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 15 hours 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 7 hours ago
yesman@lemmy.world 14 hours 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 7 hours 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 14 hours 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 14 hours 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 14 hours 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 10 hours ago
Think of the shareholders!
TwoTiredMice@feddit.dk 13 hours 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 7 hours ago
Make every kWh above the average power draw have a higher cost, that increases further with every additional kWh.
Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 8 hours 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.