I am not an expert in electricity generation or transmission, but it does seem strange that this “data center scare” is happening coincidental with (other?) big jumps in home electricity rates that have nothing to do with data centers.
For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.
At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
>At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
Who were they trying to pander to by doing that? Who's votes did the politicians expect to reap?
I feel like the goddamn goose in the meme.
They did that stuff because well off white collar jerks with no problems thought it sounded good. And now, as usual, the rest of society has to pay for it.
> For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.
This problem is unrelated to datacenters. The datacenter boom has created demand in markets outside New England, which is seeping into New England. It only got compounded by lack of natural gas.
> At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
Mass save is actually a great program. Mass houses are old, creaky, and lacking insulation. Mass save let these things be upgraded at a lower price burden to the masses. If you are talking about heat pumps, heat pumps can have backup furnaces - you could use natural gas if you wanted. The idea behind a heat pump was to have it work with solar, wind, and other low cost energy sources.
Then trump came in and shot all these other sources at gunpoint. And you are seeing it in your bills.
And while it's certainly an unpopular concept to present, electricity right now is a whole lot cheaper (on average, in the US) when viewed through an inflation-tinted lens than it has been at many times in the past.
I find that FRED (from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) is pretty useful for visualizing that kind of data, in part because it shows folks exactly what went into producing the chart. The citations and any maths are all included for inspection (see the "Edit Graph" link). It's hard to use FRED to present information disingenuously: It simply is what it is.
(wherein: It can be plainly seen that the 1980s were very dark times indeed, and the first ~half of the 1990s weren't so great either. We're currently somewhere around turn-of-the-millennia in terms of how much our electric bill hurts compared to how much everything else hurts.
(And none of this should be construed to mean that I'm ecstatic about paying my power bill or something. Everything is fuckin' expensive these days -- including electricity.))
This is not true. Energy prices are rising globally, even in countries with few or no data centers and declining industrial activity. It increasingly looks like a coordinated effort to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers before widespread adoption of solar power shifts the balance.
Those other reasons being none other than pure greed.
Total energy consumption has peaked in Europe in 2021 while prices go up like they're building a data center in every european country every 60 minutes.
Something is either a diversified commodity subject to strict free market competition, razor thin margins and highly elastic supply/demand or it's a shithole of regulatory meddling and inelastic supply/demand with long feedback loops. Which it is depends on what political position you are trying to advance.
Also, the cause not being greed doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable. There is probably a problem that can be fixed. It’s just not wishing upon a star that people were less greedy.
Yeah, just tainting something with motivated reasoning without utilizing it solely is absolutely a thing.
Not my fault Schrödinger didn't leave room for all the nuance of market conditions.
Not to say I agree with "hurr durr it's greed". Usually if something is inexplicably wacky and fucked up it traces back to Nth order effects of regulations, not necessarily in the same jurisdictions.
> It increasingly looks like a coordinated effort to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers before widespread adoption of solar power shifts the balance.
That statement isn't wrong, but increased power prices on consumers through socializing the costs of privatized benefit data centers is the mechanism for this. Data centers are a tax on consumers via their electric bills.
>The Economist has adapted a model of state-level retail electricity prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to include data centres (see chart 2). We find no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centres, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected. The same went for Georgia. In fact, the model found that higher growth in electricity demand came alongside lower bills, reflecting the fact that a larger load lets a grid spread its fixed costs across more bill-payers.
Do any of these links actually show the exact method that datacenters are "socializing the costs" for energy production? They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would, and pay for their local interconnect to the grid. Why they should be on the hook for long distance transmission/etc. is unclear to me given that every user on the grid takes part of that and has enjoyed under-replacement electrical rates for decades. I have seen the typical local tax abatement deals which I totally agree need to be outright banned - but that's really the only thing that's jumped out at me. Otherwise it's largely opinion pieces parroting the same few background sources.
I'm not sure it's really a correct mental model to put 50+ years of lack of investment maintaining and expanding transmission and grid capacity onto the industry that laid that fact bare. From where I stand and the underlying studies/reports I've personally read the root cause always seems to be we're running out of power on a grid built by the Greatest Generation and more or less zero work has been put into expanding anything since. There were plenty of people sounding alarm bells a decade ago before the latest datacenter boom.
Then you get into NIMBY stuff, pie in the sky wishful thinking re: dispatchable vs. intermittent power generation, etc.
In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter. Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.
I certainly agree with the argument that the datacenters might not end up panning out as profitable investments for society, but I'm at least hopeful that when the dust settles we'll actually have augmented our electric grid and finally started to take that looming problem seriously. We might be left with something useful that lasts another 3 generations when all said and done.
We were going to get here either way with population growth and older power generation facilities not being replaced faster than they are reaching end of life. Datacenters simply brought it forward maybe a decade or so. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's energy investments.
> They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would
Well yeah, you don't need to look further than Econ 101 and supply and demand. If demand goes up, prices go up.
The real problem is that the gains from the new demand don't end up fairly distributed, which is bad but not really directly related to the discussion.
Americans have coasted too long on other people's infrastructure investment. It's basically run out. Time to pay the piper or watch our quality of life decline.
I firmly believe datacenters are simply the scapegoat de-jour. If this buildout hadn't happened it'd still be EVs or "air conditioning use in the city" like it was beforehand.
It's coming for us either way. At least this way there is an industrial user subsidizing a portion of grid modernization and energy generation tech.
I agree that wealth distribution is a problem. But I come from a "there needs to be wealth to distribute to begin with" standpoint. Degrowth isn't the way.
> In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter.
Why do we want wealth when it is only going to the wealthiest? AI data centers benefit Big Tech, its employees, and its shareholders. So, who is "we"? I believe I can make the argument that the majority of Americans do not want this, only a privileged minority (ie those getting wealthy from this current hype cycle).
> Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.
If AI data centers want power, they should be charged a painful premium for it, paid out of the pockets of Big Tech building it. They have the resources, clearly, from the very obvious capital flows. Meta has issued its largest bond offering ever, $30B, for its Hyperion project in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Because when the bubble pops, we're all going to be left holding the bag ("socializing the losses"). We should not all have to suffer higher electrical prices for the benefit of Big Tech and their shareholders. They can pay up for the necessary power infrastructure if they want the gains they're chasing.
This statement from the EU is not just irrelevant, it’s deliberately misleading. Claiming a modest –0.5% change after a staggering 40% price surge, while oil and gas prices remain near 2019 levels and solar and wind capacity has grown tenfold, feels like a slap in the face to consumers. And yet, you’re amplifying this technically true (but deeply deceptive) narrative because it conveniently props up a flawed argument.
What's a short explanation of the discrepancy in EU wholesale vs household electricity price changes, over the period 2019-2025?
Wholesale increased 30% YoY 2025 over 2024 but household didn't.
Realistically we should compare to 2019 (pre-Covid, pre-inflation, pre-Ukraine war).
Many individual EU govts implemented retail caps, (sales) tax cuts, and transfers. Where is this summarized at-a-glance, by country, by year?
Anything better than:
If consumers want cheaper power, they should advocate for more rapid deployment of wind, solar, battery storage, transmission and interconnectors, demand response, and other technologies to make the price of fossil fuels irrelevant in their electrical costs. Data centers are not a component of cheaper energy bills, importantly. They are demand, and compete with consumers for electricity in the market. Fossil fuel prices are volatile; if you do not want to be exposed to volatile fossil fuel pricing, do not use fossil fuels in your electrical grid. It is unlikely fossil fuels get cheaper in the future, as they will be starved for investment. You cannot control the global fossil fuel market (with the primary suppliers being OPEC+ and the US), but you can control your domestic supply and demand for energy. Europe fossil gas prices are never going to go back down to pre-2020 levels as long as they rely on LNG imports vs supply from Russia, for example. The faster Europe pushes out fossil generation in its grid, the faster energy prices go back down (cost of solar at a certain points during the day goes to 0 once enough solar has been deployed; eventually, the cost of generation becomes a much smaller component of electricity prices, as the dominate factors become distribution and infrastructure to get generation to loads).
The above is crystal clear in the graphics in my citation above "Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs."
> EU countries are expected to add 89GW of new renewable energy capacity in 2025, including 70GW of solar and 19GW of wind, according to Commission projections shared with Reuters. The projections are based on industry data.
> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.
> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.
> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan. (my note: 4 years to add 4.6TW of renewables globally)
> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.
(enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year, and we're fighting over ancient sunlight pumped from the ground; why? we already solved fusion, just at a distance using the sun and batteries; 1GW of solar is installed globally every 15 hours as of this comment)
They could wave a legislative magic wand and stop subsidizing heat pumps and rooftop solar (and everything else hidden in the transmission and distribution fees on their bills) for the HN tax brackets and reap at least somewhat cheaper prices basically overnight.
It looks like the current administration hates solar, but maybe things will change in a few years. California and Texas are among the world leaders, so there's still hope.
According to what i've seen solar and wind make electricity more expensive and damages the local environment. It's an obvious target. Nuclear is the cleanest option.
This is inaccurate. In places with cheap fuel and steady load the prices for power are rising no faster than inflation. In places where fuel costs are increasing or tech companies are forcing us to subsidize their moon race to nothing the prices are increasing.
My solar install is scheduled for December. Even if it ends up missing the cutoff for a tax break I still think it’s the right thing to do. The combination of investing in green energy and locking in my effective electric rate is the smart move right now.
… and I heard on Friday that OpenAI is planning a data center 15 miles south of me. That can only make things worse.
We cancelled our install after TN removed the state level breaks. It pushed the payback out past the expected lifespan of the panels (25 years). I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.
Is this because of the labor costs in the US? In other countries the payback period is much shorter. Someone I know in Brazil told me it is 3-5 years for them.
On a related note, I asked my AC guy if he knows any trustworthy solar installers. He told me that only crooks are in that business :)
In the US, there's often a large labor/materials upcharge on anything that can be branded as "green" - you see a lot of the same thing with higher end heat pump systems and such, too. Efficiency is (for whatever reasons) frequently sold as a luxury product feature in our market and the installers take advantage.
>> I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.
We are struggling with this also -- with or without an incentive. The payback period is long. Makes sense if you think forward rates will be super-high. But people are quite aggressive with their forward rate estimates, yet super-liberal with the lifespan estimates.
I've dealt with enough appliance breakdowns to know all the tricks companies pull
- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on parts. The labor ends up costing more than an entire new system.
- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on labor. The parts ends up costing more than an entire new system, possibly because the parts are no longer made. Labor warranty is now useless and you need to buy a new system all over.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company declares bankruptcy and you have no warranty any longer.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company got acquired and the acquiring company "cant find your warranty details in their system". Regulators are powerless to actually help despite months of letters.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but a tree/hail falls on the house and they declare it out of bounds of warranty. You go through your home insurance, but they only cover current value, not replacement value. You buy a whole new system, only partially covered and start all over again.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but manufacturer blames the malfunction on improper installation, but the installation company is long-gone/retired/non-responsive/bankrupt. Possibly the Accord insurance form is fake also (how many people actually verify the insurance Accord is real?)
Been there, done that, on all the above. Eventually, your only religion is deferred maintenance because you know you get ripped off royally no matter what you do. We havent yet heard horror stories because these systems are new, but you'll hear all the above as time goes on, and people realize the actual life of their systems are far shorter than their payback periods.
Most good solar panels have a 12-15 year warranty on the panel, and a 25-30 year warranty on performance.
But this is a warranty, and you have many panels. If they're all going to fail, they will fail sooner. If one fails or breaks eventually, even if it's not under warranty, replacing the panel is dirt cheap. Of course you need to replace it with an identical panel, so it makes more sense to buy extra panels and just assume some will die. But even if you paid for a replacement, that's already just $100-$200, and it'll probably be cheaper in the future.
So the warranty isn't really that important long-term. They're more important for the short term, and a Tier 1 solar provider's so reliable that you don't really need it anyway.
Skill? If you can use a screwdriver, and lift 50lbs, you can do it.
1) Throw the "DC Disconnect" switch to de-power the panels. 2) Unscrew old panel from rails. 3) Disconnect MC4 connectors (with fingers). 4) Remove old panel and install new panel. 5) Connect MC4 connectors. 6) Screw panel into rails. 8) Throw "DC Disconnect" lever to re-power panels.
There's also a step 7 where the panel needs to be connected to the ground of the other panels, but with modern systems there's these metal clips that just clip onto the edges of adjacent panels to make the ground. Your system may be different but the ground is a pretty simple connection of metal to metal.
Yeah I just have absolutely zero interest in owning, being responsible for, and avoiding scammers in my own electrical power generation, with some vague hope of breaking even decades later. I'll gladly pay a utility for reliable power, regardless of wind and cloud conditions, where they are responsible for all the infrastructure upstream of my meter.
Right. I do a lot of self sufficient things (including some of my own power generation) but I lack the desire to become my own power utility end to end. It’s already frustrating enough since I provide water and sewage to multiple households and electrical connection to the utility with solar and generator backup.
You'd probably be cutting it close with the life of the panel (though maybe electricity price increase will save you)
For CO2 I think it pays itself off fairly quick. It's probably the best investment you could make from a CO2 and local air quality perspective, maybe if your insulation is very bad or switching to a bike from a large personal car
I’m in Canada, in a tight valley that snows a lot.
7.8kw on the roof, even if I paid full price out of pocket it would be fully paid off in 13 years, and then I get $1000 a year of free power for another 20 or so years.
I also am in the process of completing a solar install to get the tax breaks expiring this year. Depending on total cost (i'm DIYing and didn't predict all expenses) I can pay it off in 5-7 years. My power bill is up 50% in one year, and has been increasing for years. With more datacenters taking up more power (which we pay for), the bill's only gonna increase.
There is still time to complete a solar install yourself and get federal+state tax breaks. Call up your energy provider, get connected to their distributed generation department, and submit the forms/documentation/plans they require. Then you build your system, get it inspected, the utility approves it and completes the hookup. ChatGPT makes all this fairly easy. I can upload my forms and the process to GitHub if anyone wants to see the process for NY state.
The simplest grid-tied system is solar panels + roof-mounting equipment + microinverters + a combiner box + a disconnect switch. This is enough to send solar power direct to the grid, assuming your microinverter supports the standards your power utility requires. You can do a PV+ESS (battery) system, but it's a ton more expensive (even assuming you DIY). It should be cheaper to do grid-tied projects, but many power utilities now mandate new standards for grid-tied devices that only the expensive inverters support.
If you do off-grid (which I believe there's still some tax breaks for, depending), you can build a PV+ESS system much cheaper, as the off-grid equipment doesn't require the more expensive standards. We're talking $3.5k vs $9k for the same system.
It would also be cheaper if we supported balcony solar the way Germany does. A big concern of mine is that poor people and people in apartments (~40% of Americans live in apartments) won't have the ability to supplement their bills with solar. If all the people with money and land/houses switch to solar, and the poor can't, the poor'll be propping up a big portion of the energy sector themselves, which is unsustainable.
I thought there are almost no incentives for DIY. Any incentives usually come packaged with go through licensed contractors, who usually charge 10X more than DIY. This is what I've observed with most federal, state, city, utility incentives.
Ask ChatGPT to find the specific statues for federal and state, and check your local code. Most areas allow a homeowner to do electrical and building construction themselves, as long as they pull permits and get inspections. The homeowner basically acts as their own contractor. Solar is no exception; it's just building + electrical work, after all.
I will be getting 30% off from Federal for my solar+battery storage. From NY State, I get a personal income tax credit of 25% on solar (up to $5K), and I pay no state sales tax on solar or batteries. And NY has a 15-year property tax exemption for the whole solar generation setup of property tax.
There are additional credits in my state from NYSERDA that apply only to qualifying contractors, and I'm not a qualifying contractor, so I don't get those extra savings. But I don't need them, because I'm not paying anybody to do the work!
All this applies to renters as well, btw, you just need written permission from the landlord/homeowner.
Yeah, I was thinking of the same study. Looking at just the conversation on HN, lots of people are installing solar. Solar reduces the amount of energy used by that customer, but does not lower the cost of infrastructure to distribute power to that customer at all. And the cost of electricity is dominated by distribution and transmission, not generation. With an increased share of costs going to overhead infrastructure, the cost per watt goes up. Higher consumption increases the share of costs due to generation, and cost per watt goes down.
"Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise."
Which is why cheap batteries will be the camel that broke the straw's back. It's really hard to find numbers, but I like 20–30$/kwh by 2030. At those prices I can get a 4 day backup for an oversized (50kw) solar panel install for my house for 20k$. Why even hook up to the grid, at all?
I am not an expert in electricity generation or transmission, but it does seem strange that this “data center scare” is happening coincidental with (other?) big jumps in home electricity rates that have nothing to do with data centers.
For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.
At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
>At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
Who were they trying to pander to by doing that? Who's votes did the politicians expect to reap?
I feel like the goddamn goose in the meme.
They did that stuff because well off white collar jerks with no problems thought it sounded good. And now, as usual, the rest of society has to pay for it.
> For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.
This problem is unrelated to datacenters. The datacenter boom has created demand in markets outside New England, which is seeping into New England. It only got compounded by lack of natural gas.
> At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.
Mass save is actually a great program. Mass houses are old, creaky, and lacking insulation. Mass save let these things be upgraded at a lower price burden to the masses. If you are talking about heat pumps, heat pumps can have backup furnaces - you could use natural gas if you wanted. The idea behind a heat pump was to have it work with solar, wind, and other low cost energy sources.
Then trump came in and shot all these other sources at gunpoint. And you are seeing it in your bills.
Energy prices have risen roughly at the rate of CPI since 2022, perhaps we got used to the relatively flat prices for the previous decade:
https://www.apolloacademy.com/electricity-prices-have-grown-...
Indeed. You're quite right.
And while it's certainly an unpopular concept to present, electricity right now is a whole lot cheaper (on average, in the US) when viewed through an inflation-tinted lens than it has been at many times in the past.
I find that FRED (from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) is pretty useful for visualizing that kind of data, in part because it shows folks exactly what went into producing the chart. The citations and any maths are all included for inspection (see the "Edit Graph" link). It's hard to use FRED to present information disingenuously: It simply is what it is.
For instance, here's a chart with one line showing inflation-adjusted electricity expense, in the US, over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NyKY
And here's one that also adds several lines with raw data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NyNc
(wherein: It can be plainly seen that the 1980s were very dark times indeed, and the first ~half of the 1990s weren't so great either. We're currently somewhere around turn-of-the-millennia in terms of how much our electric bill hurts compared to how much everything else hurts.
(And none of this should be construed to mean that I'm ecstatic about paying my power bill or something. Everything is fuckin' expensive these days -- including electricity.))
This is not true. Energy prices are rising globally, even in countries with few or no data centers and declining industrial activity. It increasingly looks like a coordinated effort to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers before widespread adoption of solar power shifts the balance.
It is true, even if prices are rising in other places for other reasons.
Those other reasons being none other than pure greed.
Total energy consumption has peaked in Europe in 2021 while prices go up like they're building a data center in every european country every 60 minutes.
> other reasons being none other than pure greed
This is a good sign you’re missing something. Particularly when talking about a global and diversified commodity like energy.
Every for-profit company operating under capitalism is essentially required to be greedy in order to be successful.
Under this definition, the word is devoid of meaning.
That is broadly true, but we need more accuracy.
> Every for-profit company operating under capitalism is essentially required to be greedy
Every company (currently) depends on atmospheric oxygen, that doesn’t make O2 the cause of energy prices.
Greed exists. It always has. Unless energy distributors have specifically become more greedy, recently and globally, the answer is somewhere else.
Shrodinger's market conditions.
Something is either a diversified commodity subject to strict free market competition, razor thin margins and highly elastic supply/demand or it's a shithole of regulatory meddling and inelastic supply/demand with long feedback loops. Which it is depends on what political position you are trying to advance.
> Something is either
False dichotomy.
Also, the cause not being greed doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable. There is probably a problem that can be fixed. It’s just not wishing upon a star that people were less greedy.
>False dichotomy.
Yeah, just tainting something with motivated reasoning without utilizing it solely is absolutely a thing.
Not my fault Schrödinger didn't leave room for all the nuance of market conditions.
Not to say I agree with "hurr durr it's greed". Usually if something is inexplicably wacky and fucked up it traces back to Nth order effects of regulations, not necessarily in the same jurisdictions.
The AI/DC bubble is about pure greed. You're only about a third correct
It is true.
> It increasingly looks like a coordinated effort to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers before widespread adoption of solar power shifts the balance.
That statement isn't wrong, but increased power prices on consumers through socializing the costs of privatized benefit data centers is the mechanism for this. Data centers are a tax on consumers via their electric bills.
Citations:
Data Center Demand Fuels Surge in Electric Costs - https://www.thesandpaper.net/articles/data-center-demand-fue... - October 8th, 2025
AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec... - September 29th, 2025
How AI infrastructure is driving a sharp rise in electricity bills - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-ai-infrastructure-is-d... - September 5th, 2025
Data centers will cause higher electricity prices, study finds - https://www.axios.com/local/raleigh/2025/08/28/data-centers-... - August 28th, 2025
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act - https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... - August 8th, 2025
CMU: Data Center Growth Could Increase Electricity Bills 8% Nationally and as Much as 25% in Some Regional Markets - https://www.cmu.edu/work-that-matters/energy-innovation/data...
https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report
Energy prices are also flat in Europe, due to renewables pushing out volatile fossil fuels.
Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)
Household electricity prices in 1st half of 2025: -0.5% - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/... - October 29th, 2025
Ember Energy: Decoupled: How Spain cut the link between gas and power prices using renewables - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/decoupled-how-spain... - October 2nd, 2025
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...
>The Economist has adapted a model of state-level retail electricity prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to include data centres (see chart 2). We find no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centres, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected. The same went for Georgia. In fact, the model found that higher growth in electricity demand came alongside lower bills, reflecting the fact that a larger load lets a grid spread its fixed costs across more bill-payers.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/30/the-data-...
Do any of these links actually show the exact method that datacenters are "socializing the costs" for energy production? They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would, and pay for their local interconnect to the grid. Why they should be on the hook for long distance transmission/etc. is unclear to me given that every user on the grid takes part of that and has enjoyed under-replacement electrical rates for decades. I have seen the typical local tax abatement deals which I totally agree need to be outright banned - but that's really the only thing that's jumped out at me. Otherwise it's largely opinion pieces parroting the same few background sources.
I'm not sure it's really a correct mental model to put 50+ years of lack of investment maintaining and expanding transmission and grid capacity onto the industry that laid that fact bare. From where I stand and the underlying studies/reports I've personally read the root cause always seems to be we're running out of power on a grid built by the Greatest Generation and more or less zero work has been put into expanding anything since. There were plenty of people sounding alarm bells a decade ago before the latest datacenter boom.
Then you get into NIMBY stuff, pie in the sky wishful thinking re: dispatchable vs. intermittent power generation, etc.
In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter. Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.
I certainly agree with the argument that the datacenters might not end up panning out as profitable investments for society, but I'm at least hopeful that when the dust settles we'll actually have augmented our electric grid and finally started to take that looming problem seriously. We might be left with something useful that lasts another 3 generations when all said and done.
We were going to get here either way with population growth and older power generation facilities not being replaced faster than they are reaching end of life. Datacenters simply brought it forward maybe a decade or so. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's energy investments.
> They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would
Well yeah, you don't need to look further than Econ 101 and supply and demand. If demand goes up, prices go up.
The real problem is that the gains from the new demand don't end up fairly distributed, which is bad but not really directly related to the discussion.
And then supply goes up. In theory.
Americans have coasted too long on other people's infrastructure investment. It's basically run out. Time to pay the piper or watch our quality of life decline.
I firmly believe datacenters are simply the scapegoat de-jour. If this buildout hadn't happened it'd still be EVs or "air conditioning use in the city" like it was beforehand.
It's coming for us either way. At least this way there is an industrial user subsidizing a portion of grid modernization and energy generation tech.
I agree that wealth distribution is a problem. But I come from a "there needs to be wealth to distribute to begin with" standpoint. Degrowth isn't the way.
> In the end if we want wealth, we need industry. Industry needs cheap and abundant power to be competitive - AI datacenter or Aluminum smelter.
Why do we want wealth when it is only going to the wealthiest? AI data centers benefit Big Tech, its employees, and its shareholders. So, who is "we"? I believe I can make the argument that the majority of Americans do not want this, only a privileged minority (ie those getting wealthy from this current hype cycle).
Poll: American voters don't want data centers built in their communities - https://www.thecentersquare.com/issues/energy/article_d5b564... - July 2nd, 2025
> Energy consumption correlates very strongly with wealth, and we've spent decades in the margins messing around with efficiency gains vs. actually investing in anything substantial. When your power company is willing to give you a credit for a more efficient appliance so they don't have to upgrade the grid to your neighborhood you know things have jumped the shark and we are in malinvestment territory.
No longer true.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling
If AI data centers want power, they should be charged a painful premium for it, paid out of the pockets of Big Tech building it. They have the resources, clearly, from the very obvious capital flows. Meta has issued its largest bond offering ever, $30B, for its Hyperion project in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Because when the bubble pops, we're all going to be left holding the bag ("socializing the losses"). We should not all have to suffer higher electrical prices for the benefit of Big Tech and their shareholders. They can pay up for the necessary power infrastructure if they want the gains they're chasing.
> Household electricity prices in 1st half of 2025: -0.5% - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/... - October 29th, 2025
This statement from the EU is not just irrelevant, it’s deliberately misleading. Claiming a modest –0.5% change after a staggering 40% price surge, while oil and gas prices remain near 2019 levels and solar and wind capacity has grown tenfold, feels like a slap in the face to consumers. And yet, you’re amplifying this technically true (but deeply deceptive) narrative because it conveniently props up a flawed argument.
What's a short explanation of the discrepancy in EU wholesale vs household electricity price changes, over the period 2019-2025?
Wholesale increased 30% YoY 2025 over 2024 but household didn't.
Realistically we should compare to 2019 (pre-Covid, pre-inflation, pre-Ukraine war).
Many individual EU govts implemented retail caps, (sales) tax cuts, and transfers. Where is this summarized at-a-glance, by country, by year? Anything better than:
eurostat: "Electricity price statistics" https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
"Winners and losers from the energy crisis: Policy lessons from the Iberian electricity market" - Fabra, Leblanc, Souza (2025) https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/winners-and-losers-energy-cri...
If consumers want cheaper power, they should advocate for more rapid deployment of wind, solar, battery storage, transmission and interconnectors, demand response, and other technologies to make the price of fossil fuels irrelevant in their electrical costs. Data centers are not a component of cheaper energy bills, importantly. They are demand, and compete with consumers for electricity in the market. Fossil fuel prices are volatile; if you do not want to be exposed to volatile fossil fuel pricing, do not use fossil fuels in your electrical grid. It is unlikely fossil fuels get cheaper in the future, as they will be starved for investment. You cannot control the global fossil fuel market (with the primary suppliers being OPEC+ and the US), but you can control your domestic supply and demand for energy. Europe fossil gas prices are never going to go back down to pre-2020 levels as long as they rely on LNG imports vs supply from Russia, for example. The faster Europe pushes out fossil generation in its grid, the faster energy prices go back down (cost of solar at a certain points during the day goes to 0 once enough solar has been deployed; eventually, the cost of generation becomes a much smaller component of electricity prices, as the dominate factors become distribution and infrastructure to get generation to loads).
The above is crystal clear in the graphics in my citation above "Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs."
Additional citations:
EU expects to add record renewable capacity in 2025, industry sees headwinds - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... - April 10th, 2025
> EU countries are expected to add 89GW of new renewable energy capacity in 2025, including 70GW of solar and 19GW of wind, according to Commission projections shared with Reuters. The projections are based on industry data.
The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025
> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.
> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.
> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan. (my note: 4 years to add 4.6TW of renewables globally)
> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.
Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... - June 2025
(enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year, and we're fighting over ancient sunlight pumped from the ground; why? we already solved fusion, just at a distance using the sun and batteries; 1GW of solar is installed globally every 15 hours as of this comment)
All that stuff takes time to build out.
They could wave a legislative magic wand and stop subsidizing heat pumps and rooftop solar (and everything else hidden in the transmission and distribution fees on their bills) for the HN tax brackets and reap at least somewhat cheaper prices basically overnight.
widespread adoption of solar is America is planned for 2097 or thereabouts so few years left of extraction of revenue :)
It looks like the current administration hates solar, but maybe things will change in a few years. California and Texas are among the world leaders, so there's still hope.
He likes nuclear, at least. Mega bonus. Solar is pretty middling in comparison, so that’s fine with me.
According to what i've seen solar and wind make electricity more expensive and damages the local environment. It's an obvious target. Nuclear is the cleanest option.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. This oil-interest friendly administration won't last forever.
Well then what's your mechanism for denial of the data center premise?
This is inaccurate. In places with cheap fuel and steady load the prices for power are rising no faster than inflation. In places where fuel costs are increasing or tech companies are forcing us to subsidize their moon race to nothing the prices are increasing.
My solar install is scheduled for December. Even if it ends up missing the cutoff for a tax break I still think it’s the right thing to do. The combination of investing in green energy and locking in my effective electric rate is the smart move right now.
… and I heard on Friday that OpenAI is planning a data center 15 miles south of me. That can only make things worse.
Whats the time to make your money back with and without the tax break?
We cancelled our install after TN removed the state level breaks. It pushed the payback out past the expected lifespan of the panels (25 years). I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.
Is this because of the labor costs in the US? In other countries the payback period is much shorter. Someone I know in Brazil told me it is 3-5 years for them.
On a related note, I asked my AC guy if he knows any trustworthy solar installers. He told me that only crooks are in that business :)
In the US, there's often a large labor/materials upcharge on anything that can be branded as "green" - you see a lot of the same thing with higher end heat pump systems and such, too. Efficiency is (for whatever reasons) frequently sold as a luxury product feature in our market and the installers take advantage.
Or other countries could be paying more for electricity?
Yes it could be. But I checked the electricity price in Brazil and at $0.16 per kWh it is almost the same as what we pay in Texas.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Brazil/electricity_prices...
>> I would have been fine with a 10 year payback, but 25+ was just not worth doing.
We are struggling with this also -- with or without an incentive. The payback period is long. Makes sense if you think forward rates will be super-high. But people are quite aggressive with their forward rate estimates, yet super-liberal with the lifespan estimates.
I've dealt with enough appliance breakdowns to know all the tricks companies pull
- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on parts. The labor ends up costing more than an entire new system.
- You have a 25 year warranty, but only on labor. The parts ends up costing more than an entire new system, possibly because the parts are no longer made. Labor warranty is now useless and you need to buy a new system all over.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company declares bankruptcy and you have no warranty any longer.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but the company got acquired and the acquiring company "cant find your warranty details in their system". Regulators are powerless to actually help despite months of letters.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but a tree/hail falls on the house and they declare it out of bounds of warranty. You go through your home insurance, but they only cover current value, not replacement value. You buy a whole new system, only partially covered and start all over again.
- You have a 25 year warranty on parts and labor, but manufacturer blames the malfunction on improper installation, but the installation company is long-gone/retired/non-responsive/bankrupt. Possibly the Accord insurance form is fake also (how many people actually verify the insurance Accord is real?)
Been there, done that, on all the above. Eventually, your only religion is deferred maintenance because you know you get ripped off royally no matter what you do. We havent yet heard horror stories because these systems are new, but you'll hear all the above as time goes on, and people realize the actual life of their systems are far shorter than their payback periods.
Most good solar panels have a 12-15 year warranty on the panel, and a 25-30 year warranty on performance.
But this is a warranty, and you have many panels. If they're all going to fail, they will fail sooner. If one fails or breaks eventually, even if it's not under warranty, replacing the panel is dirt cheap. Of course you need to replace it with an identical panel, so it makes more sense to buy extra panels and just assume some will die. But even if you paid for a replacement, that's already just $100-$200, and it'll probably be cheaper in the future.
So the warranty isn't really that important long-term. They're more important for the short term, and a Tier 1 solar provider's so reliable that you don't really need it anyway.
The cost to replace a panel is not “dirt cheap” and requires significant skill.
I could say that “rebuilding a car engine is dirt cheap” assuming I can do it myself.
Skill? If you can use a screwdriver, and lift 50lbs, you can do it.
1) Throw the "DC Disconnect" switch to de-power the panels. 2) Unscrew old panel from rails. 3) Disconnect MC4 connectors (with fingers). 4) Remove old panel and install new panel. 5) Connect MC4 connectors. 6) Screw panel into rails. 8) Throw "DC Disconnect" lever to re-power panels.
There's also a step 7 where the panel needs to be connected to the ground of the other panels, but with modern systems there's these metal clips that just clip onto the edges of adjacent panels to make the ground. Your system may be different but the ground is a pretty simple connection of metal to metal.
Here's a YouTube short showing it: https://youtube.com/shorts/fpyXHsZCb6M?si=JHoYfff2yz3ZsA9P
Yeah I just have absolutely zero interest in owning, being responsible for, and avoiding scammers in my own electrical power generation, with some vague hope of breaking even decades later. I'll gladly pay a utility for reliable power, regardless of wind and cloud conditions, where they are responsible for all the infrastructure upstream of my meter.
Right. I do a lot of self sufficient things (including some of my own power generation) but I lack the desire to become my own power utility end to end. It’s already frustrating enough since I provide water and sewage to multiple households and electrical connection to the utility with solar and generator backup.
I think GP's point isn't necessary "with vs without tax break", it's "with vs without giant future increase in electricity price"
You'd probably be cutting it close with the life of the panel (though maybe electricity price increase will save you) For CO2 I think it pays itself off fairly quick. It's probably the best investment you could make from a CO2 and local air quality perspective, maybe if your insulation is very bad or switching to a bike from a large personal car
you'll basically never make it back iirc
by the time you may even get close to paying it off, its time for a new one.
really only worth if you just want to have solar and got a spare 5-6 figures to drop on it and wont miss that money.
hopefully this changes in the near future and it will be way more affordable.
What planet are you on?
I’m in Canada, in a tight valley that snows a lot.
7.8kw on the roof, even if I paid full price out of pocket it would be fully paid off in 13 years, and then I get $1000 a year of free power for another 20 or so years.
Even at full price it’s a total no brainer.
I also am in the process of completing a solar install to get the tax breaks expiring this year. Depending on total cost (i'm DIYing and didn't predict all expenses) I can pay it off in 5-7 years. My power bill is up 50% in one year, and has been increasing for years. With more datacenters taking up more power (which we pay for), the bill's only gonna increase.
There is still time to complete a solar install yourself and get federal+state tax breaks. Call up your energy provider, get connected to their distributed generation department, and submit the forms/documentation/plans they require. Then you build your system, get it inspected, the utility approves it and completes the hookup. ChatGPT makes all this fairly easy. I can upload my forms and the process to GitHub if anyone wants to see the process for NY state.
The simplest grid-tied system is solar panels + roof-mounting equipment + microinverters + a combiner box + a disconnect switch. This is enough to send solar power direct to the grid, assuming your microinverter supports the standards your power utility requires. You can do a PV+ESS (battery) system, but it's a ton more expensive (even assuming you DIY). It should be cheaper to do grid-tied projects, but many power utilities now mandate new standards for grid-tied devices that only the expensive inverters support.
If you do off-grid (which I believe there's still some tax breaks for, depending), you can build a PV+ESS system much cheaper, as the off-grid equipment doesn't require the more expensive standards. We're talking $3.5k vs $9k for the same system.
It would also be cheaper if we supported balcony solar the way Germany does. A big concern of mine is that poor people and people in apartments (~40% of Americans live in apartments) won't have the ability to supplement their bills with solar. If all the people with money and land/houses switch to solar, and the poor can't, the poor'll be propping up a big portion of the energy sector themselves, which is unsustainable.
I thought there are almost no incentives for DIY. Any incentives usually come packaged with go through licensed contractors, who usually charge 10X more than DIY. This is what I've observed with most federal, state, city, utility incentives.
Ask ChatGPT to find the specific statues for federal and state, and check your local code. Most areas allow a homeowner to do electrical and building construction themselves, as long as they pull permits and get inspections. The homeowner basically acts as their own contractor. Solar is no exception; it's just building + electrical work, after all.
I will be getting 30% off from Federal for my solar+battery storage. From NY State, I get a personal income tax credit of 25% on solar (up to $5K), and I pay no state sales tax on solar or batteries. And NY has a 15-year property tax exemption for the whole solar generation setup of property tax.
There are additional credits in my state from NYSERDA that apply only to qualifying contractors, and I'm not a qualifying contractor, so I don't get those extra savings. But I don't need them, because I'm not paying anybody to do the work!
All this applies to renters as well, btw, you just need written permission from the landlord/homeowner.
The fed tax credit ones are just part of your normal filing with the IRS (5695). The state ones vary
hm, I think this contradicts the results from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
Yeah, I was thinking of the same study. Looking at just the conversation on HN, lots of people are installing solar. Solar reduces the amount of energy used by that customer, but does not lower the cost of infrastructure to distribute power to that customer at all. And the cost of electricity is dominated by distribution and transmission, not generation. With an increased share of costs going to overhead infrastructure, the cost per watt goes up. Higher consumption increases the share of costs due to generation, and cost per watt goes down.
"Contrary to these concerns, our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices. Fig. 5 depicts this relationship for 2019–2024: states with the highest load growth experienced reductions in real prices, whereas states with contracting loads generally saw prices rise."
Which is why cheap batteries will be the camel that broke the straw's back. It's really hard to find numbers, but I like 20–30$/kwh by 2030. At those prices I can get a 4 day backup for an oversized (50kw) solar panel install for my house for 20k$. Why even hook up to the grid, at all?
Hook up to the grid for arbitrage, and make some more money.
> Why even hook up to the grid, at all?
Day 5?
It is good the electricity demand is going up, because this will help us electrify things.