Good day all. If you are a homeowner, you have probably seen your electric bills increase over the last few years. There are several reasons for this of course. One is the imposition of “Green” and “Renewable” energy sources. The other issue is the construction of more and more data centers.
By rights, adding Data Centers, or DC’s, shouldn’t have that much affect on your electric bill. The reason it does is capacity. Thanks to pinheaded Progressive idiots, many energy production companies have been investing, another term is wasting, huge amounts of money on so called Renewable energy systems. The problem with those systems is they don’t work very well and are the most expensive way to produce energy there is.
When I talk about renewables, I’m referring to things like solar power and windmills. The problems with these are many. For solar power, it only works when the sun is shining. Windmills only work when the wind is blowing. Adding to the problem of windmills is that they are basically giant bird mulchers.
There are a whole host of other technical issues as well. The most efficient forms of energy production are the ones that the Leftard clowns from the Church of Global Warming and Climate Change absolutely hate. Natural Gas, Coal, Hydro and Nuclear. The “Footprint” of a Natural Gas, coal or nuclear power plant is minuscule for the power they produce when compared to that of windmills and solar panels. (Hydro is a different kettle of fish since you need to build dams, but they’re still far more efficient than “Green Energy”)
This brings us to the issue of rising electric bills and DC’s. A Data Center is going to use two things in abundance. Power and water. You will have thousands of servers running in a building and each server might have two power supplies, (Redundancy), that might be rated to 1 kilowatt. Then there are the data storage units and all of the ancillary systems to keep everything up and running. Water is used to cool the DC’s since server produce a heck of a lot of heat.
With the ever increasing Internet and all the things we now do online, more and more DC’s are being constructed to take up and spread out the loads. They need power. Since, thanks to the Leftards, we haven’t really been building new power stations, we’re beginning to run short and this is forcing states to start looking at alternatives. Here are the details from Newsmax:
Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.
It’s not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.
This is a classic Catch-22 situation. Blocking the construction of DC’s means blocking thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent high paid tech jobs in the DC’s. You also have the issue of overloading the current DC. (Which is why tech companies want to build more of them)
But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines.
That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.
As I’ve mentioned before, the major issue is the American power grid. It’s basically over 130 years old. Yes, it’s been upgraded over the decades, but at it’s core, it’s hopelessly obsolete and vulnerable to sabotage and natural disasters. (Think a Carrington Event or an EMP from a nuclear weapon) The power grids in Europe and Japan are far more modern and for good reason. The United States blew everything up in WW2 and then helped to rebuild their grids.
Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.”
There is only so much that can be done in the regulatory field. If it costs a power company more then they can make, they are going to fail and shut down. Over the years, all sorts of things have been done to try and mitigate this mess such as Demand/Response. However, these are all just band-aids to a major, and frankly, government caused problem.
Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That’s pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use.
“A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.”
A fix, Peskoe said, is a “can of worms” that pits ratepayer classes against one another.
It is an issue, although certain parties are either in denial or there is something else going on. (Think palms greased)
Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia’s Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather.
That is a major expense, but one that should have gotten underway a few decades ago. Now the owners of the DC’s are saying that they’re willing to pay “Their Fair Share,” but many people are beginning to question this.
But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.
Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren’t nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant.
In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs.
The Newsmax article then goes into what each state and the ISO’s and RSO’s are doing, or not doing. The answer to the issue is very simple. More power plants need to be constructed. Frankly, since these DC’s use so much power, they should be budgeting the construction of on site power stations to handle their requirements. I’m not talking about backup generators either.
Now one “Incentive” is that if a company building a DC also builds out a suitable power station, they can overbuild the capacity beyond what they could ever use and then sell it into the grid. That would add to their bottom line. Currently, Natural Gas is considered the “Cleanest” solution outside of hydro, but there is also a lot of research going into nuclear power.
I’m not talking about the old “Tea Kettle” style of plants that can take a decade or more to build, even without all the issues of regulations, lawsuits and nuclear waste. There are some new technologies out there that are right out of science fiction, including a few designs that are flat out impossible to melt down, ala Fukushima or Three Mile Island. (FYI, TMI is being brought back online for the purposes of powering new data centers) The ultimate tech is Nuclear Fusion of course, but we’ve been working on that for 50+ years and who knows if we will ever solve the problems.
I know one thing. The solution is not going to be simple or easy. One thing that has to be done though, is shutting down all the Leftard obstructionists. These people are a major reason we, the United States, has so much trouble adding to or upgrading our infrastructure. In New Hampshire, there was a plan to run high tension lines down from Canada but ran into issues with the NIMBY’s. (Not In My Back Yard) There are also Balloon head Politicians who see all this as a cash cow they can milk. So, as I said, the issue is both simple to fix and incredibly complex. My best advice? Become a prepper.
Thatisall
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