- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Power-hungry data centers have been popping up all over, to serve the boom in artificial intelligence. The Energy Department projects data centers and other commercial customers will use more electricity than households for the first time ever next year. That’s a challenge for policymakers, who have to decide how to accommodate that extra demand and who should foot the bill.
It’s just really complicated to figure out who should be paying for this power…
That’s a challenge for policymakers, who have to decide how to accommodate that extra demand and who should foot the bill
Gee I wonder who is going to foot the bill?
I’m kinda curious is there’s different meters and billing for different uses.
Like, does the Walmart Supercenter pay the same price per W/hr that I do for the electricity used at my house?
Could a power company even charge a particular customer, like a datacenter, a higher rate without violating a law somewhere about a utility power company not serving the customers in an area equally or something?
Edit:
Me after reading the comments.
there absolutely is for most utilities like water, sewer, electricity. residential vs commercial vs industrial. you can usually see the distinct rates on the energy company’s website and find out just how in the bag for industry/commerce your utility is!
here, not only do the ‘big’ customers get a break on the per-unit charges, but the fixed monthly account charge (cost for the hookup or the meter, before the usage related charges) is also a much smaller percentage of the total bill than it is for the small residential customer. for me, half the year that line item is higher than the whole rest of the bill (usage + taxes, etc).
yeah, i think that has held true for me everywhere i’ve lived. the dogma is that industry/commerce rate discounts attract employers aka eCoNoMiC aCtiViTy while their consistent volume of usage makes up for the discount.
maybe there’s some logic to the idea that a smaller group of high volume clients is easier to provide administrative support (connect/disconnect/outages/billing/communication) and infrastructure than a massive group of distinct low volume clients, and maybe i can get with that when it comes to things like waste disposal and sewage… but when it comes to energy, especially fossil fuel energy and a scarcity of renewable capacity, i think electricty usage should be graduated: the more you use, the more your rates go up and marking those extra revenues for increasing renewable/non-fossil fuel capacity until there isn’t scarcity. and definitely certain “industries” and “commercial” clients should pay penalties if they are for-profit and Part of the Problem.
these are all very milquetoast social democratic reforms, so of course they cannot even be mentioned in our free liberal democracy marketplace of ideas.
This is part of the debacle with Texas’ power grid woes from last (?) year. Basically they gave these crypto mining operations locked in pricing per k/Wh for several years but they then rely on doing “surge pricing” of the electricity to manage the grid when consumption is greater than demand (heat waves in the clearest example), so the mining operations made more money by suspending mining and selling their fixed price power from the grid back to people that needed it at the surge pricing.
We simply mustn’t penalize our local mom and pop data center small businesses by charging them for the cost of the electricity that they’re consuming! Do you want China to win?
Food prices are rising in price faster than inflation too. Hey, so, if everything is rising faster than inflation, what exactly is inflation measuring? 🤔
Inflation takes a basket of products and measures prices over time. One of the biggest problems of the latest wave of inflation is that it’s affecting essentials more than most other products. If food, rent and electricity go up very fast but other consumer items like TVs or fast fashion remain stable or even go down, living costs are affected for poorer people much more significantly than inflation numbers portray.
Right, because ultimately what inflation is measuring is how expensive it is to be comfortable, rather than how expensive it is to survive. Capitalist economists are uninterested in the survival of the poor, they are only interested in the comfort of the comfortable, so they measure toys along with food as if they’re equally important.
Gold Price Performance USD
Change Amount % Today -3.05 -0.09% 30 Days -2.33 -0.07% 6 Months +439.72 +15.17% 1 Year +830.12 +33.10% 5 Year +1,354.95 +68.32% 20 Years +2,894.79 +652.98%
Thomas has invested in energy-saving windows and insulation to keep his house comfortable. But in the heat of the summer, his power bills still top $400 a month.
In Pembroke Pines, Fla., Al Salvi’s power bill can reach $500 a month.
To get these kinds of bills you need to be using 3000 kWh of electricity per month. That’s 100 kWh a day, or the equivalent of running 4 very energy-intensive appliances every minute of the day. Another way to compare this is that it’s 50% more in a month than the entire year’s usage of an average citizen of Cuba, where it’s even hotter.
I’m used to living in 2-bedroom or 3-bedroom apartments and letting the temperature go up to 78 F in the summer and down to 60 F in the winter. A high electric bill for me is $120, $150 is unheard of. And it wouldn’t be too hard for me to go much lower.
Maybe these people shouldn’t be living in McMansion-like arrangements that hog so much energy. If higher energy prices bring most Americans to their knees, that’s a good thing. God forbid an American would have to practice one-planet living, or even go without consuming 10x as much as people from other countries.
🍹📊🇺🇲, may electricity prices surge to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour to accurately reflect all the externalities of power generation.
I’m used to living in 2-bedroom or 3-bedroom apartments and letting the temperature go up to 78 F in the summer and down to 60 F in the winter.
That’s nice for you that you aren’t as susceptible to temperature as some of us. I live in an area where it can regularly reach the fun extremes for both winter (single digits) and summer (high 90s with humidity). I happened to live through too many snow/ice storms that went through here growing up to make me able to stand outside with a t-shirt and jeans in 50F and be fine, yet I can’t stand temps above 72F during the summer for more than a couple hours at best, meanwhile my sister and mom can’t stand temps below 76F in the winter. Also since I’m one of the “freaks” who willingly works nights, I kinda want to be able to sleep on the summer days so my window AC unit hovers around 66F to 64F just so i can try to sleep comfortably.
66F to 64F is like 18-19°C?! I’m sorry but this is extremely low in summer. This is exactly what the comment above you is talking about, like at 19°C it’s cold enough to wear two layers on your torso if not doing physical activity. You seriously need to acclimate yourself to higher sleeping temperatures in summer, it can be done.
or maybe their house is like a sieve and the only way to keep the room temperature normal is to blast the AC.
also, huge windows, no (or not enough) overhangs, no outside shutters (curtains and blinds are dogshit lies). a shitton of housing stock was not designed for any kind of real climate.
There is a difference between setting the AC unit to 65F and having the room at 65F. I have no problem with the former if it’s the only way to maintain normal temperatures, but if it’s the latter it’s wasteful
or maybe their house is like a sieve
Good lord the house me, my parents, and my 3 siblings live in is complete disaster. The building started life in the mid to late 1800s… as a single floor funeral home with a crematorium in the basement. Then sometime it got rezoned to be a house, and expanded on so much that it became a two floor sorta two family home since it technically is two addresses (the first floor is house number and the 2nd floor is house number and a half, including the fact it has two electric meters, two gas meters, and so on), now the quality of these expansions wildly varies though mostly on the bad side, like on the level of we’re sure it may just end up being cheaper to just tear it down and build a new house than spend forever (and money we don’t have) chasing all the issues it has.
Now, I mentioned that my mom and sister can’t stand temps below a certain point, during winter due to again probably the quality of the expansions, my room just holds onto heat all the time, meanwhile my mom’s room and sister’s room seem to not exactly hold onto heat very well. You can start seeing where the problems start creeping up. So that window unit is pretty much the only thing keeping my room at a semi regular temperature during both summer and winter.
yeah, it can be ridiculously expensive to make an old house airtight after the fact. tear off all the cladding and possibly the roof too, airseal the whole fucking thing from foundation to the top, then rebuild the outside. something like that.
and that’s just airtightness, but what about insulation?
It’s far beyond old house we’re dealing with here, the expansions the original building had went through includes near doubling the foundation footprint, gutting it and changing it probably several times throughout it’s life, like the stairs to the 2nd floor when the 2nd floor was added was originally on the other side of the house, not to mention the addition of the backrooms on the first floor that wasn’t integrated with the rest of the first floor in terms of air circulation. And for the fun part, there’s asbestos in the house, how much? We know the answer is “Yes” for sure, and I’m pretty sure the insulation has asbestos in it too.
Like from what my dad had told me, the city documents for the property shows that the building had been expanded, changed, and added onto at least 20+ times throughout it’s life.
oh awesome, that means that tearing it all down and starting from scratch is even more expensive, cos you gotta hire someone to safely bag the asbestos. or do it yourself and die from cancer in a decade.
You seriously need to acclimate yourself to higher sleeping temperatures in summer, it can be done.
Before I finally got a window unit for my room, I was regularly sweating, in just underwear, with no covers. And remember, I’m a night person working night shift so heat was that much worse because I have to sleep during the daytime hours. It was fucking awful, and I have a lot of choice words to say to you if you decide to be judgemental about it.
Whatever did we do before cheap oil and coolants gave us the ability to bend the climate completely to our will, to the point where we make it so cool indoors in many public buildings that you need to wear a hoodie in the summer? I like the winter and the summer because I don’t have to add or subtract layers throughout the day, lots of places make this impossible because they just have to make it too hot in the wintertime and too cold in the summertime to wear your outdoor clothes inside.
How could humans ever have survived in the days before circa 1950 when such an essential, vital technology was popularized?
I wonder this all the time and I live in a climate with similar extremes to yours.
At any rate, I don’t suppose you spend $500 during July and August cooling your room down to 66 F. $500/month in electricity takes effort, you need to be cooling a large amount of space that nobody is occupying, and running a large number of appliances.
How could humans ever have survived in the days before circa 1950
Some literally didn’t. You see this every time there’s a heat wave, the elderly and other vulnerable people literally fucking die.
Did they die of not being able to use 4000 watts every hour of the day (which we’ve only been able to do for 80 years), or did they die of not having cool enough air (which we have been very capable of providing for 8000 years)?
We need to be wary of this logic of “we need the things that we have developed in the age of capitalism”.
Good point. It’s not profitable to build passively cooled housing. But it’s essential that we do. That doesn’t get you all the way to temperatures that won’t kill anybody, but it does mean you go from using 1500 W on average to something much less, and for MOST people, it might even be enough on its own.
Is one 750 W window-mounted air conditioner, running 12 hours a day (270 kWh/month = $40), not enough to prevent someone in that room from getting heat exhaustion?
I’d argue that even in hot climates, the temperature 2 meters under the ground is going to be a consistent 70 F year-round, and a fan drawing air through a pipe at that depth is sufficient to provide cool enough air to survive in the summer. Across Southwest Asia people have been putting principles like this to use since the beginning of civilization.
The problem is not access to technology or affordability per se, the problem is a cultural norm of overconsumption.
Yes you can use the ground to cool you, provided you live near the ground. If you live in the eleventh floor on the sun-facing side of an apartment building, it’s a little more difficult to use the ground to cool you. There are, of course, other clever passive tricks in building design that would work if we cared to spend the money on them.
But yes, running a little window unit (I think 750 W is conservative for those things but regardless) during the hottest hours in a small room would be fine for anyone in terms of survival.
You can get most of the way there with an EV and a long commute.
Using a liberal estimate of 0.37 kWh/mile, to get just halfway to 3000 kWh per month means driving 4000 miles a month. That’s 133 miles every day of the month, or 180 miles every workday. This is 2.5x the average amount that people drive.
Inflation is a weird thing to measure against, considering the price of electricity should be… included in inflation.
It’s another way of saying that electricity costs are rising faster than other costs
It is, but what this says is that even accounting for the diminishing buying power of the dollar, the price of electricity is rising and it can’t be accounted for just due to inflation itself.
The diminishing buying power of the dollar is subjective, relative to the commodity being bought. Inflation is an average over a set of commodities. There is inherent value of the dollar that can up or down. The diminishing buying power of the dollar IS the rising price of electricity (if you’re buying electricity) and the rising buying of the dollar is the diminishing price of the Libyan Dinar (if you’re buying land in Libya).
To say the price of electricity is increasing even accounting for the diminishing value of the dollar makes no sense because the diminish value of the dollar is a relative measure and the way it’s measured IS by looking the price of the thing being bought
But that’s not the only thing it measures, if it did it would be an entirely useless abstraction. I don’t get how the complaint makes any sense, it’s a very standard shorthand for “this thing is rising in price in ways that can’t be accounted for by the shrinking overall value of the dollar when measured against the price of all commodities in the domestic market”.
The buying power of the dollar being relative to what commodity it is buying is exactly why overall inflation is a useful measure to be compared against. It isn’t the most relevant measure, but it’s a good summation to the layman that something else is going on.
No, not really. Let’s take another example. Let’s say the average building height in NYC is increasing year over year. Some buildings are going to be higher than that average. You wouldn’t say this building is higher than could be explained by the increase in average height because the increase in average height is NOT an explanation.
The decreasing value of the dollar is not an explanation causing price increases. Price increases IS the decreasing value of the dollar. The price of some commodities increasing faster than other commodities is exactly what we would expect during inflationary periods.
It’s not like there’s some number that is “the value of the dollar” and it changes in an objective way that businesses need to adapt to by raising prices. The value of the dollar is literally defined by the prices of things.
Now that is a useless analogy. Buildings aren’t abstract constructions that fluctuate up and down based on complex relationships of military power projection, debt and demand.
The fact that inflation is the sum of all these price increases isn’t a profound discovery, and neither is that some things get pricier outpacing inflation, literally everyone understands that. That’s why it’s an average. That doesn’t mean it’s dumb or redundant to point it out, and pointing out that this is a thing that always happens reads like a hunting for an ummm akchually. This is just an exercise in microscopic hair splitting.
I really disagree. There’s no objective thing called inflation. There is no single quantity called the “value of the dollar”. The price of electricity going up is not caused by inflation. The price of electricity going up IS inflation. You can’t say that the price of electricity is going up “even when accounting for inflation” because the price of electricity going up IS inflation.
What you could say is that the price of the inputs to the price of electricity are going up at a slower rate than the price of electricity itself. That’s an interesting thing to say. But the state of affairs described by that could happen even if deflation was happening in the economy.
Here, let me try another way. The definition of inflation is:
the general increase in prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time
Do you see why your statement:
even accounting for the diminishing buying power of the dollar, the price of electricity is rising and it can’t be accounted for just due to inflation itself
Doesn’t make any sense? I’ll rewrite your words:
Even accounting for [prices going up], the price of electricity is [going up] and it can’t be accounted for just due to [prices going up]
Recommend that anyone getting screwed by their electric bills investigate free energy audits before Trump possibly pulls the programs.
