Ah, capitalism!
Technically it’s socialism - the population is subsidising the datacenters. It’s only capitalism when it comes to getting paid
They are raising prices because there is new demand in the market. That’s not socialism at all, it’s market forces.
I’m betting the datacenters and power companies are funded by capital from investors that demand to receive the maximum capital return that can be extracted from that municipality. That’s capitalism
It is not socialism. It is literally capitalism. Socialism is a form of government. It is true that the costs of higher energy are being spread across society and therefore socialized, but that is not the same as socialism.
If you are looking for the truest -ism that this would be, it would be the original Mussolini definition of fascism as the merger of state and government, that is now closer to what we would call corporatism.
I’m sure you meant this as a joke, a good one at that - remember the /s :D
Yes, i’m getting rinsed 😂
Losing valuable internet points 😭
Lost so much karma i’m a sith lord rn
Please provide your definition of socialism.
Loobying is bribery.
Socialize the expenses, privatize the profits. Everything is working as designed.
I participate in the “residential smart thermostat rewards” program where they can adjust my temps during high demand periods. In the past it has been like if it’s 100F out they will bump my settings from 77 to 79 which is not a big deal and gets me like two weeks of free electricity.
This year those mother fuckers have been bumping the thermostat up to like 86 when it’s 87 outside. Gee I wonder what the fucking difference is now? I can reject their temp settings in the app, but I can only do it like three times before they cancel my rewards. I’m half tempted to go wire up a little Arduino in series with the thermostat so I can control the AC without touching the smart thermostat if needed.
I had a similar deal (I actually got a free Nest thermostat out of it), but eventually I disabled that feature. Instead, I now use a fixed temperature upper bound that is at the edge of my comfortable range. Of course, this is because I can afford to run the air conditioning when it gets that hot.
This is honestly the first year I’ve even noticed the events. Previously I’d notice the email like a few days later and check the logs to see what they did. This was the first time where I was just at home and felt noticeably uncomfortable and checked the thermostat to see they’d set it to 86F which is outrageous. Its pissing me off enough that I want to cheat the system instead of just opt out, because like… The fucking audacity.
There was an article I read a while ago that kind of explained it. Basically, the increased datacenter demand forces the grid operator to build more capacity, which requires money. I think there are meetings where they decide how it is distributed across all their corporate and resident ratepayers. Basically the lobbyists argue that the since this new capacity technically benefits rate payers in the form of more capacity, they should take a share of it. Even though none of us are actually going to be using that capacity…
And it doesn’t help at all that the grid companies are monopolies
But correct me if I’m wrong if the data centers are the cause of the electrical increase then shouldn’t they be offering to relieve the city of the cost because they’re the source? Like if I wanted to run 3kw of electricity on a 220v outlet with a laboratory grade vacuum pump for an hour, I would need to pay more for my electrical bill for my house only, right? My neighbors wouldn’t see a spike, I would see a spike.
My neighbors using their central air have a higher bill than me because they use more, that’s always how it’s been.
If they’re the cause they should have to pay more than the rest of us. If they’re using more energy, they should have to pay more, if they can’t pay to do upfront costs with the energy companies maybe they shouldn’t be building them. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 It makes you wonder who the hell is selling these people predatory contracts.
They’re paying for every kilowatt-hour they use, same as us. They are just a different ‘class’ of ratepayer (i.e. a bigger customer). The reason prices go up is not entirely just because of demand, but because there’s not enough supply, and the prices go up to cover for the cost to build it. The way I understand it is that some board has to decide how to distribute the increase in rates across their customers in order to meet the extra revenue, and the higher classes of ratepayers know that if their rate went up, that would be millions lost. So they hire lobbyists to convince the grid company to shift the cost to residential tax payers, and since neither you are me is going to march to the electric company and demand a fairer distribution, they end up shifting ‘some’ of it to us.
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Depends on the market too, some US states have a requirement that if the power company has to increase capacity, it’s on the power company’s dime.
If I got that letter I’d be on the verge of going Paper Mario on that fuckin place
Unpopular opinion, but when competing for a scarce resource, everyone pays more because it is more scarce. Then more gets created (at least in the case of power) and the system equalizes.
It would be better if there was a provision to cover the spike for ratepayers for some number of years.
Large data centers often pay less than home users (due to economies to scale)
businesses actually pay less for electricity than residentials, they get bulk discounts, residents get hikes.
Quebec has it right, citizens pay the cost of production and their price is protected. The power sold to Americans is sold at market price.
Yeah… Burn the data center down…
You have always paid for millionaires/billionaires projects. The government spends your taxes and gives it to their corporations to build infrastructure and weapons. How do you think we built railroads and space shuttles and tanks?
Those aren’t great examples. Not sure how it is in the us, but the rails were originally primarily built buy private businesses, some were nationalized, and are now private again. Space exploration is a net benefit to science and understanding, that’s why is government funded. Tanks fall into defense spending, yes the money does come from public pockets and goes to private businesses, but that’s because of the MIC lobbying
WHY is everyone so ANGRY at This? It’s the EXACT same Thing that Happens when your Neighbors have a HUGE Power Hungry weekend! EVERYONE Pays an Increase INSTEAD of JUST your Neighbor! I’ve NEVER had to Pay MORE for a Bill when I’ve used MORE Energy! It’s ALWAYS Distributed to EVERYONE instead!
Bro, what are you going to do about this? Share it on the internet? Sure yea will solve nothing.
Wow bro, you’re so smart. Clearly once someone posts something to the Internet that is the only action they are taking. And clearly posting to the Internet is only as effective at communicating the problem as putting up posters for thousands of people to read.
What should we do about it OP not knowing your super-smart insight here? Reply to their post about it?
I believe it’s time to start mass protests worldwide l, but hey, let our feature be destroyed.
To be clear, this is a generic supply and demand effect that isn’t specific to datacenters. It’s how any market works.
If they’re using those centers to generate revenue and they can afford to pay the electricity bill, there’s something off. My neighbors aren’t paying for my electricity.
I am not paying for the hood milk factories electricity, I am not paying for the John Hancock building’s electricity, I am not paying for the liquor stores electricity. Walmart and micky d’s are paying their own bills.
There’s no reason the common person should be paying for the electrical bill of another, especially when revenue of 200$ to 250$ per person per annual subscription services so… yearly. …
“Hey we’re making money off of you but you’re gonna pay for our store to exist…”
🤷🏻♂️ Someone is bribing the department of energy.
To be clear, the amount of data centers being built is directly affecting this, so the anger directed to data centers is more than justified
datacenters
where do you think the increased demand came from?
jfc
Everything is worth what someone is willing to pay.
How the fuck should a loan program help paying for monthly recurring costs?!
Because in the summer people run the AC more than they can afford and rack up like $300 bills when their off-summer average would normally be like $70. The loan programs are more like a deferred payment plan where they will cap the individual monthly payment at $150 or something, and then just push the surplus onto other future bills. Then usually when you close the account you owe them a bunch of money still, and that’s when they start doing things like offering to set you up with loan services.
Have you heard of the concept of company towns?
the more I’m debt you get the more you owe them,
Well, in the past (and the present in many places) perpetual unrepayable debts were used as a way to implement slavery without calling it slavery. They call it debt peonage. You know, food for thought.
Short term it pads the companies books a bit more by adding an asset on top of the revenue. Medium term it’s a perpetual impairment generator. The executives are just planning to cash out before the inevitable happens.
It helps people who can still pay on average but have an unexpected cost which, due to higher bills, now pushes them into the red.
“Capitalism breeds innovation”
Meanwhile we have monthly installments for monthly installments.
I guess they cover you for a while until you figure it out. It’s better than nothing ig.
It’s really not. What it does is trap these people in endless debt. Now we don’t know any details about these loans, but there’s no way in hell the customers aren’t going to be paying fees and interest. A loan of $40 will be a loan of $100 the next month and so on. This is a way to make extra off of the people who have nothing.
That’s more than 1200% interest. Even loan sharks don’t do that.
That example is assuming you’ll accrue another $40 next month. The interest numbers are pulled from my ass to make a point.
In the corporate world, if you are taking on debt to fund operations, that’s an indicator that your business is circling the drain. The same applies to personal finance.
Businesses can afford to go bankrupt. People can’t afford to die. Electricity is a basic necessity for a lot of people.
I absolutely cannot figure this out. Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone? Why would a data center pay less? (I’m not asking anyone to justify the poor decisions of energy companies)
It’s more that everyone pays more including the data center even. It could also be related to non-generation costs such as building additional distribution infra which can be regulated as a shared cost even though the data center pays for all extra generation.
Same as with RAM prices. There is a limited supply and the datacenters are hogging it, possibly willing to pay extra because the entire bubble depends on MORE MORE MORE, or willing to bulk purchase the entire contingent in advance.
Now if you are a power supplier you find yourself in the comfortable position of being financially courted by the datacenter corps, and you have a captured audience of consumers who rely on you supplying them, who you can now justifiably bleed out, and if they cant pay you just sell it to the datacenter after all.
That is actually very sick behavior.
To you or I, surely, but to an MBA it’s just business as usual.
Capitalism is essentially based on the concept that everyone doing whatever they believe is in their best interest will magically balance itself out and achieve the most-efficient outcome, instead of the most self-serving and greedy criminals and psychopaths colluding to exploit and deceive the masses, accrue the lions share, and enslave everyone else.
It’s basically a religiously-dogmatic mental illness that has no place beyond the 19th Century, but the criminals and psychopaths used their wealth to exploit and deceive the masses… so here we are. May the greediest psychopath win!
One might not have to buy (i.e. pay), or buy as much, if one has solar or even just a stack of batteries to get electricity during the off periods.
This is America.
Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone?
Perversely, no. Large industrial users often get a bulk rate that’s cheaper than the household rate.
Happy cake day, BTW.
Definitely a smart move letting those power utilities be privatised, even a regulation forcing cost price power for residents would have been better than full privatisation. I’m so glad my state never got sucked into letting that happen here.
Fortunately, Oregon seems to have figured out how to handle this. This was in my feed, literally right under this post.
but reducing customers rate by 1.3% isnt that much, it should be 30%
Our rates haven’t gone up by much lately. The rates have kept more in line with the stupid inflation.
As the other commenter said, they have a limited supply and are expecting us plebeians to be priced out and go without. It’s already happening: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/virginia-county-tells-workers-switch-002400860.html
Isn’t a kwh the same price for everyone?
Not sure why you’d assume this
People tend to like to imagine the world is fair and just.
If it’s anything like it is here in Victoria (Australia); the price per MWh is recalculated based on supply/demand on a 5 minute basis:
https://www.aemo.com.au/aemo/data/nem/priceanddemand/PRICE_AND_DEMAND_202607_VIC1.csv
That’s because when supply outruns demand, surplus electricity is basically worthless and wholesalers need to pay someone to take it - we have long stretches of time, even during winter, where our domestic solar production saturates the demand, resulting in our Feed-in tariffs (what homes get paid for surplus production) has dropped to 1c/kWh, except for certain edge cases).
The bulk of the cost incurred is due to peak-energy generation (gas turbine, I believe?) ramping up to cover peak evening times.
These costs are aggregated and amortised over total demand, to balance out people’s energy bills.
This has been a bit of a tangent, but I found this interesting when I first learned it, and just wanted to share!
Folks who are saying the price is going up because of demand are technically right but it’s kinda misleading. People get mad when they don’t understand their bills so I wanna add to that:
With more demand in the system, more distribution equipment is used and will need more maintenance. Your electric bill has fixed fees and usage fees. The fixed fees include the cost of capital upgrades, which cover these costs. It’s not a direct 1:1 cost for each connection, as the upstream feed capacity needs to increase too.
Cost per KW may go up too, it depends on the way your utility is set up. Time of day pricing is meant to encourage offsetting costs and sometimes large customers pay proportional to the contribution to peak demand.
It doesn’t help that this increase in demand comes when so much of the grid is old as fuck in north america. But we live in interesting times.
Data centers forcing grid upgrades is all the more reason their rates should be higher. They should be paying 100% of those capital upgrade costs, too!
Okay these are literally things that you can vote for you need to find out who regulates energy rates and get on their ass
It may well be the same price for the data center too, but now that there’s significantly more load on the network and there’ve been no changes to network capacity the price is being adjusted to reconcile the new demand with existing supply.
they get a wholesale/bulk rate which is far cheaper than residential, we atually pay for any datacenter, business in the end.
Everyone on the power exchange. Consumers don’t pay the exchange price. They pay a premium to the company that transforms exchange power to household power on a virtual sheet of paper.
Clout. Aura. Bargaining force. Call it whatever you want, really. Corporations are big, they have capital, capital is power. They can hire people to influence politics, pushing for people who are on their side to get elected by funding campaigns, and naturally bribe people on the down low.
Stick, along with the other people served by their provider, most likely don’t have the ability to pay people to lobby for them full time. Most people barely have the money to keep their personal economy going, and spend a significant portion of their time just making that happen. As a result, the corporations who are benefiting from this sit on all the power, because they can influence public opinion as well, painting their politics as beneficial to private individuals, even if that’s a complete lie.
That is why democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. Workers could band together and claim power, but they’re kept in situations where doing that just isn’t feasible.
Things won’t get better without some kind of revolution. The balance of power is tipped so far in favour of the corporations that no matter how much time or money workers spend (neither of which we have) trying to better things, they’ll never get even close to what the corpos can swing with.
