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>Data centers should be required to provide their own power, like this datacenter [1] in Ireland Data Centers should buy power at whatever the going rate of el

>Data centers should be required to provide their own power, like this datacenter [1] in Ireland Data Centers should buy power at whatever the going rate of electricity is. It is advantageous for some data centers to build their own power, but its not the norm nor should any industry be required to. Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail? Just because an industry that uses power has become the enemy of the week doesnt exclude them from market access. That should be obvious. >A bigger problem, however, is that this requires functional government working in the interests of its residents. It requires governments reacting to random populist impulses that don't fundamentally aid the community to ban random industries from the grid. Why not pressure the government to react to power price increases with additional supply like anyone who spends 20 seconds considering this issue would come up with?

freetime2 5mo ago
> Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail? Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else.
- protocolture 5mo ago
  >Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else. Common utilities are common to everyone. Signing a contract for supply of power is what they should be doing. The only "negative externality" is that extra supply might, in whatever jurisdiction this is, not be brought online as demand increases. That's a feature of however your polity has designed their power market. The "negative externality" was brought into existence when that system was designed. The same effects occur regardless of who purchases the power, including residences. Not to mention that, it literally benefits you to have this generation on grid, instead of running privately where only the datacentre can access it. Growing the common utility is better than demanding the monster of the week goes off and sources their own generation. Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today.
  - freetime2 5mo ago
    > Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today. No - it's a real problem: > While hyperscale data centers can be built within 18 to 24 months, high-voltage transmission upgrades often require 7 to 10 years to plan, approve, and construct. As such, data centers are depleting available grid capacity faster than it can be physically replaced. As new generation sources can spend 4 to 5 years in interconnection queues before coming online, shrinking reserve margins (or the quantity of power that operators use to absorb system shocks and maintain reliability) cannot be replenished fast enough to meet demand. As reserve margins shrink, the grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to shortages and instability. [1] Data centers place vastly different demands on a grid than residences, and it's a bit silly to suggest that they should be treated the same by utilities: > For decades, the U.S. electricity system experienced gradual, diversified, and relatively predictable demand growth. This environment influenced how grid forecasting methods, reliability standards, and cost-allocation mechanisms were designed. However, data centers are now entering the electricity system faster and at a larger scale than planning, regulatory, and market-based institutions can manage. To be clear I'm not saying that data centers must be off grid. Just that they should not be permitted to destabilize energy markets where they are built. To this end, Texas and Viginia are passing laws that require large-load customers to fund the increased generation and transmission costs: > To manage price increases and allocative risk, Dominion proposed the GS-5 “High Load” tariff, which would apply to customers with at least 25 MW of demand. Under the tariff, large customers would pay a greater share of the generation, transmission, and distribution investments needed to serve large loads (such as data centers). Although large customers already pay for some on-site connection facilities, the proposed GS-5 tariff would go a step further. For example, if Dominion must build a dedicated substation or high-voltage line to serve a GS-5 campus, the infrastructure would be treated as customer-specific, and their costs recovered from the high-load customer instead of through general rates. This is a reasonable approach to me. Although in some cases it might actually be quicker and cheaper for data centers to just handle their own power generation (as was the case with that data center in Ireland) separate from the grid. [1] https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-texas-virginia-comparison https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-...
ben_w 5mo ago
> Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail? Onion Futures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act There's lots of things where it's not particularly difficult for very rich groups, sometimes even very rich individuals, to be able to afford so much of a thing that by buying it they damage opportunities for everyone else. This is a known limitation of the free market, and why almost nowhere is actually a perfectly free market, only more or less free.
- protocolture 5mo ago
  > to be able to afford so much of a thing that by buying it they damage opportunities I dont see the relevance. Like we aren't talking about a rich person buying batteries to just hoard electricity. Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products. If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers. The Peoples Data Centre requires just as much electricity as a private one.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    > Like we aren't talking about a rich person buying batteries to just hoard electricity. We're talking about them raising electricity prices and cutting off domestic users: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-... and https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/ai-data-center-frenzy-is-pushing-up-your-electric-bill-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/ai-data-center-frenzy-is-pus... > Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products. Most of the world's aluminium, by a large margin, comes from China; my understanding is that they had the de-facto planning permission requirement to have a direct connection to a non-grid electricity supply for much of their growth era. Furthermore, to the point of "people benefit": the US has tariffs on Chinese aluminium (and PV, EVs), supposedly because the Chinese government was distorting the market. Saying "people benefit" doesn't mean there's no market distortion going on. > If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers Or just close down; it wouldn't be the first time the US had ghost towns when businesses fail. In the meantime, sudden unexpected higher energy bills. Conversely, if AI does what it promises to do, replace human labour, the new equilibrium of electricity prices* is whatever balances human and AI productivity. Depending on how much compute this needs, and how much electricity this compute needs, and how fast new power supplies can be built and at what cost, this can be anything including driving electricity prices up far beyond the point where normal people can afford to keep their refrigerators running**. I'm lucky enough to live in a different continent and enjoy both cheap plug-and-play PV and also the output of these data centres without the higher energy bills; but even I can see this is a massive market distortion, one affecting multiple levels of which domestic electricity is simply the top level of this increasingly suspicious Jenga tower. I wonder how much further it will go before it collapses? * and human wages, but that's a different topic. ** or may force humans to accept lower and lower wages until they not only can't pay for refrigerators, or indeed rent, but also food and literally starve; but again, different topic.

freetime2 5mo ago

> Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail? Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else.

protocolture 5mo ago
>Yes I would say any large construction project that carries a risk of negatively impacting its community should be required to mitigate those issues in order to gain approval. Otherwise you are just passing on those negative "externalities" to someone else. Common utilities are common to everyone. Signing a contract for supply of power is what they should be doing. The only "negative externality" is that extra supply might, in whatever jurisdiction this is, not be brought online as demand increases. That's a feature of however your polity has designed their power market. The "negative externality" was brought into existence when that system was designed. The same effects occur regardless of who purchases the power, including residences. Not to mention that, it literally benefits you to have this generation on grid, instead of running privately where only the datacentre can access it. Growing the common utility is better than demanding the monster of the week goes off and sources their own generation. Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today.
- freetime2 5mo ago
  > Dress it up in whatever language you want but this is just populism, trying to punish whatever the media has made you angry at today. No - it's a real problem: > While hyperscale data centers can be built within 18 to 24 months, high-voltage transmission upgrades often require 7 to 10 years to plan, approve, and construct. As such, data centers are depleting available grid capacity faster than it can be physically replaced. As new generation sources can spend 4 to 5 years in interconnection queues before coming online, shrinking reserve margins (or the quantity of power that operators use to absorb system shocks and maintain reliability) cannot be replenished fast enough to meet demand. As reserve margins shrink, the grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to shortages and instability. [1] Data centers place vastly different demands on a grid than residences, and it's a bit silly to suggest that they should be treated the same by utilities: > For decades, the U.S. electricity system experienced gradual, diversified, and relatively predictable demand growth. This environment influenced how grid forecasting methods, reliability standards, and cost-allocation mechanisms were designed. However, data centers are now entering the electricity system faster and at a larger scale than planning, regulatory, and market-based institutions can manage. To be clear I'm not saying that data centers must be off grid. Just that they should not be permitted to destabilize energy markets where they are built. To this end, Texas and Viginia are passing laws that require large-load customers to fund the increased generation and transmission costs: > To manage price increases and allocative risk, Dominion proposed the GS-5 “High Load” tariff, which would apply to customers with at least 25 MW of demand. Under the tariff, large customers would pay a greater share of the generation, transmission, and distribution investments needed to serve large loads (such as data centers). Although large customers already pay for some on-site connection facilities, the proposed GS-5 tariff would go a step further. For example, if Dominion must build a dedicated substation or high-voltage line to serve a GS-5 campus, the infrastructure would be treated as customer-specific, and their costs recovered from the high-load customer instead of through general rates. This is a reasonable approach to me. Although in some cases it might actually be quicker and cheaper for data centers to just handle their own power generation (as was the case with that data center in Ireland) separate from the grid. [1] https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-texas-virginia-comparison https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/data-centers-...

ben_w 5mo ago

> Whats next Aluminium smelting? Oil production? Big box retail? Onion Futures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act There's lots of things where it's not particularly difficult for very rich groups, sometimes even very rich individuals, to be able to afford so much of a thing that by buying it they damage opportunities for everyone else. This is a known limitation of the free market, and why almost nowhere is actually a perfectly free market, only more or less free.

protocolture 5mo ago
> to be able to afford so much of a thing that by buying it they damage opportunities I dont see the relevance. Like we aren't talking about a rich person buying batteries to just hoard electricity. Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products. If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers. The Peoples Data Centre requires just as much electricity as a private one.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  > Like we aren't talking about a rich person buying batteries to just hoard electricity. We're talking about them raising electricity prices and cutting off domestic users: https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-... and https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/ai-data-center-frenzy-is-pushing-up-your-electric-bill-heres-why.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/ai-data-center-frenzy-is-pus... > Presumably people benefit from telecommunications and aluminum products. Most of the world's aluminium, by a large margin, comes from China; my understanding is that they had the de-facto planning permission requirement to have a direct connection to a non-grid electricity supply for much of their growth era. Furthermore, to the point of "people benefit": the US has tariffs on Chinese aluminium (and PV, EVs), supposedly because the Chinese government was distorting the market. Saying "people benefit" doesn't mean there's no market distortion going on. > If AI fails to prove itself, these datacenters are going to find other customers Or just close down; it wouldn't be the first time the US had ghost towns when businesses fail. In the meantime, sudden unexpected higher energy bills. Conversely, if AI does what it promises to do, replace human labour, the new equilibrium of electricity prices* is whatever balances human and AI productivity. Depending on how much compute this needs, and how much electricity this compute needs, and how fast new power supplies can be built and at what cost, this can be anything including driving electricity prices up far beyond the point where normal people can afford to keep their refrigerators running**. I'm lucky enough to live in a different continent and enjoy both cheap plug-and-play PV and also the output of these data centres without the higher energy bills; but even I can see this is a massive market distortion, one affecting multiple levels of which domestic electricity is simply the top level of this increasingly suspicious Jenga tower. I wonder how much further it will go before it collapses? * and human wages, but that's a different topic. ** or may force humans to accept lower and lower wages until they not only can't pay for refrigerators, or indeed rent, but also food and literally starve; but again, different topic.