this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Bigger clients negotiate bulk discounts, basically. But the other factor at play here is supply and demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price for the supply. Household demand has remained more or less the same, but because data center demand has shot up, prices have too.
See, the data is right there to raise the rates on the data centers causing the rise in demand and not the households.
As prices go up it becomes more attractive to build more generating capacity. When capacity goes up prices will come back down.
Mind you, the Trump administration has made it much harder to install the cheapest electric generation available — solar and wind.
"When capacity goes up prices will come back down"
Loooooool. I know that's how its supposed to work but you're mistaken if you think that they will ever decrease the price. That almost never ever happens.
My electric company (which is the only one in my area) even started fucking mining bitcoin and they hit us with a surge pricing model charging us even more for the electricity we use not only during daytime but also during summer. I'm sure they say some bullshit about capacity loads or whatever.
They sure got enough capacity to mine the fuck out of that bitcoin though.
Greedy fucks, all of them.
My prices went down in the last two years by almost half. I could get a time based tariff and sometimes buy electricity at negative prices. Of course I have like 400 different electricity providers I can choose from... Monopolies are... not great.
Ok so 400 different providers lets me know you're not in the USA then.
That's where this article is written about
Yeah, monopolies are no-no in Europe.
It depends and varies wildly based on your area and how the electricity is actually sold.
If they are using an energy stock exchange, as many places are, then increased capacity, especially increased renewable capacity, greatly reduces the price per kWh because the price depends on the most expensive method of generation.
And because renewables always offer their electricity for free to the exchange, as they don't have any fuel etc costs, you sometimes end up in the peculiar situation like here in Finland (and in the entire NordPool area) tomorrow between 13:00 and 16:00, where electricity is literally priced at 0€/MWh, as there is enough renewables to cover it all.
Free electricity is cool unless you produce solar. Everyone who does will be paying to produce electricity because the grid fees go both ways (produce or consume) lol
Luckily I do not produce solar. Wanted to install, but lately I've been thinking... With how NordPool works, the more common solar becomes, the less attractive it'll be because there'll be more and more periods where you have to PAY to produce electricity. Or disconnect your panels from the grid every time that happens? AKA whenever solar is the most effective...
I'm not familiar with NordPool specifics but this is exactly right and is playing out in California and elsewhere too. Basically just the duck curve. Storage is all but required as solar covers 100% of midday load.
Long term it's a good thing. Medium term it means you'd be an idiot to install solar, unfortunately.
I'm not familiar with the Cali system, but if it's day-ahead pricing then it'd be similar to Nordpool.
From what little I've researched about privately producing back to the grid here in Finland, it really didn't make much sense. You get terrible rates and as you said have to pay the transfer fees too. It's priced in a way that they clearly would rather you didn't do it at all.
But the NordPool isn't really a system designed with tiny private producers in mind. Price goes to zero, or sometimes even negative, exactly to try to prevent having to pull electricity production down as that's expensive and complicated. It's clear to see that it isn't a sustainable model in the long run, but hopefully it incentivises companies to build the solution - storage - to make use of all that "wasted" energy and stabilize the price and market.
Ideally anyway. Government interference can always screw it up and create barriers to competition.
Where I live (Ontario, Canada) on-peak electricity prices have pretty much exactly kept pace with inflation over the past 20 years, so in effect electricity costs have not gone up.
Off-peak prices have crept up more than that but solar power doesn’t help with off-peak generation at all. Wind turbines do produce more at night but we’ve had government subsidies to encourage building wind power capacity and those subsidies result in higher wholesale prices for that power (actually above the off-peak prices consumers pay).