alt Hacker News> But what if the power company needs to upgrade the substation to handle the increased needs of the data center? Or secure additional sources of electricity? In these cases, the investments are part of the electricity grid that everyone uses. These costs will likely be shared among all customers.
Okay but this is a policy choice. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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In the US this isn't even true. The costs of grid upgrades are paid new capacity up front, which actually means there is a queue for grid connections twice the US total production, with no costs to ongoing customers.
Yes, an alternative policy could be, the same unit price for electricity, and the additional cost is covered by increased usage (at the same unit price). The entity making the decision for the increased investment (the utilities company) will take the risk and rewards that comes with the investment.
But, if it turns out to be a reward, people will revolt that for-profit company is making excess profit from something as basic as utilities.
Still waiting for canadian cell phone bills to come down after all those "upgrades" that supposedly happened.
Build more power!
Exactly. Over in Virginia 37 datacenters use close to 3GW of electricity. The power utilities and overarching transmitters are looking at projects to ship some of that electricity (which requires ~700kV transmission). Two projects in the works are at $18B between them.
$18B to provide redundancy and not have to require schools and local government to limit electricity use and provide a bit more slack in the powergrid is a burden that all the users get to share. Lucky them. Yes, all users benefit, but lucky break for those datacenters, getting all that redundancy for power, without a $500M/ea bill.
I'm really tired of reading comments like this"this is a policy choice" when these companies are straight up bribing politicians or exploiting their conflicts of interest to make this their policy. The public doesn't have a choice when all our leaders are bought and paid for by oligarchs and their businesses.
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Where I live, if a developer wants to build a subdivision, they pay for the water and sewer lines. They pay to connect those lines to the city infrastructure. If the city infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the new volumes, they pay for at least a proportionate share of that too. The ongoing maintenance becomes part of the city's budget eventually, but not the costs of the build out.
All those costs go into the price of the houses built there.
And this is also part of why building "affordable" houses rarely happens. All the infrastructure costs the same whether the houses cost $100K or $1 million.