Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.
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.
Yeah but all that costs money too, subsidies or not it comes from somewhere. Maybe your electric bill is lower but you’re paying higher on taxes or on something else that could have been subsidized.
The only good subsidies do is lower risk and advance technology. No one wants to take a chance on first generation products at high cost and high risk. So once the technology is developed, scalable, and sustainable someone begins to profit off of a subsidy. What good is a subsidy if it’s taken as profit somewhere on the chain of companies building it and not saving rate payers?
Regardless, there is going to be a bottleneck somewhere when demands are spiking and it takes years for this stuff to come online to support it. Data centers are gobbling up existing capacity that was built for long term projected growth. So how are utilities going to pay for future infrastructure to replace that capacity…. rate increases for everyone! The bottle neck of generation is caused by them and huge demands quickly, not because of subsidies, technology, or political will (related energy supply). You allow the generation to go to data centers then you are bottlenecking the materials or labor to replace the capacity later.
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.
Yeah but all that costs money too, subsidies or not it comes from somewhere. Maybe your electric bill is lower but you’re paying higher on taxes or on something else that could have been subsidized.
The only good subsidies do is lower risk and advance technology. No one wants to take a chance on first generation products at high cost and high risk. So once the technology is developed, scalable, and sustainable someone begins to profit off of a subsidy. What good is a subsidy if it’s taken as profit somewhere on the chain of companies building it and not saving rate payers?
Regardless, there is going to be a bottleneck somewhere when demands are spiking and it takes years for this stuff to come online to support it. Data centers are gobbling up existing capacity that was built for long term projected growth. So how are utilities going to pay for future infrastructure to replace that capacity…. rate increases for everyone! The bottle neck of generation is caused by them and huge demands quickly, not because of subsidies, technology, or political will (related energy supply). You allow the generation to go to data centers then you are bottlenecking the materials or labor to replace the capacity later.