One thing it's doing is jacking up electricity rates for US States that are part of the [PJM Interconnection grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJM_Interconnection). It's a capacity auction price that is used to guarantee standby availability and it is [up significantly](https://www.toledochamber.com/blog/watts-up-why-ohios-electr...) at $270.43 per MW/day, which is far above prior years (~$29–58/MW/day) and this is translating to significantly higher consumer prices.
Are they paying for electricity used by server farms. Or are they just paying more profits for owners of electricity producers? Do server farms get electricity below market price?
Ofc, possible long term contracts and options are involved in some of these markets. But there the option sellers would bear the cost.
This is a recurrent question and not just for servers.
In Europe it is constantly
>"why does the households of half of Europe pay for German unwillingness to have a good power mix? Why should anyone want more cross country or long range interconnects if it drives up local prices?"
Say Norway with abundant hydropower, they should by all right have cheap power. But reality is not so in half of the country because they're sufficiently interconnected to end up on a common bidders euro market and end up paying blood money for the poor political choices of countries they don't even share a border with.
Addition: this also creates perverse incentives. A good solution for many of the interconnected flat euro countries would love enormous hydropower overcapacity to be built in Norway at the cost of the local nature. This is great for whoever sells the hydropower. This is great for whoever is a politician that can show off their green all-hydro power mix in a country as hilly as a neutron star. But this is not great for whoever gets their backyard hiking trails reduced to a hydro reservoir.
But hey we do it with everything else too, "open pit mines are too destructive to have in our country, so we'll buy it from china and pretend we're making green choice. Globalism in a nutshell: Export your responsibility.
In India, we have different energy consumption bands like 0-200kWh, 200-400kWh and so on. People whose consumption is in 0-200kWh pay less as compared to 200-400kWh and so on.
The lack of investment in energy infrastructure - especially dispatchable power sources and grid transmission - is finally coming to bite us.
Datacenters are simply the final straw/tipping point, and make a convenient scapegoat.
At some point you run out of the prior generation's (no pun intended) energy investments. Efficiency gains only get you so far, eventually you need capital investment into actually building things.
Yep, this is no different from any other consumption market showing up for power. The US has talked about 'brining manufacturing back' and while I don't see it happening, what did we expect that was going to do to the power grid.
One thing we should be careful about regarding calculations related to the larger set of "all data centers" vs only "GenAI" is that the data centers include all the predictive algorithms for social media and advertising. I, for one, would not want to misdirect ire at ChatGPT that really belongs directed at ads.
givemeethekeys|4 months ago
Where I live, the utility company bills you at a higher rate if you use more electricity.
XorNot|4 months ago
You need strong residential consumer protections to avoid this.
Ekaros|4 months ago
Ofc, possible long term contracts and options are involved in some of these markets. But there the option sellers would bear the cost.
justlikereddit|4 months ago
In Europe it is constantly >"why does the households of half of Europe pay for German unwillingness to have a good power mix? Why should anyone want more cross country or long range interconnects if it drives up local prices?"
Say Norway with abundant hydropower, they should by all right have cheap power. But reality is not so in half of the country because they're sufficiently interconnected to end up on a common bidders euro market and end up paying blood money for the poor political choices of countries they don't even share a border with.
Addition: this also creates perverse incentives. A good solution for many of the interconnected flat euro countries would love enormous hydropower overcapacity to be built in Norway at the cost of the local nature. This is great for whoever sells the hydropower. This is great for whoever is a politician that can show off their green all-hydro power mix in a country as hilly as a neutron star. But this is not great for whoever gets their backyard hiking trails reduced to a hydro reservoir.
But hey we do it with everything else too, "open pit mines are too destructive to have in our country, so we'll buy it from china and pretend we're making green choice. Globalism in a nutshell: Export your responsibility.
blueblisters|4 months ago
wait what? consumers are literally paying for server farms? this isn't a supply-demand gap?
barbazoo|4 months ago
StrangeDoctor|4 months ago
PJM claims this will be a 1.5-5% yoy increase for retail power. https://www.pjm.com/-/media/DotCom/about-pjm/newsroom/2025-r...
quaintdev|4 months ago
phil21|4 months ago
Datacenters are simply the final straw/tipping point, and make a convenient scapegoat.
At some point you run out of the prior generation's (no pun intended) energy investments. Efficiency gains only get you so far, eventually you need capital investment into actually building things.
pixl97|4 months ago
tylervigen|4 months ago
Mistletoe|4 months ago