alt Hacker NewsHow about an across the board $1/W hook up fee for new customers? Thats about the price of installed capacity per watt.
New house with 200 A panel an assumed 30% utilization rate? $3600.
New data center with 80% utilization rates at 100MW? $80 million dollars.
New 10 GW data center? That'll be $8 billion.
It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.
Replies
Linear progression is unfair, just like for taxation. If you're going to make a law like this, it should be something like nlog(n) so that the big players that abuse the system pay more than the little guy.
Texas has an independent energy grid, so are not exporting energy to them.
> It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.
I don’t find anything outrageous whatsoever about building out transmission to strengthen regional interconnections. Lord knows we are decades behind the curve on this. If AI datacenters are what finally lets us maybe start to get a tiny bit ahead of the game I’m all for it. When the bubble pops there will finally be a bit of pressure off, and perhaps we can get back to a tiny bit of overbuilt capacity to cover for exceptional events again. And more reasonable projects maybe won’t be sitting in a decade long interconnection queue.
At some point we get to all collectively pay for our parents lack of investment in energy infrastructure. We have been living off our (great?) grandparents investments into the future and wide scale deindustrialization of the economy since I’ve been alive. At some point you run out of inertia.
Could always move to Texas if you hate the idea of your state ever possibly spending a dollar that benefits someone across the border. They islanded their grid pretty much precisely due to this attitude.
Watching the PJM and MISO interconnections over the past decade or so has been illuminating. It’s been a very slow moving disaster in the making that nearly no one is paying attention to.
As for your proposed solution I doubt anyone - including the datacenter operators - would argue since that is largely what tends to happen as it is. Just change utilization factor to capacity factor and sounds good to me!
Your math on the house seems off by a factor of 4? But 30% utilization seems high, as that would be a $2k/mo electric bill at 20 cents/kWh.
Reframing what you're saying, that would be a connection fee that worked out to just under 12 cents per kWh used for the first year, which seems both somewhat reasonable but also probably not going to move the needle much on the large deployments?
All projects have an interconnection fee.
Large projects will have a large load interconnection tariff that’s supposed to shoulder the costs of upgrading the infrastructure to support these new projects.
Data center discussions are weird right now because people assume these things don’t exist and propose them as solutions. They already exist.
The problem in the article is something different: The sites they’re talking about are designed to disconnect from the grid and use backup power when the voltage drops, which can be a problem because now there’s too much energy being supplied to the grid and not enough load to absorb it.