I keep hearing how everyone’s electric bills are going up with AI data centers near them. Why aren’t the companies paying the bill? Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?
I keep hearing how everyone’s electric bills are going up with AI data centers near them. Why aren’t the companies paying the bill? Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?
Expanding on that: in competitive electricity markets, in theory, total demand is met by the cheapest plants (by “marginal price”: how much does an additional unit of electricity cost?) that are available.
The marginal price of PV, wind and hydropower is pretty much zero.
The next cheapest are usually older nuclear fission plants and coal power plants.
Then is a huge gap and then come newer nuclear plants and gas fired power plants.
But all of these plants aren’t built over night. So maybe before all of the datacenters, total demand may have mostly been met by renewables and coal and gas power plants only operated a few hundred hours per year. Now, total demand rises and those plants need to operate more often. That’s why the prices rise just because of demand increase. Other effects (e.g. changes in regulation, corporate greed, …) might be at play as well.
Sure, but the companies driving the increased demand should be paying for the increased capacity directly instead of having the general public subsidize it.
No no no! It’s cheaper for them to pay off politicians for special rates and then pass on the cost to the consumer! Won’t you think of the poor billionaires!
Think of the shareholders!
How would that work? With a flat fee or depending on whether ai companies are tipping the scale to a more expensive marginal price within a price period?
Make every kWh above the average power draw have a higher cost and it increases further with every additional kWh.
Colombia has price discrimination for residential areas: households in richer areas have to pay more than those in poorer areas. I don’t know how good the actual implementation works out for the people there, but it was in effect when I was there more than 10 years ago and it still seems to be (see “estratos” here: https://www.enel.com.co/content/dam/enel-co/español/personas/1-17-1/2025/pliego-tarifario-enel-diciembre-2025.pdf). If that is possible for different areas of one city, of course we could make data centers pay more for 1 kWh than a private consumer would.
It just won’t happen in our hyper-capitalist north american and european countries.
I don’t know how wide spread smart meters are in the US, but it should be fairly simple so have an extra tariff on these kind of consumers, or perhaps just tariffs during peak periods.
At least it could be enforced that the surplus heat from data centers had to be reused in some way, could be residental heating or ptx.