• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: April 20th, 2026

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  • They’re paying for every kilowatt-hour they use, same as us. They are just a different ‘class’ of ratepayer (i.e. a bigger customer). The reason prices go up is not entirely just because of demand, but because there’s not enough supply, and the prices go up to cover for the cost to build it. The way I understand it is that some board has to decide how to distribute the increase in rates across their customers in order to meet the extra revenue, and the higher classes of ratepayers know that if their rate went up, that would be millions lost. So they hire lobbyists to convince the grid company to shift the cost to residential tax payers, and since neither you are me is going to march to the electric company and demand a fairer distribution, they end up shifting ‘some’ of it to us.




  • There was an article I read a while ago that kind of explained it. Basically, the increased datacenter demand forces the grid operator to build more capacity, which requires money. I think there are meetings where they decide how it is distributed across all their corporate and resident ratepayers. Basically the lobbyists argue that the since this new capacity technically benefits rate payers in the form of more capacity, they should take a share of it. Even though none of us are actually going to be using that capacity…

    And it doesn’t help at all that the grid companies are monopolies