This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.
If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
I work in industrial manufacturing and automation, several of my customers (those running steel foundries, aluminum die casting, plastic recycling and extrusion, and other power-intensive processes) represent a sizeable fraction of the utility usage in the small towns in which they're located.
They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.
Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?
It’s a hard to answer because each grid will treat it differently. My own experience when trying to track some of this data down, DCs are largely having to do the same and that’s why a lot of the buildout includes behind the meter generation to make up for it.
There is not a good picture in aggregate though so it creates all kinds of narratives.
So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.
It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.
It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.
(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])
Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
Agreed that in some situations, on some US electric grids (ISOs/TSOs), data centers are absorbing their electrical supply costs that would otherwise be externalities. This is good, I fully support this. This is not uniform unfortunately, and remains to be solved for in totality imho. I take no issue if we get to a point where the AI bubble pops and we're left with net new electrical infrastructure that continues to provide benefit decades into the future while the data centers sit silent (similar to the "fiber boom bust glut" at the turn of the century). I take issue with the AI bubble costs being pushed citizens already, broadly speaking, unable to make ends meet merely out of a desire to speculate (and no one can be sure how long this exuberance and hype cycle is going to last; as long as it lasts, humans who need electricity at a reasonable cost are at risk).
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
Do you have evidence that they are the problem. The research suggests otherwise. From some of the regional grids I have looked at the bigger problem has been lack of continued investment in transmission and generation. Even now I see so much push back for solar farms. People are their own worst enemy.
In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.
The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.
Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.
To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.
I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason.
We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
>Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge jump in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
Thank you this. Super helpful. There were so many articles and most of them did not mention price I skipped through it aggressively.
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
I only skimmed because what I saw was either no evidence or low. They to touched on demand but not immediately the correlation to price which is hard to connect without supply and other mechanics that go into different electric grid geographies. This feels very similar to the water argument or the anti-solar farm crowd. Lots of emotions and not as many facts. I am going to lean on the original research link.
No worries, voters are engaged so I am not concerned. Data centers are a third rail in politics at the moment. I encourage politicians and lobbyists to voice their support so we know who they are, as elections have consequences.
Why would anyone be worried? I was asking for actual science behind your claims. If you cannot it’s ok, just cements my thinking similar to the water claims people like to make. It’s the modern hysteria.
My mental model of HN is there is a subset of forum participants who either don't believe the impact data centers are causing, or simply don't care. I’m not here to change hearts or minds (mental models are rigid, humans are emotion vs data driven); only to share data, and consume data.
I believe the data shows data centers to have an outsized impact on the costs discussed. Others may disagree, but the facts are the facts, especially if we're asking schools to conserve power while serving data center loads (per this post and related thread). That is not a fact in support of "data center power consumption is not of material concern, and does not require potential regulatory intervention." Quote the opposite (again, imho). If data centers do not have enough power, the solution is simple; force them to load shed and operate dynamically based on the remaining power available to them until more power is brought online.
Again, show one critical research paper that draws a solid link towards data centers and price increases. You linked to so many articles, many of which just spoke on demand increases. I absolutely believe that in some grids, data centers have driven some of the increase but you claiming that data centers are the only problem reads like those folks scared of solar farms being built.
Just because you want to believe it does not make it true. You are claiming it’s 100% the reason and I am suggesting it’s probably part of it but unclear if it’s 5% or 90%.
So far, the data are clear--data centers are not increasing electricity rates. Those are the facts. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/the-numb... This may change in the future, but so far, there is no statistically significant correlation.
Not only that, but states with increasing electricity consumption have lower rates. So it's possible data center will lead to lower rates.
> IER is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. The Institute's CEO and founder, Robert L. Bradley Jr., is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and Energy & Climate Change Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. He has written eight books, including Energy: The Master Resource; Climate Alarmism Reconsidered; and Edison to Enron.
> Overall, we rate the Institute for Energy Research as Right Biased due to its strong advocacy for fossil fuel expansion and deregulation, aligning with free-market conservative energy policies. We rate its reporting as Mixed for factual accuracy, as it does not always align with the consensus of science by selectively presenting data that favors fossil fuels while downplaying or omitting information on climate change and renewable energy viability. IER is a nonprofit organization that does not fully disclose its funding sources. However, past reports indicate financial ties to fossil fuel interests, including donations from ExxonMobil and groups associated with Charles Koch—a key funder of climate-skeptical and free-market advocacy. While the institute claims to support “energy freedom,” its funding sources suggest a strong alignment with the fossil fuel industry.
(I've forwarded your IER citation to a data science practitioner in the energy space to decompose, more to come)
Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")
No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")
> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.
> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.
> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.
> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.
(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)
I am not suggesting that data centers or any load growth for that matter have no impact on prices but rather challenging the idea than data centers are the primary/only reason certain regions have had price increases. Most of the shared links focus on PJM which imo has a flawed auction model that requires 3 year forecasts that nobody would expect to get correct. But it makes for sensational journalism because you can show pictures of data centers up against homes.
I have yet to see any strong research showing a correlation to data center growth and price increases. If you have any beyond a gut feeling I would love to read!
The county narrative is cherry picking imo and poor journalism. They are part of PJM which contains one of the largest data centers hubs. The PJM grid serves something like 67mm residents. PJM also uses an annual forward capacity auction to set prices and that is at least partly to blame in price increases. They are trying to forecast peak demand 3 years in advance to set a price for power plant owners to stay online in the event of needing that peak capacity. It’s poorly designed and why they have had such significant spikes there.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!
Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".
Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
While that is an interesting issue to deal with, I was totally lost at the concept of not saving before going home. I can't go five minutes without saving, and you were willing to leave the "room" without saving? That's just one of those things so outside my normal that I got lost in thinking about it especially as matter of fact as it was recited. You live in a different realm my friend.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
How about just forget about this thread and don’t let it be a major annoyance. It’s a very minor annoyance. It would be a more widespread debate/discussion if so many people were upset by it. At the least, just admit you’re in the minority that are so upset by it and then just live with it anyways.
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
I am certainly in the minority and I do live with it.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
If you’re a cost conscious manufacturer, I think you could do it very cheaply these days (cents/unit). The problem is most manufacturers would turn this into a full blown AI capable smart device to justify charging a lot more.
There's something to be said about having lights on in a room that is not occupied the entire time the lights are on. Before LED lighting, it was a decent attempt at reducing unnecessary lighting.
Assume that each workstation is lit by 100W of lighting and is vacant 18 hours per day (to make the math easy).
I claim that's 75W of power that could be reclaimed by turning off a 100W load 75% of the time. Explain how you get to energy or how I dropped time, please.
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that.
https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
I'm confused as to why they've allowed the data center power drain (which they knew was going to happen) to cascade into consumer power prices. Surely they should be charging consumers their existing price and charging the data centers an increased price based on their massive usage.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
You're confused why neoliberals want to give out more corporate welfare over helping citizens material needs?
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
Enron managed to mangle/free-marketize California's electricity system. Utilities have to purchase electricity at market prices on an exchange that Enron built.
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
This is insane reporting. Their own article says the data center buildout happened in 2017. The article they link about it says the same thing. And so rate changes now - in 2026, nearly a full decade after those DCs were built out - are somehow the fault of the measly 37 datacenters there? They don't even say that outright - they're just insinuating this from the title and wording in the artcile to be sneaky about it. This is garbage! They just put "$current_thing bad" in the headline and nobody's really checking that they're straight up lying by omission!
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
“Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight. Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.
$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency
This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.
If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
I'm surprised that the 404 Media article does not mention anything about this. At least, searching for the word "Clean" did not return any results.
Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
I work in industrial manufacturing and automation, several of my customers (those running steel foundries, aluminum die casting, plastic recycling and extrusion, and other power-intensive processes) represent a sizeable fraction of the utility usage in the small towns in which they're located.
They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.
Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?
It’s a hard to answer because each grid will treat it differently. My own experience when trying to track some of this data down, DCs are largely having to do the same and that’s why a lot of the buildout includes behind the meter generation to make up for it.
There is not a good picture in aggregate though so it creates all kinds of narratives.
The gas-powered generators are what makes a data center unpleasant to live by.
A lot of the problem right now is simply that new massive data centers are crying about being forced to.... pay their fair way.
They are mad that they aren't getting special treatment. They want to be treated better than the aluminum smelting plant.
So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.
It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.
It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.
(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])
Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
Agreed that in some situations, on some US electric grids (ISOs/TSOs), data centers are absorbing their electrical supply costs that would otherwise be externalities. This is good, I fully support this. This is not uniform unfortunately, and remains to be solved for in totality imho. I take no issue if we get to a point where the AI bubble pops and we're left with net new electrical infrastructure that continues to provide benefit decades into the future while the data centers sit silent (similar to the "fiber boom bust glut" at the turn of the century). I take issue with the AI bubble costs being pushed citizens already, broadly speaking, unable to make ends meet merely out of a desire to speculate (and no one can be sure how long this exuberance and hype cycle is going to last; as long as it lasts, humans who need electricity at a reasonable cost are at risk).
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
Do you have evidence that they are the problem. The research suggests otherwise. From some of the regional grids I have looked at the bigger problem has been lack of continued investment in transmission and generation. Even now I see so much push back for solar farms. People are their own worst enemy.
In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
Residential energy reduction is one small piece of it.
The de-industrializing of the US is a much larger reason we have been able to use cheap parlor tricks vs. actually building things for the past 40ish years.
Those cheap tricks are now running out of easy gains, and the chickens are coming home to roost. At some point you run out of your grandfathers investment into future society and basic infrastructure.
To anyone paying attention to it, this problem has been a slow moving disaster for decades. It’s effectively impossible to build net new generation or large scale transmission upgrades on any reasonable timeframe or budget. Even getting a wind farm in the south end of my state interconnected to the load center metro area in the central part of the state has been over a decade so far and no ground actually broken. Just constant NIMBY.
I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"
Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.
And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.
In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.
Agree! My wish is that instead of focusing purely on demand (it’s kind of hard to disaggregate) we refocus on figuring out how to renew generation efforts and updating our transmission. I have seen the same exact issue locally. Large solar farms tens of miles away from civilization in pure farm land that get pushed back on for no good reason.
We have gotten lucky and lazy for the past few decades.
The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677039 - June 2026
Gartner Says Data Center Electricity Consumption to Grow 26% in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665985 - June 2026
Nobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662607 - June 2026
Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637512 - June 2026
Datacenter boom keeps dirty coal plants alive in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465092 - June 2026
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447122 - June 2026
A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439 - June 2026
Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401477 - June 2026
The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366144 - June 2026
Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361555 - June 2026
Tracking at:
https://aidatacentermap.org/
https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/
>The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677039 - June 2026
The article says
>Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge jump in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEHF01
Thank you this. Super helpful. There were so many articles and most of them did not mention price I skipped through it aggressively.
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
I only skimmed because what I saw was either no evidence or low. They to touched on demand but not immediately the correlation to price which is hard to connect without supply and other mechanics that go into different electric grid geographies. This feels very similar to the water argument or the anti-solar farm crowd. Lots of emotions and not as many facts. I am going to lean on the original research link.
No worries, voters are engaged so I am not concerned. Data centers are a third rail in politics at the moment. I encourage politicians and lobbyists to voice their support so we know who they are, as elections have consequences.
‘Cost Me the Election’: Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash - https://www.newsweek.com/cost-me-the-election-data-centers-t... - June 25th, 2026
Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-se... | https://archive.ph/MMot6 - June 24th, 2026
Where Republicans and Democrats stand on AI data centers - https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/where-republicans-and-democrats-... - June 12th, 2026
Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183512 - May 2026
Why would anyone be worried? I was asking for actual science behind your claims. If you cannot it’s ok, just cements my thinking similar to the water claims people like to make. It’s the modern hysteria.
My mental model of HN is there is a subset of forum participants who either don't believe the impact data centers are causing, or simply don't care. I’m not here to change hearts or minds (mental models are rigid, humans are emotion vs data driven); only to share data, and consume data.
I believe the data shows data centers to have an outsized impact on the costs discussed. Others may disagree, but the facts are the facts, especially if we're asking schools to conserve power while serving data center loads (per this post and related thread). That is not a fact in support of "data center power consumption is not of material concern, and does not require potential regulatory intervention." Quote the opposite (again, imho). If data centers do not have enough power, the solution is simple; force them to load shed and operate dynamically based on the remaining power available to them until more power is brought online.
Again, show one critical research paper that draws a solid link towards data centers and price increases. You linked to so many articles, many of which just spoke on demand increases. I absolutely believe that in some grids, data centers have driven some of the increase but you claiming that data centers are the only problem reads like those folks scared of solar farms being built.
Just because you want to believe it does not make it true. You are claiming it’s 100% the reason and I am suggesting it’s probably part of it but unclear if it’s 5% or 90%.
So far, the data are clear--data centers are not increasing electricity rates. Those are the facts. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/the-numb... This may change in the future, but so far, there is no statistically significant correlation.
Not only that, but states with increasing electricity consumption have lower rates. So it's possible data center will lead to lower rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research
> IER is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. The Institute's CEO and founder, Robert L. Bradley Jr., is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and Energy & Climate Change Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. He has written eight books, including Energy: The Master Resource; Climate Alarmism Reconsidered; and Edison to Enron.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-energy-research...
> Overall, we rate the Institute for Energy Research as Right Biased due to its strong advocacy for fossil fuel expansion and deregulation, aligning with free-market conservative energy policies. We rate its reporting as Mixed for factual accuracy, as it does not always align with the consensus of science by selectively presenting data that favors fossil fuels while downplaying or omitting information on climate change and renewable energy viability. IER is a nonprofit organization that does not fully disclose its funding sources. However, past reports indicate financial ties to fossil fuel interests, including donations from ExxonMobil and groups associated with Charles Koch—a key funder of climate-skeptical and free-market advocacy. While the institute claims to support “energy freedom,” its funding sources suggest a strong alignment with the fossil fuel industry.
(I've forwarded your IER citation to a data science practitioner in the energy space to decompose, more to come)
Brookings: Confronting and addressing rising energy bills linked to data centers - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/confronting-and-addressin... - March 13th, 2026
Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands... - February 26th, 2026 ("As data centers expand nationwide, utilities are receiving hundreds of gigawatts in interconnection requests, with implications for the power grid and consumers. Dozens of utilities received data center requests for at least 700 gigawatts (GW) of power connection development in 2025, which is more than the 477 GW in electricity that the United States consumed in all of 2023. Even though many of these projects will never be built, the requests are still leading to a ramp-up in energy infrastructure investments, including generation facilities, transmission lines, and transformers.")
No more PJM data centers unless they can be reliably served: market monitor - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-data-center-interconnec... - November 26th, 2025 ("The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rule that large data centers can only come online if the grid operator can still meet reliability metrics.")
FERC Complaint: https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/filelist?accession_number... ("20251125-5275_2025-11-25 IMM Complaint re Data Center Loads-AS FILED-1.pdf")
Brannon, Ike and Wolf, Samuel, The Impact of Data Centers on Energy Demand and Market Prices (November 11, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5017484 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5017484
> The number of data centers in the U.S. has increased sharply in the last decade and nearly all forecasts suggest that their growth will accelerate in the next decade, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Since data centers are extremely energy intensive, they have led to significant increases in energy consumption. After two decades of relatively static demand, demand for energy in the U.S. is accelerating rapidly, and demand growth is driven in large part by data centers.
> Data centers have had a particularly strong impact on Northern Virginia: More than half of all the nation's energy consumption attributed to data centers occurs in the state-mostly in Northern Virginia, where the needs of the federal government and national security agencies are important drivers of demand.
> Capacity market prices in the last auction nearly doubled across the PJM region and by more than 14 times in Virginia, signaling an urgent need to secure new transmission and generation to ensure reliability for consumers. Billions of dollars of new investment in generation and transmission capacity will be needed to restore a healthy reserve margin and to recover the portion of reserve capacity that has been consumed by data centers.
> We estimate that failing to make such investments in a timely manner would force regulators to acquiesce to rate increases of as much as 70 percent in the next decade in order to ensure that the grid functions properly and provides energy to all users. The consequences of such a failure could be the appearance of regular brownouts and blackouts in Northern Virginia and across the country.
(If you want to talk to someone at Brookings, FERC, UtilityDive, or another domain specific firm to confirm, let me know and I will connect you to them)
Those read more like policy pieces. Correlations but not strong causation.
Brookings misses out on of the key failures in PJM which is how those terrible 3 year forecasts are causing issues with rates.
Again interesting from a policy perspective but they don’t reach your claim of data centers being the entire problem for retail energy rates.
Please tell me the mental model you have that you believe you can plug a 1GW load into an existing power network and not increase prices?
Do you think that distribution infrastructure required would be free? Do you think markets respond to new demand with new supply instantly?
The market incentive to increase generation is higher prices.
Data center investments, in terms of the energy they will require, far outstrip generation planning and buildout, and by a huge margin.
When you have a demand/supply equilibrium, and you drastically increase demand, what happens to the price?
I am not suggesting that data centers or any load growth for that matter have no impact on prices but rather challenging the idea than data centers are the primary/only reason certain regions have had price increases. Most of the shared links focus on PJM which imo has a flawed auction model that requires 3 year forecasts that nobody would expect to get correct. But it makes for sensational journalism because you can show pictures of data centers up against homes.
I have yet to see any strong research showing a correlation to data center growth and price increases. If you have any beyond a gut feeling I would love to read!
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).
Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.
Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.
The county narrative is cherry picking imo and poor journalism. They are part of PJM which contains one of the largest data centers hubs. The PJM grid serves something like 67mm residents. PJM also uses an annual forward capacity auction to set prices and that is at least partly to blame in price increases. They are trying to forecast peak demand 3 years in advance to set a price for power plant owners to stay online in the event of needing that peak capacity. It’s poorly designed and why they have had such significant spikes there.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
My state almost got a bill passed that would have made data centers pay for the new generating capacity. The House passed it, but the Senate strangled it. Thanks lobbyists!
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb593.html
The lobbyists are just doing their jobs well. It's the Senate that isn't. Blame the people who you pay taxes to purely to be impartial.
There's no reason not to blame lobbyists as well. A lobbyist saying "it's just business," doesn't excuse them for being assholes.
Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.
Most people don't have AI subscriptions. A lot of the most fervent detractor hate AI to the core and refuse to use it as much as possible.
Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.
Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".
i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!
Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...
April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
archived; no ads no trackers: https://nonogra.ph/county-with-37-data-centers-asks-schools-...
If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.
Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.
Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.
Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!
not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
While that is an interesting issue to deal with, I was totally lost at the concept of not saving before going home. I can't go five minutes without saving, and you were willing to leave the "room" without saving? That's just one of those things so outside my normal that I got lost in thinking about it especially as matter of fact as it was recited. You live in a different realm my friend.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
How about just forget about this thread and don’t let it be a major annoyance. It’s a very minor annoyance. It would be a more widespread debate/discussion if so many people were upset by it. At the least, just admit you’re in the minority that are so upset by it and then just live with it anyways.
I say that to make a point about magnitude of annoyances. Sure it’s annoying. So are potholes.
It does seem like a slightly smarter device could be built. The times it happens to me, and I wave my hands in the air to turn lights back on, it’s not that annoying. When I’m there for 3 more hours and I have to do it every 5-10 minutes. That’s more annoying. So the simple thing to do is to program the thing to incrementally increase its timer length. 5/10/20/30 minutes might be less annoying. Also if motion is detected a short time after the no motion timer triggers, that’s probably a sign there was someone present the entire time. Can adjust the logic with that in mind too. The current devices are fine it’s the logic that was lazy.
I am certainly in the minority and I do live with it.
Things like motion sensor lights, faucets that turn off so quickly that you have to hold your hands in weird position to wash them, 1.6 gallon flush toilets are all completely avoidable things that are forced on us by a misguided sense of doo gooding.
These so called innovations are WORSE than what they replaced, less reliable, and often are so badly designed they accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do.
A increasing retry time motion sensor light switch is a good idea. But then again, wherever these things are installed, they go with the cheapest thing that to meet code and get whatever energy certification.
Zero Fs are given by the people who don't have to use the room. The worst thing will be what is used. That is my experience.
Oh you want to change the timersetting? Guess what that's on a dip switch behind the face plate, and you need to find and shut off the breaker and pull the thing from the wall. Put in a ticket to facilities, we'll get to it never
Yes let's make you flush 5 times to save 0 water over a conventional while we run the sprinklers to keep our immaculate lawn green during a 105 degree summer.
Want to take a nice 5 gpm shower? No, you need to let almond farmers drain the river before it gets to the ocean so everybody can have almond milk. Stay in there twice as long buddy, don't know what to tell you.
Smarter device would just require a little more cost. Current devices can work with no code, just analog electronics.
If you’re a cost conscious manufacturer, I think you could do it very cheaply these days (cents/unit). The problem is most manufacturers would turn this into a full blown AI capable smart device to justify charging a lot more.
There's something to be said about having lights on in a room that is not occupied the entire time the lights are on. Before LED lighting, it was a decent attempt at reducing unnecessary lighting.
"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."
And the rest has AI. All is fine. /s
Those aren’t the same unit.
“Everyone turned off their lights” relates to power.
“Power datacenters for one second” relates to energy.
The statement was rhetorical, not a precise engineering analysis.
You dropped the time component from the first, so yes, the result is incomparable.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
I don't think so, "while vacant" is an infinite amount of time, if you look infinitely far into the future.
Assume that each workstation is lit by 100W of lighting and is vacant 18 hours per day (to make the math easy).
I claim that's 75W of power that could be reclaimed by turning off a 100W load 75% of the time. Explain how you get to energy or how I dropped time, please.
2400 watt hours in a day, being reduced to 600 watt hours.
If you're not going to be charitable in interpreting comments, then perhaps this isn't the venue for you.
Uh... Watt-hours per day reduces to Watts in dimensional analysis, which is of course my original point.
The article didn't include the actual power rates. I think the applicable tariff is $3.316/kW of demand + 16.82c/kWh. https://www.scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch/DOCS/89pc01!.PDF
Compared to my local utility (and most of Canada), the demand charge is low, but the per kWh charge is high. NSPower's general tariff is $9.089/kW + 15.738c/kWh for the first 200/mth, and 12.674c/kWh after that. Equivalent rates in Quebec and Manitoba are about half that. https://www.nspower.ca/your-business/save-money-energy/busin...
Current CAD/USD is 0.7, so subtract 30% for NSPower's rates in USD.
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
Was that tech guy a crypto miner by chance?
Power companies don't want to turn away customers in order to keep prices LOW! If you want that outcome, you need a government intervention (which could be laws around utility pricing, requirments for DC buildout etc)
My state almost passed one such bill this year. Lobbyists got it put in time-out until this year's legislative session ran out.
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
This is suburban Richmond, not a "small rural county".
I'm confused as to why they've allowed the data center power drain (which they knew was going to happen) to cascade into consumer power prices. Surely they should be charging consumers their existing price and charging the data centers an increased price based on their massive usage.
Without some sort of mitigation, the costs keep rising and it'll drive families away from these cities and/or counties to avoid the cost hikes. This is akin to what we're seeing in a lot of major cities with rent, people are living further and further away from where they work, paying taxes in other forms (time, public transport costs, gas costs for their car inc. wear & tear, etc).
Hardly seems fair or right.
You're confused why neoliberals want to give out more corporate welfare over helping citizens material needs?
This is literally what they believe in. This is what they have been doing for nearly 50 years. It's the entire purpose of neoliberalism: corporations are more important than citizens.
This is back to the propaganda that people need to recycle because big companies dont want to clean up after themselves.
The ~spice~ inference must flow.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
It is also often a violation of the Clean Air Act but we don't have good regulation in place to actually hold them accountable
And SCOTUS just today made a ruling that will increase money in politics, so it's not going to get better any time soon.
In more ways than one: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
public infrastructure should be owned by the public
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”
Enron managed to mangle/free-marketize California's electricity system. Utilities have to purchase electricity at market prices on an exchange that Enron built.
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
I pay over $0.51/kWh in electricity thanks to PG&E.
I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.
I'd imagine your normal Colo facility uses a lot less power than an AI data center.
Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s
a few years from now they will advise people to stop eating so much, since they need the farmland for data centers
Maybe the county could just ask its employees to work from home so that its office electricity bill goes down to zero. A win-win solution!
This is insane reporting. Their own article says the data center buildout happened in 2017. The article they link about it says the same thing. And so rate changes now - in 2026, nearly a full decade after those DCs were built out - are somehow the fault of the measly 37 datacenters there? They don't even say that outright - they're just insinuating this from the title and wording in the artcile to be sneaky about it. This is garbage! They just put "$current_thing bad" in the headline and nobody's really checking that they're straight up lying by omission!
Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
Unplug the data centers instead.
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
We can't leave money on the table for all those below average prices - so let's raise them all to the average... oh wait
Is this why median is usually better when discussing things, since the median may not change at all or may go down in this circumstance?
obviously the average goes up in this circumstance...
Do we scale back AI slop for a few days or pull power back from schools? Easy, kids can suffer, give them some ice water.
The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough.
If we took the money Accenture spends on tokens so that their staff can convert PDFs to presentations(1) we can probably fund a school or two.
1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...
Maybe it would help remove useless and harmful tech from schools. Books don't need batteries.
"ai" bubble burst cannot come soon enough
but sure would be nice if it would cause an exponential acceleration of fusion development in the meanwhile
however that still has a law of theromodynamics problem of pumping heat into atmosphere
maybe exponential advancement of solar but they've already figured out that cannot improve more than another several percent, and manufacturing is already near peak efficiency