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No, it's not. Regulations making building new power plants, especially renewables, and extra especially nuclear, in addition to making power lines difficult to

No, it's not. Regulations making building new power plants, especially renewables, and extra especially nuclear, in addition to making power lines difficult to build, are to blame. Yes, in an environment where power availability is ~fixed on short-to-medium time scales, adding a new large demand will increase prices. But a fixed supply is a policy choice, and is not the fault of AI companies.

triceratops 11mo ago
The headline says "partly". Your comment agrees with that.
- MostlyStable 11mo ago
  I don't even agree with partly. 100% of the blame, in my opinion, is on the policy-caused supply restrictions. I will admit that this is at least partially a semantic debate about what "cause" means, but in my opinion "blaming", even partially, AI, data-centers, or any other large power consumer for the price increases actively makes solving the problem harder and is anti-useful.
  - triceratops 11mo ago
    Why does it make solving the problem harder? If demand went up, it went up so build more supply. Talking about the cause of the demand doesn't hinder building more supply.
  - DangitBobby 11mo ago
    I thought there were technical and logistical hurdles to attaching new power while maintaining grid stability, and that's the primary bottleneck and indeed the reason the regulations exist to being with?
rc5150 11mo ago
"Yes, in an environment where power availability is ~fixed on short-to-medium time scales, adding a new large demand will increase prices." You just nullified your own point.
- MostlyStable 11mo ago
  No, the point of my comment is that, while that is true, that's not the "cause".
  - J_McQuade 11mo ago
    Now assume there were no such regulations and factor in the time it takes to actually plan, build, and commission a new power station and associated grid infrastructure. I'm not sure that your distinction matters in any real way.
    - MostlyStable 11mo ago
      >time it takes to actually plan, build, and commission. This is, currently, mostly regulatory. Yes, in the absence of any regulations at all it would still take time to plan, build, and commission, and I am not advocating for literally no regulations, but solar and wind plants could probably be spun up in well under a year under a dramatically reduced regulatory burden, almost certainly faster than a new Datacenter can be built. They are, after all, dramatically simpler installations. And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades, and the new demand would be a much smaller drop in the much larger bucket. So I think that in an alternate regulatory regime both A) yes actually power plants could built ~ as fast as data centers and other large power consumers and B) we would have so much more power that increases in demand would be less of a shock to the system.
      - giantg2 11mo ago
        "And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades" That would only be true if you could forecast the demand to justify the cost of the new infrastructure. It seems the demand from AI was beyond forecasts. The policies doesnt make the plants impossible to build, just slower. So your argument about continuously building plants is true in our current reality, and those plans include the extra time to comply with policies.
jollyllama 11mo ago
Regulations also made coal more expensive and forced many plants to close. You can argue that's a win, but it's a lie to then attribute the resulting price increase to AI or other factors.
- QuercusMax 11mo ago
  If you're gonna go down that path, then you should blame scaremongering about nuclear power too.
  - jollyllama 11mo ago
    Indeed!
pessimizer 11mo ago
Yes, that's probably what made my electric bill go up 40% since last year.
- triceratops 11mo ago
  Also cancelling previously-approved solar and wind projects due to extremist ideology.
harimau777 11mo ago
Conservatives promoted a worldview where corporations are expected to do absolutely anything that isn't illegal to increase shareholder value. In such a world, regulations are the only way to protect ourselves from corporations that would gladly kill us to make a buck.
- rileymat2 11mo ago
  That’s a bit of an overstatement, the executives and board can and do weight reputational long term damage at times.
  - mikem170 11mo ago
    Seems to be that big companies usually push to externalize costs and take advantage as much as possible, to the detriment of everyone else. Shareholders have a right to sue them if they don't. Fake cures, filthy mines, toxic ingredients, polluted waterways, fraud, predation, monopolies, algorithmic social outrage networks, etc. These things have been going on for a long time. Regulations have fixed a lot of problems. It doesn't seem that reputation matters as much as regulation. It doesn't take many greedy people/companies to leave behind a big mess. Just a few breaking the rules (including the cultural rules around reputation) gain an advantage over all those who don't. What better way for society to protect itself?
  - daveguy 11mo ago
    The executives are trying to maximize shareholder value. They are shareholders through options at the least. The board can also own shares (which should be illegal).
    - triceratops 11mo ago
      The executives are trying to make more money. They get paid in shares so making the share price go up makes them more money. Whether or not the means used to achieve that end are beneficial to other shareholders is beside the point. This is potentially a violation of fiduciary duty.
ajkjk 11mo ago
it's to blame in the sense that there is a counterfactual reality where the AI companies pay for their own power and your bill doesn't go up and we can pass a law to make that counterfactual real. but yeah, blame is supposed to be about assigning responsibility. the change is attributed to AI in the sense that if they didn't exist it wouldn't have gone up, but technically the responsibility here is on policymakers to do something now that we are aware of the attribution, and they deserve to be blamed if they don't. blaming AI companies directly is a contemptuous mindset that blames them basically just for existing. which might be cathartic but it's not useful.
- richwater 11mo ago
  Why is AI demand any different than other business demand? What you're advocating for is intentionally handcuffing a growing industry for no reason other than you don't like them.
  - daveguy 11mo ago
    Any industry that stresses public infrastructure is in the same category. They all should be regulated and not handed, in the form of tax breaks, what should be public money to invest in additional infrastructure.
  - delusional 11mo ago
    the "growing industry" can pay for itself.
  - otikik 11mo ago
    Crypto mining was similar
  - ajkjk 11mo ago
    because they're driving up electric prices disproportionately... the argument is to handcuff them because of the externalities. which is one of the things laws are for. It's not about fairness it's about whether this is the world we want to live in. The market was designed a certain way; the design stops benefitting the public the way it should; so update the design, easy.
jasonsb 11mo ago
100% this. I'm sick and tired of alarmist news and scapegoats when politicians and greedy energy corporations are to blame for everything. Yes, AI consumes more energy because we're using AI so by this logic we are to blame for everything.
- floundy 11mo ago
  If these "greedy utility companies" were such good monopolists or duopolists wouldn't it reflect in some pretty insane stock performance? Eversource (NYSE: ES) is my local electric/natural gas provider in Massachusetts that I hear these same arguments about. Their stock is down 21% over the past 5 years. (To contrast, the S&P500 is up 91% over this same timeframe).)
hdgvhicv 11mo ago
Demand added now Ignore regulations, make it the Wild West, break out the child labour and environmental destruction and all your other wet dreams. How long will it take to increase supply?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
  New generation could be deployed on the same timelines as a data center.
Babkock 11mo ago
AI has done bad things for humanity. I know, I know, a tough pill to swallow. However will Hacker News users cope with the trauma?? Of knowing... AI... can be bad... sometimes?
lukan 11mo ago
"and extra especially nuclear, in addition to making power lines difficult to build, are to blame" I used to think nuclear reactors are just hard to build in general, because the costs when something goes wrong are very, very high. So what unnecessary regulation is there with nuclear reactors that you think should be deleted?
- bpodgursky 11mo ago
  I'm sorry but this is the easiest thing to google in history, don't make people do the work for you. Start here: 1. How many new nuclear power plants has the NRC approved in its entire history (since being formed from the AEC)? 2. What's the cost of a nuclear kw in China vs the US, and is the trend going up or going down?
  - dghlsakjg 11mo ago
    Neither of those questions will answer what GP was asking. Specifically: they were asking the opinion of the commenter. Google won't help here.
  - hitarpetar 11mo ago
    if your best argument is just "Google it" I'm gonna go ahead and assume you don't know what you're talking about and are just making an appeal to authority
- MostlyStable 11mo ago
  This is a much larger discussion, but the single most obvious one is getting rid of the Linear No Dose Threshold. There are an abundance of sources on why this concept is flawed and how it impacts nuclear regulation. It's not the only issue by far, but it's probably the single easiest to address.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    In other words, allow higher exposure to ratiation? Does not sound too great and obvious to me to be honest and it seems debated in the scientific community. So irrational fear of radiation is surely a thing and maybe the models as to when real danger starts can be updated, but I would not call that question obvious when the experts debate it and I ain't one.
charliebwrites 11mo ago
What are the specific regulations that make building new power plants hard?
bryanlarsen 11mo ago
Removing regulations from nuclear won't help because it takes so long to build a nuclear plant. Yes it would help in the long term, but in the short term price goes up. However it should be faster to build a solar plant, a battery bank and a power line between them and the new data center than it takes to build a new data center. It isn't because of silliness, and that's what to blame for the power price increases IMO.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Removing regulations 20 years ago when people were screaming that we need to would have helped. 20 years ago nuclear was still the best answer, but since it wasn't allowed we didn't build it (instead mostly coal and gas). Power companies are good at planning, and AI/data centers are not using that much more power than predicted 5 years ago - but the regulations have to allow for plans. Removing regulations today will have an effect in 10-20 years. I cannot give you a quick answer to the problem.
rurp 11mo ago
So supply and demand only matter for the axis you personally care about? AI companies use a lot of electricity. Increased demand leads to increased prices. This isn't normally controversial.
potato3732842 11mo ago
Even with prolific supply there's tons of government programs that subsidize things and then roll those things back into delivery and transmission costs. The poors pay for rooftop solar and heat pump subsidies for HNers.
tzs 11mo ago
So the reason my electricity rates were pretty much constant from 2013 to 2023 and then started going up is not the things that have changed in the last couple or so years but rather the things that have not changed?

triceratops 11mo ago

The headline says "partly". Your comment agrees with that.

MostlyStable 11mo ago
I don't even agree with partly. 100% of the blame, in my opinion, is on the policy-caused supply restrictions. I will admit that this is at least partially a semantic debate about what "cause" means, but in my opinion "blaming", even partially, AI, data-centers, or any other large power consumer for the price increases actively makes solving the problem harder and is anti-useful.
- triceratops 11mo ago
  Why does it make solving the problem harder? If demand went up, it went up so build more supply. Talking about the cause of the demand doesn't hinder building more supply.
- DangitBobby 11mo ago
  I thought there were technical and logistical hurdles to attaching new power while maintaining grid stability, and that's the primary bottleneck and indeed the reason the regulations exist to being with?

rc5150 11mo ago

"Yes, in an environment where power availability is ~fixed on short-to-medium time scales, adding a new large demand will increase prices." You just nullified your own point.

MostlyStable 11mo ago
No, the point of my comment is that, while that is true, that's not the "cause".
- J_McQuade 11mo ago
  Now assume there were no such regulations and factor in the time it takes to actually plan, build, and commission a new power station and associated grid infrastructure. I'm not sure that your distinction matters in any real way.
  - MostlyStable 11mo ago
    >time it takes to actually plan, build, and commission. This is, currently, mostly regulatory. Yes, in the absence of any regulations at all it would still take time to plan, build, and commission, and I am not advocating for literally no regulations, but solar and wind plants could probably be spun up in well under a year under a dramatically reduced regulatory burden, almost certainly faster than a new Datacenter can be built. They are, after all, dramatically simpler installations. And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades, and the new demand would be a much smaller drop in the much larger bucket. So I think that in an alternate regulatory regime both A) yes actually power plants could built ~ as fast as data centers and other large power consumers and B) we would have so much more power that increases in demand would be less of a shock to the system.
    - giantg2 11mo ago
      "And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades" That would only be true if you could forecast the demand to justify the cost of the new infrastructure. It seems the demand from AI was beyond forecasts. The policies doesnt make the plants impossible to build, just slower. So your argument about continuously building plants is true in our current reality, and those plans include the extra time to comply with policies.

jollyllama 11mo ago

Regulations also made coal more expensive and forced many plants to close. You can argue that's a win, but it's a lie to then attribute the resulting price increase to AI or other factors.

QuercusMax 11mo ago
If you're gonna go down that path, then you should blame scaremongering about nuclear power too.
- jollyllama 11mo ago
  Indeed!

pessimizer 11mo ago

Yes, that's probably what made my electric bill go up 40% since last year.

triceratops 11mo ago
Also cancelling previously-approved solar and wind projects due to extremist ideology.

harimau777 11mo ago

Conservatives promoted a worldview where corporations are expected to do absolutely anything that isn't illegal to increase shareholder value. In such a world, regulations are the only way to protect ourselves from corporations that would gladly kill us to make a buck.

rileymat2 11mo ago
That’s a bit of an overstatement, the executives and board can and do weight reputational long term damage at times.
- mikem170 11mo ago
  Seems to be that big companies usually push to externalize costs and take advantage as much as possible, to the detriment of everyone else. Shareholders have a right to sue them if they don't. Fake cures, filthy mines, toxic ingredients, polluted waterways, fraud, predation, monopolies, algorithmic social outrage networks, etc. These things have been going on for a long time. Regulations have fixed a lot of problems. It doesn't seem that reputation matters as much as regulation. It doesn't take many greedy people/companies to leave behind a big mess. Just a few breaking the rules (including the cultural rules around reputation) gain an advantage over all those who don't. What better way for society to protect itself?
- daveguy 11mo ago
  The executives are trying to maximize shareholder value. They are shareholders through options at the least. The board can also own shares (which should be illegal).
  - triceratops 11mo ago
    The executives are trying to make more money. They get paid in shares so making the share price go up makes them more money. Whether or not the means used to achieve that end are beneficial to other shareholders is beside the point. This is potentially a violation of fiduciary duty.

ajkjk 11mo ago

it's to blame in the sense that there is a counterfactual reality where the AI companies pay for their own power and your bill doesn't go up and we can pass a law to make that counterfactual real. but yeah, blame is supposed to be about assigning responsibility. the change is attributed to AI in the sense that if they didn't exist it wouldn't have gone up, but technically the responsibility here is on policymakers to do something now that we are aware of the attribution, and they deserve to be blamed if they don't. blaming AI companies directly is a contemptuous mindset that blames them basically just for existing. which might be cathartic but it's not useful.

richwater 11mo ago
Why is AI demand any different than other business demand? What you're advocating for is intentionally handcuffing a growing industry for no reason other than you don't like them.
- daveguy 11mo ago
  Any industry that stresses public infrastructure is in the same category. They all should be regulated and not handed, in the form of tax breaks, what should be public money to invest in additional infrastructure.
- delusional 11mo ago
  the "growing industry" can pay for itself.
- otikik 11mo ago
  Crypto mining was similar
- ajkjk 11mo ago
  because they're driving up electric prices disproportionately... the argument is to handcuff them because of the externalities. which is one of the things laws are for. It's not about fairness it's about whether this is the world we want to live in. The market was designed a certain way; the design stops benefitting the public the way it should; so update the design, easy.

jasonsb 11mo ago

100% this. I'm sick and tired of alarmist news and scapegoats when politicians and greedy energy corporations are to blame for everything. Yes, AI consumes more energy because we're using AI so by this logic we are to blame for everything.

floundy 11mo ago
If these "greedy utility companies" were such good monopolists or duopolists wouldn't it reflect in some pretty insane stock performance? Eversource (NYSE: ES) is my local electric/natural gas provider in Massachusetts that I hear these same arguments about. Their stock is down 21% over the past 5 years. (To contrast, the S&P500 is up 91% over this same timeframe).)

hdgvhicv 11mo ago

Demand added now Ignore regulations, make it the Wild West, break out the child labour and environmental destruction and all your other wet dreams. How long will it take to increase supply?

ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
New generation could be deployed on the same timelines as a data center.

Babkock 11mo ago

AI has done bad things for humanity. I know, I know, a tough pill to swallow. However will Hacker News users cope with the trauma?? Of knowing... AI... can be bad... sometimes?

lukan 11mo ago

"and extra especially nuclear, in addition to making power lines difficult to build, are to blame" I used to think nuclear reactors are just hard to build in general, because the costs when something goes wrong are very, very high. So what unnecessary regulation is there with nuclear reactors that you think should be deleted?

bpodgursky 11mo ago
I'm sorry but this is the easiest thing to google in history, don't make people do the work for you. Start here: 1. How many new nuclear power plants has the NRC approved in its entire history (since being formed from the AEC)? 2. What's the cost of a nuclear kw in China vs the US, and is the trend going up or going down?
- dghlsakjg 11mo ago
  Neither of those questions will answer what GP was asking. Specifically: they were asking the opinion of the commenter. Google won't help here.
- hitarpetar 11mo ago
  if your best argument is just "Google it" I'm gonna go ahead and assume you don't know what you're talking about and are just making an appeal to authority
MostlyStable 11mo ago
This is a much larger discussion, but the single most obvious one is getting rid of the Linear No Dose Threshold. There are an abundance of sources on why this concept is flawed and how it impacts nuclear regulation. It's not the only issue by far, but it's probably the single easiest to address.
- lukan 11mo ago
  In other words, allow higher exposure to ratiation? Does not sound too great and obvious to me to be honest and it seems debated in the scientific community. So irrational fear of radiation is surely a thing and maybe the models as to when real danger starts can be updated, but I would not call that question obvious when the experts debate it and I ain't one.

charliebwrites 11mo ago

What are the specific regulations that make building new power plants hard?

bryanlarsen 11mo ago

Removing regulations from nuclear won't help because it takes so long to build a nuclear plant. Yes it would help in the long term, but in the short term price goes up. However it should be faster to build a solar plant, a battery bank and a power line between them and the new data center than it takes to build a new data center. It isn't because of silliness, and that's what to blame for the power price increases IMO.

bluGill 11mo ago
Removing regulations 20 years ago when people were screaming that we need to would have helped. 20 years ago nuclear was still the best answer, but since it wasn't allowed we didn't build it (instead mostly coal and gas). Power companies are good at planning, and AI/data centers are not using that much more power than predicted 5 years ago - but the regulations have to allow for plans. Removing regulations today will have an effect in 10-20 years. I cannot give you a quick answer to the problem.

rurp 11mo ago

So supply and demand only matter for the axis you personally care about? AI companies use a lot of electricity. Increased demand leads to increased prices. This isn't normally controversial.

potato3732842 11mo ago

Even with prolific supply there's tons of government programs that subsidize things and then roll those things back into delivery and transmission costs. The poors pay for rooftop solar and heat pump subsidies for HNers.

tzs 11mo ago

So the reason my electricity rates were pretty much constant from 2013 to 2023 and then started going up is not the things that have changed in the last couple or so years but rather the things that have not changed?