Is Your Electric Bill Going Up? AI Is Partly to Blame

Received an email from our East Coast USA centralized power provider about 2 hours ago now in a very obnoxiously large BOLDED email font stating "Your electricity use is projected to be 35% higher this billing period".

My 'who you know' management people at this power provider have expressed a severe growing backlog of unpaid bills in our talks and as a result they have had to change their policy around cutoffs. More alarming is their need to bring law enforcement with them to residences now for power cutoffs that have reached an unpaid threshold above some normal classification, and yes violence against the power company employees only doing their job is growing given the culmination of economic events creating this situation. Consider your own reaction if you haven't paid your electrical bills for many months and you see the power company pull up to your residence to pull your meter thus leaving you in the dark and cold. Violence against power companies employees is growing although it has not yet reached news worthy status but just give it time.

My opening statement represents the power company's changes to communicate your consumption and how it will impact your personal finances at month's end in order to get in front of all those in society that are reactive, which is most folks. As a highly proactive futurist four years ago now I installed BIPV and batteries taking advantage of the U.S. and Maryland governments monetary kickbacks so while some here see me as the problem my 35% increase this month is minuscule given having nearly no electric bill through PV and significant efficiency improvements to my residence.

Time is one's most valuable asset and many waste their time to then only complain about their situation. I would encourage everyone to get in front of your dependencies and work daily to reduce or eliminate them and this approach will return more of one's time, something that cannot be bought.

Stay Healthy!

"Yes, in an environment where power availability is ~fixed on short-to-medium time scales, adding a new large demand will increase prices."

You just nullified your own point.

Regulations also made coal more expensive and forced many plants to close. You can argue that's a win, but it's a lie to then attribute the resulting price increase to AI or other factors.

The headline says "partly". Your comment agrees with that.

Yes, that's probably what made my electric bill go up 40% since last year.

Conservatives promoted a worldview where corporations are expected to do absolutely anything that isn't illegal to increase shareholder value. In such a world, regulations are the only way to protect ourselves from corporations that would gladly kill us to make a buck.

it's to blame in the sense that there is a counterfactual reality where the AI companies pay for their own power and your bill doesn't go up and we can pass a law to make that counterfactual real. but yeah, blame is supposed to be about assigning responsibility. the change is attributed to AI in the sense that if they didn't exist it wouldn't have gone up, but technically the responsibility here is on policymakers to do something now that we are aware of the attribution, and they deserve to be blamed if they don't. blaming AI companies directly is a contemptuous mindset that blames them basically just for existing. which might be cathartic but it's not useful.

100% this. I'm sick and tired of alarmist news and scapegoats when politicians and greedy energy corporations are to blame for everything. Yes, AI consumes more energy because we're using AI so by this logic we are to blame for everything.

Demand added now

Ignore regulations, make it the Wild West, break out the child labour and environmental destruction and all your other wet dreams.

How long will it take to increase supply?

"and extra especially nuclear, in addition to making power lines difficult to build, are to blame"

I used to think nuclear reactors are just hard to build in general, because the costs when something goes wrong are very, very high. So what unnecessary regulation is there with nuclear reactors that you think should be deleted?

Removing regulations from nuclear won't help because it takes so long to build a nuclear plant. Yes it would help in the long term, but in the short term price goes up.

However it should be faster to build a solar plant, a battery bank and a power line between them and the new data center than it takes to build a new data center. It isn't because of silliness, and that's what to blame for the power price increases IMO.

So supply and demand only matter for the axis you personally care about? AI companies use a lot of electricity. Increased demand leads to increased prices. This isn't normally controversial.

AI has done bad things for humanity. I know, I know, a tough pill to swallow. However will Hacker News users cope with the trauma?? Of knowing... AI... can be bad... sometimes?

So the reason my electricity rates were pretty much constant from 2013 to 2023 and then started going up is not the things that have changed in the last couple or so years but rather the things that have not changed?

Even with prolific supply there's tons of government programs that subsidize things and then roll those things back into delivery and transmission costs.

The poors pay for rooftop solar and heat pump subsidies for HNers.

What are the specific regulations that make building new power plants hard?

On the one hand I can understand residential rates being somewhat higher, they are still running service to your neighborhood, running a drop to your house, providing a meter and having to maintain that, but are selling a relatively small amount of electricity on that meter.

But a huge new consumer should not be paid for by raising residential rates. If their demand exceeds supply, that price should be paid by that consumer not all the other customers whose usage hasn't changed.

And all those subsidized heat pumps and solar panels our governments make subsidy programs for are paid for by rolling those costs into our transmission/distribution/delivery fees.

Quantity matters.

People replacing gas stoves with electric will cause a significant total increase in electricity demand but that increase will be spread out over a decade or two.

New data centers are causing a significant increase over a short term, and so have a much large effect.