alt Hacker NewsThe main problem identified in this article is cost allocation, not rate of deployment. Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth. Speeding up permitting would simply accelerate this subsidy to data centers, with households paying even more, sooner.
Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years. The problem is that capex deployed to serve data centers is being paid for by households, not that it cannot be deployed.
Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear price increase there from data centers.
The bill you cited would fix much of this, but it would do so via provisions forcing data centers to pay for the costs they cause, instead of forcing households to subsidize them.
If your point is “it’s policy,” fine. But the policy causing this is cost allocation, not permitting.
Your comment doesn’t engage with the article’s central finding at all: who pays.
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> Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth.
That's not what the article is describing.
What's happening is that price is used suppress demand during the period between when demand increases and when supply responds. That isn't the cost of increasing supply, it's the cost of not having it already. Which is why you want to cause the period between the one and the other to be as short as possible.
> Your claim that supply is effectively fixed also seems false. Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
The claim that supply is fixed is "false" in the sense that it isn't literally impossible to add new supply. It is, however, much more difficult than it could or should be, which makes the investment cost more and take longer than it otherwise would, and in the meantime people are paying higher prices.
Moreover, "17x" doesn't really mean anything when the base rate started so close to zero. We've been deterring these investments for far too long.
> Real-world data also cuts against you. New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure, yet the study found no clear price increase there from data centers.
New York and New England are among the hardest places in the country to build energy infrastructure which is why the price of electricity there is already high and then you don't get increased demand in the place with high prices since the high prices shift the demand to other locations.
That's not a useful strategy if you want lower prices since the prices are only not going up there because they're already up there.
> Your comment doesn’t engage with the article’s central finding at all: who pays.
We need to distinguish two things here.
The first is, who pays for the actual long-term costs of increasing generation. But that's easy, because that cost isn't actually that high. It's equivalent to the normal pre-existing price of electricity. It might even be less because e.g. solar has gotten pretty cheap and to the extent that you add that, the average generation cost would even go down.
The second is, what happens during the period between when the new demand comes online and when the new generation comes online? But having new data centers "pay" that to keep the short-term price of electricity from going up is not possible, because having the short-term price go up is the thing that suppresses the short-term demand to keep it from exceeding supply. If the price didn't go up in the interim then the demand at the lower price would exceed available supply.
Which brings us back to, what you need is to bring the new generation online as quickly as possible.
In this case the other 62% is only $5.1 billion, which averages out to about $15 per person across the US. Since this is reflected in wholesale electricity prices I assume it is even enough that after accounting for unequal impact, it still isn't that high. It seems like a problem, but not a major one.
> Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth.
Data centers pay for electricity under the tariffs utilities charge them. To the extent their demand increases wholesale electricity prices, it's the normal consequence of additional demand competing for constrained supply. In no other market is it standard for the person outbidding to also pay for continuing to provide the service to the person who was outbid. The only reason there is much incremental grid cost is because utilities are legally required to continue serving their residential customers. It seems extremely reasonable for residences to share in some of these costs when getting electricity at a significant discount from market price.
The notion that 'households' are paying for data center electricity is just not what is happening. Maybe residences should get discounted electricity, but again this is a policy question and I'm not sure the best use of the marginal federal dollar.
> Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years.
Investment is not transmission built, I don't see how this disproves the well-documented countrywide transmission delays. If anything, it is an indication that we are transmission bottlenecked.