Yep. It’s the same reason everyone has to pay more for RAM now, even though consumers didn’t cause the shortage.
Comment on AI Electric Bills
ProfessorScience@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Its supply and demand. The AI data centers are paying their electric bills, but at the same time they represent a significant increase in demand for electricity, so electric companies can raise their prices.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 2 days ago
yesman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The AI data centers are paying their electric bills
This bears repeating. Datacenters do have to pay the light bill. Even when the VC money dries up. It’s a beautiful thing.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Naw, they’ll just declare bankruptcy and the municipalities will foot the bills for the infrastructure debt.
Basically, have you even seen the Simpsons monorail episode? It’s that.
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
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.
snooggums@piefed.world 2 days ago
Sure, but the companies driving the increased demand should be paying for the increased capacity directly instead of having the general public subsidize it.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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!
Gerudo@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Think of the shareholders!
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
Some AI companies are doing this because the cost of relying on the open market is too high to build in certain areas and the standard of electricity required by the data center may be something that the grid can’t supply.
There are also some countries, like Saudi Arabia, trying to lure data centers into their countries by offering cheap land, permitting, and cheap electricity.
AA5B@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yeah but the examples I read about also used that strategy to get around state and local regulations for things like renewable energy portfolios.
Good for them if they’re building acres of solar and storage. Bad for us if they’re using diesel generators
TwoTiredMice@feddit.dk 2 days ago
How would that work? With a flat fee or depending on whether ai companies are tipping the scale to a more expensive marginal price?
queermunist@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Make every kWh above the average power draw have a higher cost, that increases further with every additional kWh.
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
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: enel.com.co/…/pliego-tarifario-enel-diciembre-202…). 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.