Bigger clients negotiate bulk discounts, basically. But the other factor at play here is supply and demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price for the supply. Household demand has remained more or less the same, but because data center demand has shot up, prices have too.
Comment on As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
how can they get away with this? Are data centers not paying their bills?
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As prices go up it becomes more attractive to build more generating capacity. When capacity goes up prices will come back down.
silence7@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Mind you, the Trump administration has made it much harder to install the cheapest electric generation available — solar and wind.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
“When capacity goes up prices will come back down”
Loooooool. I know that’s how its supposed to work but you’re mistaken if you think that they will ever decrease the price. That almost never ever happens.
My electric company (which is the only one in my area) even started fucking mining bitcoin and they hit us with a surge pricing model charging us even more for the electricity we use not only during daytime but also during summer. I’m sure they say some bullshit about capacity loads or whatever.
They sure got enough capacity to mine the fuck out of that bitcoin though.
Greedy fucks, all of them.
Tja@programming.dev 13 hours ago
My prices went down in the last two years by almost half. I could get a time based tariff and sometimes buy electricity at negative prices. Of course I have like 400 different electricity providers I can choose from… Monopolies are… not great.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
It depends and varies wildly based on your area and how the electricity is actually sold.
If they are using an energy stock exchange, as many places are, then increased capacity, especially increased renewable capacity, greatly reduces the price per kWh because the price depends on the most expensive method of generation.
And because renewables always offer their electricity for free to the exchange, as they don’t have any fuel etc costs, you sometimes end up in the peculiar situation like here in Finland (and in the entire NordPool area) tomorrow between 13:00 and 16:00, where electricity is literally priced at 0€/kWh, as there is enough renewables to cover it all.chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ideally anyway. Government interference can always screw it up and create barriers to competition.
Where I live (Ontario, Canada) on-peak electricity prices have pretty much exactly kept pace with inflation over the past 20 years, so in effect electricity costs have not gone up.
Off-peak prices have crept up more than that but solar power doesn’t help with off-peak generation at all. Wind turbines do produce more at night but we’ve had government subsidies to encourage building wind power capacity and those subsidies result in higher wholesale prices for that power (actually above the off-peak prices consumers pay).
baronvonj@lemmy.world 1 day ago
See, the data is right there to raise the rates on the data centers causing the rise in demand and not the households.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 1 day ago
even under the assumption that they do pay the exact same prices as normal citizens (they don’t). electricity prices will go up the more usage there is, as they mostly rely on limited factors.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Yupp just like every single other aspect of our living here our lives have been made worse to protect the interests of large corporations.
Land of the free, and all that.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They are. The state has failed to ensure there is adequate supply to keep prices flat.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Look up your local “Public Service Comission”
Then note that everyone on it is a republiQan.
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
It is like Obamacare. You have a person who smokes, gets drunk, eats a lot of sugar, don’t exercise, you pay for their bill through hiked premiums.
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 day ago
In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.
And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn’t be able to afford private healthcare. That’s called empathy - and I wish that’d sink in as well.
Caffeinated_Sloth@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’d rather my part of the public money go to help an alcoholic neighbor than to subsidize a certain Coastal Elite’s habit of buying golf courses and ballrooms.
tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
isn’t that the reverse argument? Typically only <20% of people take the healthcare system for granted whilst everyone else pays their dues. Here, it’s everyone pays their electricity bills but 1 absolute behemoth of a customer hordes the resources, and instead of being cut off or denied service as would be typical in other services, they pay hand over fist to get first dibs on all resources, whilst passing off the cost to everyone else
nexas_XIII@midwest.social 1 day ago
Like health insurance isn’t already like that lol, lmao even.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Spewing more inflammatory bullshit again, huh.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 1 day ago
it’s my life choices that rise my electricity prices, i should have built a giant data centre to consume the equivalent of a whole town do the taxpayer’s would subsidise my bills.
silence7@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
What? That doesn’t make any sense.
AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s essentially supply and demand. If the data center is willing to pay more, then everyone has to pay more.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Places like data centers don’t pay the same rate that individuals do though. They get an industrial rate.
Basically they cut them a break so they can fuck you. The supply is more More than enough and the only demand that increased was from corporate interests.
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
It makes sense if you’re a greedy piece of shit that values corporate investment more than the people you serve.
I’m glad you see that it doesn’t make sense though it means you are a good person.