generating as much legal and financial friction as possible. The difference is that in China it can be semi-state-backed or at least tolerated, so it’s not just a bizarre parasitic business model like in the West but also a geopolitical tactic.
Imposing bureaucratic offset requirements etc. for renewable generation is the opposite of that. It can't really be news that Trump is a hypocrite, but water is wet again today.
Dam removals have multiple factors behind them, from pure economics (cheaper to remove than repair) to environmental -- restoring fisheries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_Califo...
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
Maybe other people are thinking about different dams, but the ones that were in the news semi-recently for being dismantled were producing something like five wind turbines worth of energy. China has built five turbines in the time it took you to read this comment.
By cancelling and stalling solar and wind projects while propping up coal of all things? That makes no sense.
The two largest in the EU by population (20% and 15%) and GDP (24% and 16%).
I mean, what’s the point anyway? Taxes, subsidies, natural resources, industry and geography are so vastly different between those countries.
That's as may be, but my electricity bill is 1/3 for kwhs of electrcity, and 2/3 for "delivering" said power.
As such, it seems like France and Germany may have an advantage there, no?
The grid is owned and managed by a government entity, so the price is set by them with parliament oversight. Last year they had to reduce the price (from 10c/kWh), as they found out they'd been overcharging people for a few years and had a few hundred million surplus of revenue.
And yes they are investing quite a lot to modernise the equipment and put high voltage powelines underground (lots of forests here). My country has a population density comparable to Texas.
Electricity itself is priced at around 0,14 €/kWh (sparing you the 6th significant digits), so roughly $0,16/kWh at current exchange rates and taxes of of 0,034 €/kWh ($0,039/kWh).
Let's round it to up to $0.17/kWh, which is surprisingly close to your number.
The additional taxes are a "flat" fee of 1,8 €/month (2 $/month),
Then there is the registration itself, with sits at about $15 / month. (I can challenge myself to getting bills where the registration and taxes are bigger than the actual current.)
I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
Then there's a USD0.175 fee for "delivery," plus an additional ~50% in taxes and fees for "delivery (total cost ~USD0.26/kwh or EU0.22) for "delivery."
Total cost: USD0.38/kwh or EU0.33
N.B.: The above detail was for the month of June. Prices do fluctuate and I'd expect that electricity prices for July, especially as hot as it's been here, will be more than for June.
>I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
I just divided total cost, including taxes and fees (for electricity and for delivery) by the number of kwh used.
That's not very exact as some of the fees do not vary by usage, but I figured it was close enough.
PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.
The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.
If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.
If you're using the grid as a battery where you feed power into it at 4PM and draw power from it at 4AM, that costs money.
We really need to separate the reliability and grid maintenance costs from the usage costs. Bundling them together worked when electricity was a true monopoly, but it isn't that anymore.
If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.
I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...
Where there might be a problem is refusing to pay any connection charge for the X-monthly bill that now shows 0 units consumed.
Sounds like they'd need to throw the breaker and cancel any existing contract.
I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...
In California it's going to vary city by city but there are typically interconnect requirements for single family homes and ADUs. You're welcome to go full sovereign citizen and the city or county is welcome to deem your house uninhabitable and use force to evict you.
For what? For not having power connected?
Are people not allowed to have (say) propane only homes in California?
Are you able to cite any relevant law here that requires a building to be connected to a power grid?
Yes.
And folks in Florida. And Arizona. And Colorado. And wherever else. Building codes and HOAs exist and absolutely have their own standards for habitability. It's not that hard to turn up news articles of folks who run afoul of this.
In California it is/was the energy code that required connection to the grid. In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.
I guess I'm glad I don't live in the US, I've built, bought, sold, renovated, and helped out others renovating a number of times in the past four decades and never run into such restrictions.
> In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.
Odd, given one doesn't follow from the other; you can have working A/C without a grid connection .. and it's better to build to the environment than waste power in any case .. the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures and people have lived there for millennia w/out A/C - in more recent times rammed earth walls and high roofs with wide verandahs work to beat the heat w/out draining power.
the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures
Arizona also famously prohibits collecting rain water. It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.
The interior gets hotter, Marble Bar for example.
> Pilbara is sparsely populated, Arizona's had much larger urban centers since the 70s
I fail to see how this is relevant to the design of individual buildings and the choices regarding passive Vs active cooling.
> A couple years ago Phoenix saw daily highs of over 43 for a month straight.
That occurs roughly every five years or so in interior (not coastal) Pilbara locations.
This year a W.Australian wheatbelt town much further south (cooler, and not in the Pilbara) saw a month of ~ 40 temperatures peaking at 45 .. a month of over 40 in the interior is expected yearly.
> It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.
Much like the Pilbara, save for the "pre-Columbian" marker - before European colonization people lived in all parts of Australia, including the Pilbara, the Tanimi, and other desert regions, for tens of thousands of years.
https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/curtailment?iso=caiso
From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)
Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.
All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.
When they're barely used, price per watt stops mattering. It's just a fixed cost.
If the fixed cost of an idle gas plant dominates, that's a good thing. An idle gas plant doesn't cost that much, so if the final power price is that plus 50% I'm pretty happy.
If batteries are expensive for long rare gaps then don't use batteries for those gaps. Easy.
If I was in such a situation where I lived in a Sunny enough place and had my property of such a size I would rather trade 95% uptime for being totally off grid and have some sort of emergency system for the 5% when it may not work.
I am actually surprised that the ultra libertarian and independent folks of Southern USA have not yet realised that they can get truly independent by making their own energy and powering their own vehicle
It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.
And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.
"The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt."
What an immature over simplification that means nothing. none of the examples you provided are an example of corruption
Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?
Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.
That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.
But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.
Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.
I work in energy/home automation. I'm burnt out.
> It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses"
You nailed it! I don't want to say much more because I do enjoy my scant little paycheck to build the moat SAAS
> An ideal world...
> We don't live in an ideal world though...
Yes. That was thoroughly established in the original comment and my reply. Have you come to look for an argument? Or to show off how pragmatic you are? What's your point besides "shit sucks?" If that's your point, I'm glad to commiserate. Shit sucks.
Nope I just gave my opinion, but judging from your spiteful reply it's clearly you looking for an argument but I won't bite.
Is this supposed to be positive?
Instead, they get to offshore jobs or bring in H1Bs to further their bottom line.
Electricity Prices Adjusted for Inflation https://share.google/dhmpNiMkGIpXa7bwu
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.
MISO/Entergy has some of the cheapest power out of all the US regions [0]. The heavy, fully-amortized coal mix combined with the Mississippi River makes for a hell of a combo. Barges can deliver fuel at a 2-3x lower cost than rail per ton-mile.
[0] https://www.entergytexas.com/wp-content/uploads/eti_rs.pdf
If you do the math the projected electricity demand by data centers for 2030 means that electricity production in the USA would have to double compared to residential use! That is simply impossible using the current grid. Solar farms powering data centers requires less permitting and no grid connection which seems preferable and would allow data centers to be built in remote areas so the noise does not affect homes. Batteries would keep the data centers running at night. If AI demands so much power, let them build the generation capacity themselves.
Also the math for the 2030 projections of the number of computer chips needed for AI are ridiculous, we would need ten new foundries in the US which is just not going to happen. The numbers I'm seeing related to AI ramp-up just make no physical sense.
Check out the graph of China's electrification.
https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...
The number of fabs required still seems excessive also. So overall the physical plants required for AI's projected trajectory do not seem possible, unless AI gets a lot more energy efficient and chips get much faster. Or those who want data centers build the power infrastructure themselves without competing with other electrifications.
Ontario can’t..
New England wants it but keeps hitting NIMBYism..
NY wants it but needs new infrastructure
https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
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%.
Energy is civilization, from muscle power through oxen, water wheels, steam, all the way to nuclear. Cheaper energy raises living standards. The reverse is also true.
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
I have to pay for trash removal in my town and I have a variety of choices. And while I pay the town for water, many people have wells. And I have my own septic system. So, while electricity is mostly regulated, many other utilities are on a house by house basis.
Humans and absolutes tend to be a pretty bad combo.
It is my experience that no system is good for all things. While some systems trend better than others, they are only good until they are not - and there will always be a 'not'.
Similarly, every 'not' is different. When we get there we're wise to consider it with experience + evidence and a willingness to do what those indicate.
Saving a click:
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.
CVS bought Aetna [health insurance]. CVS also owns CVS Caremark a PBM. If your employer picked Aetna as your health insurance you must fill your meds at a CVS.
And MCO’s are incentivized to approve all claims, so doctors and patients won’t complain about denied coverage.
UNH can’t charge too much more than Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Centene/Molina/etc.
That cannot happen with a utility like electricity.
You can tell your employer you don’t want to pay for the employer subsidized plan, but then you lose access to the employer subsidy and ability to pay premiums with pre tax income.
A silver plan an employer subsidizes is similar to a silver plan from healthcare.gov (expect plan to pay 70% and insured to pay 30%).
They are better than nothing if you qualify for a subsidy, but if you don't and you live in a HCOL area (which the subsidies are not adjusted for) you are pretty much screwed.
The MCOs are not carving out different networks for specific employers. You buy a bronze PPO from United Health directly, or your employer does, it’s going to be all the same providers. If you get gold, then the deductibles/copay will be less.
The networks used to be different when HMOs were in vogue, but if your employer is only giving you an HMO option, you need to find a different employer. PPOs are the only sensible option (except maybe Kaiser on the west coast, but even they sell PPOs, just costs more to see a non Kaiser provider).
I found that in practice the non-default options do not wind up being any cheaper so after trying it for a few years I switched back to the default option, where the price is not regulated but is set through a prescribed auction process.
I suppose the deregulation might still put downward pressure on prices in theory.
Electricity transmission at the minimum should be owned wholly by the public to remove profit incentive.
There’s your downward pressure—no incentive to jack up costs.
Until then, providing electricity to people will be a profit generating activity.
My provider is a coop and my rates are lower than the publicly held providers in this region. So you seem to be correct.
Everyone else gets stuck with the awful mess of their employer choosing their insurer, switching not more than once a year.
Whereas multiple utilities are disincentivized due to the cost of moving earth and labor to get you the utility.
Also, I like how the trope is managed care organizations wield unlimited power and make enormous sums of money and have laws that help them benefit over everyone else, but their profit margins and stock returns are abysmal.
Are electricity prices at noon climbing faster, or less fast, than prices at 6pm?
In the last couple years peak has gone from ~0.36 to ~0.56, while off-peak went from ~0.12 to ~0.27.
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
Did these guys not get the memo?
Presuming you had one.
i'm curious why? like truly curious. libertarians would probably say "regulations" and anti-capitalists would probably say "capitalism" etc. you would think with solar costs going down that this trend would be different. market dogma would say that the demand went up? thinking out loud, somebody plz ELI5
And induction, which of course is electric as well, would be cheaper still.
The article brought up some downstream effects such as seniors choosing between paying for power or their meds.
When we approve an outcome without addressing the consequences, we are effectively rubberstamping those consequences. I believe this doesn't serve us well.
I'll also note that I live in such a place. Heck, I don't have air conditioning at all. But if I don't have heat in the winter, I'll die. It's cold out. Not many place have the luxury of not needing heating nor cooling - and even when some folks can go without, not all buildings are fit for that purpose. 2 windows on one side of an apartment doesn't make for good ventilation.
Maybe we give it to them? They're very likely on subsidized income anyway, it's a one time cost and drop in the bucket to move them to someplace more affordable.
I think you're inventing stuff to say. The article said:
"There's a lot of seniors down here that are living
check to check.
They can barely afford prescriptions such as myself,"
Dozens of millions of Americans are poor because they're poor. People work hard with what they have and for some it works out well and for some it doesn't. That's reality.
Established funding sources tend to have long lines of applicants.
Past that, if it's public funds, the rising political force is fiercely opposed to this - mostly for ideological reasons that are disconnected from actual outcomes.
From the Energy Star website, savings since 2020:
- Electricity: 520 billion kilowatt-hours
- Energy costs: $42 billion
- GHG emissions: 400 million metric tons
What engineering was centralised? Isn't it just a label?
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA. This is especially true for appliances like heat pumps due to their >100% "efficiency", and if you are somewhere with cheap clean electricity (Pacific Northwest) they are a no-brainer.
> the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
With smart splitters and some planning, panel upgrades can often be avoided:
https://homes.rewiringamerica.org/articles/electrical-panel/...
Panel upgrades are just the most visible, but not individually expensive, part.
I understood that, but my point is that smart panel and smart circuit splitters upgrades can eliminate the need for a service drop upgrade.
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA.
And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.
> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.
Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.
Building a large solar installation may scale a bit sub-linearly, if you can e.g. order things in bulk at better prices, and have some electric assemblies done at a factory, more efficiently.
Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).
Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.
I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.
Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.
The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
I did get induction to replace a propane cooktop recently but that's only because I had to get a new range after a fire and induction probably made more sense than it did a few years back.
That doesn't sound like "great news" to me unless you're a serious classist.