My electric utility just arbitrarily added 170 (~50% of the total) bucks to my bill this month, despite me using 11% less electricity.
The whole point of being a utility is to allow the “efficiency” of a monopoly without the ability to gouge the customers. Frankly, I’m looking to see if there is a lawsuit against the utility at this point so I can join on to it.
Also looking into residential solar. Ideally I can just give my electric utility the finger and disconnect my service. Between them and gas, I’m paying about 400 bucks a month, which could get me a nice loan for a solar array, battery backup, and all electric appliances.
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.
I think that sooner or later GPT 6 and higher models will become too expensive for most people, and they will moderate their ardor and start introducing restrictions on use without all this circus like, look, we have a perpetual motion machine…
But even weak models are enough to spy on you damn well.
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.
how can they get away with this? Are data centers not paying their bills?
The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.
What? That doesn’t make any sense.
It’s essentially supply and demand. If the data center is willing to pay more, then everyone has to pay more. I hate it.
Places like data centers don’t pay the same rate that individuals do though. They get an industrial rate.
Basically they cut them a break so they can fuck you. The supply is more More than enough and the only demand that increased was from corporate interests.
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.
It is like Obamacare. You have a person who smokes, gets drunk, eats a lot of sugar, don’t exercise, you pay for their bill through hiked premiums, and overutilization. Hopefully, that sinks in.
This is going to feel like the recycle scam isn’t it. Corpos sucking down every last drop of energy while residential will be asked to turn up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter so we “do our part”.
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.
I see white roofs that can be dark themed to reduce the load on the grid.
Wasn’t there a country with too much solar, causing electricity prices to fall too low?
Do they not have any space left for data-centres?That’s probably true but you only get ⅓ of a day on average of power. Demands are still rising so the other ⅔ of the day prices are higher and likely still averages higher on average for an entire day even if ⅓ of it is so cheap.
You could store surplus energy with batteries, pumped storage hydro power stations, gravity batteries and so on to bridge the gap at night. It’s just a matter of subsidies in the right direction and political will to get there. But currently in impending pre-war times it’s more like in a diesel-punk dystopy.
I’d say you won’t really require batteries for something like this, that will mostly be generating less energy than it is expending at any point of time.
Note that I am only suggesting filling the roofs and not the rest of the area around it.Besides, they most probably have a Double-conversion UPS, so they just need to make a controller that supports a side input channel for charging from the PV output.
Don’t let the tech bros into your state.
Tiered pricing would help.
It does
The more you use, the cheaper it is
Why isn’t the roof of that facility covered with solar panels? It might not provide all the juice they need, but it will offset some. Future facilities like this should be forced to install some sort of energy mitigation strategy before getting approval.
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
I get it, but you make them all do it anyway, just on principle, if nothing else.
And all we get in return are chat systems that make up bullshit facts. I mean, I don’t disagree that they can actually do some useful stuff, too. But the proportion of the public that benefits from them in any meaningful way is tiny compared to the cost to the rest of us. I hope a tornado lands on Elon’s gas-powered monstrosity in, where, Tennessee, I think? Destroy that shit, please.
Unlike this place, I bet most people out there actually enjoy Google’s AI summaries. I mean, it’s almost the Wikipedia article verbatim, but if you just need to know what a thing is, they actually save people time
And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.
In the case of Wikipedia, it saves them money
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.
