21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.

This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/dat...

A very fair question and the answer is complicated. Production costs and transmission costs are separate. Also demand changes the market rate. And even if renewables are cheaper to produce in a market usually the highest price regardless of source sets the price. This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.

It’s a massive topic and I encourage everyone to go and dive into it. It’s endlessly fascinating and also one of the really positive stories in the world right now which can help balance your emotions in a sometimes depressing world. At least for me it does.

Mostly because marginal pricing/merit order.

In a vast over simplfication, the most expensive producer that gets to supply sets the overall price. So even if you supply 99% from wind and hydro, the 1% of power that comes from gas sets the price for 100% of the electricity in the market.

When gas gets more expensive, electricity from gas gets more expensive. The more you have to rely on gas (because you don‘t have batteries, not enough solar, etc), the more you pay high prices.

There are different ways to address these issues. Demand side load management, batteries, etc.

Solar is priced based on gas prices as a financial incentive to encourage producers to build solar. That’s because profiting from the difference between the cost of production for solar and the cost of production from gas is supposed to be the incentive to build solar.

The gas prices went up massively in 2022 with the war in Ukraine, and even though that subsided before the war in Iran a little, the existing supply companies are not going to give back an increase in the price they’ve gained because their prices dropped.

because you start internalizing costs

You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand. My first question would be whether electricity (commercial and residential) has become relatively more expensive than gas, beer, and other commodities. If it's the same rate then it's more of an overall inflation thing. If electricity really is far and away higher than the rest over time then one would have to look at laws, the grid, demand, and of course supply too.