Technology

Always has been

Residents in big cities have been experiencing it for decades at this point.

ConEd saying "We're preparing for the heat wave in your area this week. Please, limit your energy usage to prevent power outages."

Yeah, and times square is still lit up full brightness. The skyscraper offices aren't doing their part. Most of them, you can feel the cold on the street from their lobbies.

Charge higher rates for crypto and AI. No one should be hot or cold so some asshole can make more money.

literally passing the bucks to us: https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-fbf213a915fb574a4f3e5baaa7041c3a

This has been the case for decades, why would it change now?

Were you recently told your bill is gonna go up again when they put in that massive data center in a year or so? We were told. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ no option to say "fuck you, make them pay their bills." Nope. PSE&g was like "brace for it bitch." And that was it.

Where I used to live, the electric bill doubled after the city council voted to allow the electric company to charge customers for the cost of storm repairs. Nearly $400 a month for us. I knew people who lived there part time and were getting $200 bills for months when they weren't living there and had no electrical usage. And people had been saying for years that the electric company wasn't doing enough to prepare for storms.

The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.

When they make up a significant amount of energy usage, the demands for amount and infrastructure like production and transfer increase.

They're not a consumer like the others in that their impact is much higher than what they pay for in terms of paying consumed power.

The article mentions data centers containing as much power as entire cities.

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.

even under the assumption that they do pay the exact same prices as normal citizens (they don't). electricity prices will go up the more usage there is, as they mostly rely on limited factors.

Are data centers not paying their bills?

They are. The state has failed to ensure there is adequate supply to keep prices flat.

Of course it should be covered in solar panels but so should most roofs everywhere but this single roof would be less than a drop in the bucket.

A square meter solar panel gives you about 100 watts while the sun is at it's highest point, and only when aimed directly at the sun. Typically over the entire day, the average will be a fraction of that

Meanwhile these servers use multiple CPUs that each take around 200 watts. A single server can take between 1-5 kilowatt in power. A single rack than carry dozens of those server's, so you see that you'd need way, waaaayyy more solar panels to make up for all of that

Again, not saying they shouldn't. All buildings should have solar panel roofs, but for this one building it won't do much to the point that the difference would be a blip

All the models are already too expensive for most people. Most people don't pay to use them, billionaire investors do. When the AI bubble bursts our retirement funds will collapse and billionaires will simply move money somewhere else.

I've been thinking this for some time. It just seems completely implausible that companies like OpenAI will continue letting the people of the world use their product for free, what with the ruthless material requirements involved in it's distribution and upkeep.

To me it seems clear that the right to intellectual property and the right to work or contribute meaningfully to a workplace (as if that were actually a right) are currently being blitzscaled. I.e. these guys are running their companies at a loss to allow their product to become a necessity. Once that's achieved you will no longer have the option not to use it and they will be able to charge whatever they like.

We really need to begin pressuring states and governance to protect us from the predatory business models of these venture capitalists.

Raking in vc money?

It does

The more you use, the cheaper it is