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.
And 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.
toomuchtodo 38 minutes ago [-]
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])
Kamq 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
infecto 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
cduzz 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
>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 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.
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.
toomuchtodo 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
freediddy 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
Tangurena2 2 minutes ago [-]
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!
Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.
mywittyname 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
slg 11 minutes ago [-]
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".
genewitch 8 minutes ago [-]
i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!
morkalork 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
scottndecker 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hakunin 1 hours ago [-]
Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.
imhoguy 42 minutes ago [-]
Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.
burnte 1 hours ago [-]
Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!
skeeter2020 1 hours ago [-]
not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
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
shagie 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
dylan604 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
fluorinerocket 26 minutes ago [-]
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?
dylan604 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
emsign 1 hours ago [-]
"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."
GuestFAUniverse 32 minutes ago [-]
And the rest has AI. All is fine. /s
sokoloff 51 minutes ago [-]
Those aren’t the same unit.
“Everyone turned off their lights” relates to power.
“Power datacenters for one second” relates to energy.
cwillu 46 minutes ago [-]
You dropped the time component from the first, so yes, the result is incomparable.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
sokoloff 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
Dr_Emann 36 minutes ago [-]
I don't think so, "while vacant" is an infinite amount of time, if you look infinitely far into the future.
zamadatix 1 hours ago [-]
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.
preinheimer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
advisedwang 1 minutes ago [-]
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)
jimmydddd 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
mwigdahl 7 minutes ago [-]
Was that tech guy a crypto miner by chance?
51 minutes ago [-]
jabroni_salad 59 minutes ago [-]
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?
WarmWash 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
frantathefranta 11 minutes ago [-]
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).
skywhopper 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
philipwhiuk 52 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
toast0 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
35 minutes ago [-]
khuey 39 minutes ago [-]
This is suburban Richmond, not a "small rural county".
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Quinner 1 hours ago [-]
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.
larkost 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
downrightmike 56 minutes ago [-]
public infrastructure should be owned by the public
culi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cmiles8 1 hours ago [-]
Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”
malshe 1 hours ago [-]
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!)
freediddy 31 minutes ago [-]
I pay over $0.51/kWh in electricity thanks to PG&E.
butterfi 1 hours ago [-]
I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
I'd imagine your normal Colo facility uses a lot less power than an AI data center.
eskatonic 14 minutes ago [-]
Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s
rdtsc 1 hours ago [-]
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.
culi 1 hours ago [-]
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
excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance
malshe 1 hours ago [-]
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!
ck2 4 minutes ago [-]
"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
cdrnsf 2 hours ago [-]
Unplug the data centers instead.
markvdb 2 hours ago [-]
Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.
ben_w 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jeffbee 2 hours 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.
gedy 1 hours ago [-]
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
genewitch 2 minutes ago [-]
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...
cmiles8 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
And 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-...
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
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])
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.
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
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.
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 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 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
‘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
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.
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb593.html
Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.
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.
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.
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?
“Everyone turned off their lights” relates to power.
“Power datacenters for one second” relates to energy.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
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.
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.
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?
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.
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
obviously the average goes up in this circumstance...
The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough.
1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...