Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI

I am curious how electricity is priced. Why are more and more utility providers charge based on ‘infrastructure cost’ or ‘fixed platform fee’ instead of usage fee?

It's not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters -- or if that is just the convenient boogeyman.

The grid operator for the northeast, according to my Governor, has been well-behind in building out infrastructure. Of course new datacenters cause more load. But so do new houses (we're building as many as we can) and electric cars, etc.

I'll be the first to complain about Texas being on its own energy grid and the dumpster fire of resultant things that happen because of it, but it is worthwhile to call out that this sort of thing is not possible in Texas because of that.

who is actually signing off on these agreements to build it, knowing the bill goes to the locals? seems openly shady

We've been here before [1]. In that case, extra load on the grid meant the municipality needed to purchase more power (at higher prices), which raised everybody's prices.

Electricity supply is highly regulated. Prices for electricity are constrained and often set by state regulators. These are so-called "usage fees". But beyond that the utility is allowed to charge customers for infrastructure and transmissio and those fees are out of control. We recently had a court case where a North Carolina utility illegally overcharged customers but the judge didn't assign damages because legally the utility could just charge customers for those damages [2]. And the legislature passed laws to protect the utility as well.

This is going to get worse too because private equity is rapidly moving into this market and they know that capex can be entirely pushed onto customers with no recourse.

So the data centers tend to get sweetheart deals on electricity too. So while the total cost of electricity has gone up (per Mwh), they pay less pushing even more burden onto everyone else. Plus they get discounts on property taxes, energy tariffs and other taxes, as in the case of Kevin O'Leary's mega-DC in Utah.

But this state interconnect bill is another level of evil because it's pushing the costs onto states that have nothing to do with the data center and won't get any "benefit" (there is no benefit) anyway.

What we need are laws that make these projects pay for their own infrastructure. This might cause them to build near power sources. Great. Away from people, mostly.

The level of regulatory corruption here is actually sickening. Take Elon's Grok DC in Memphis that exploits local laws against clean air by using "mobile" gas turbines in the city of Memphis.

[1]: https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/power-hungry-cry...

[2]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...

Funny how most people were complaining about lack of infrastructure spending before AI, now that the bills come due it's "WAIT! I'm paying for the thing I use!?!"

Are Americans really getting stickershock from $2B? Lets search some random numbers + "Maryland"

They invested $1B in quantum computing. Crickets.

$10B dollar purple line

$9B dollar missed pension returns, $3B directly to wallstreet hedgefunds POOF! (Explains why the stock market rises as the country takes on more and more debt)

The list literally goes on and on, probably over $30B of sunk costs into either nothing, planning or infrastructure that wasn't properly maintained.

>WBAL News Radio

>6 days ago — Congressman Andy Harris says the cost of the Key Bridge rebuild was

>nearing $10 billion, and that's the reason the state won't go forward

What's the traffic for this $5B-$10B bridge? 34,000.

America's energy infrastructure has been chronically under-invested for the last 60 years, widening the gap between young and old. All the articles talking about the cost of AI are written by entrenched forces that AI have already replace, their free money from infrastructure scams.