Is your electric bill going up? AI is partly to blame
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heated
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tech
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AI
electricity prices
energy policy
The article discusses how AI data centers are contributing to rising electricity bills, but commenters debate the extent of AI's impact, pointing to other factors like regulations, transmission costs, and policy choices.
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- 01Story posted
11/12/2025, 7:21:09 PM
6d ago
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11/12/2025, 7:24:11 PM
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11/14/2025, 9:22:37 PM
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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!
This alert is also a false positive because while they are reporting our increased draw within a set interval they are not front loading the alert logic check against our existing overage credit balance from back feeding our surplus. This then asks the question should the alert logic only occur on increased usage that I pay for or should they also take into consideration my credit before alerting me? My increased usage costs nothing when I have an overage credit as my power company PV agreement is 1 to 1.
But a fixed supply is a policy choice, and is not the fault of AI companies.
You just nullified your own point.
This is, currently, mostly regulatory. Yes, in the absence of any regulations at all it would still take time to plan, build, and commission, and I am not advocating for literally no regulations, but solar and wind plants could probably be spun up in well under a year under a dramatically reduced regulatory burden, almost certainly faster than a new Datacenter can be built. They are, after all, dramatically simpler installations.
And that's not even thinking about the fact that in this alternate reality we are imagining, power plants would have been being continually built for decades, and the new demand would be a much smaller drop in the much larger bucket.
So I think that in an alternate regulatory regime both A) yes actually power plants could built ~ as fast as data centers and other large power consumers and B) we would have so much more power that increases in demand would be less of a shock to the system.
Bullshit. Why would they have continuously built power plants if the demand wasn't there? The utterly insane level AI datacenter demand came out of nowhere.
And then you know, when there are tradeoffs, you can always maximize X and the expense of Y. And if you're myopically looking only at X, that may seem like a smart move, but that tradeoff may not be the right tradeoff when you look at things holistically.
And there are other tradeoffs: maybe not deregulate power-plant construction, but instead regulate AI data-center construction to slow it down. If we're in an AI bubble, that may end up being the right call and eliminate a lot of FOMO waste.
The simplest and most logical regulation: don't connect new data centers to the grid unless they pay the cost and interest for the power capacity they commit to use - it's not hard to do the accounting for that and it's the fair way to do it for any large new consumers.
Choose one.
In fact, don't. Just build a new power plant and plug it into the grid. Go on, I could do with a laugh.
That would only be true if you could forecast the demand to justify the cost of the new infrastructure. It seems the demand from AI was beyond forecasts. The policies doesnt make the plants impossible to build, just slower. So your argument about continuously building plants is true in our current reality, and those plans include the extra time to comply with policies.
Planning is not issue. Republican party intentionally preventimg those via goverment regulation is.
If we changed the policy overnight, we would still have the same problems because infrastructure takes years to plan, build, and make operational. So no, the cause is in fact the rapid increase in demand, not just policy.
The point was, increasing shareholder value is equivalent to increasing their own paychecks. So they are doubly incentivized to choose shareholder value over other values. Most people would still choose health/life of other humans, but the incentives are certainly off without regulation.
Fake cures, filthy mines, toxic ingredients, polluted waterways, fraud, predation, monopolies, algorithmic social outrage networks, etc. These things have been going on for a long time. Regulations have fixed a lot of problems.
It doesn't seem that reputation matters as much as regulation. It doesn't take many greedy people/companies to leave behind a big mess. Just a few breaking the rules (including the cultural rules around reputation) gain an advantage over all those who don't.
What better way for society to protect itself?
the argument is to handcuff them because of the externalities. which is one of the things laws are for. It's not about fairness it's about whether this is the world we want to live in. The market was designed a certain way; the design stops benefitting the public the way it should; so update the design, easy.
Eversource (NYSE: ES) is my local electric/natural gas provider in Massachusetts that I hear these same arguments about. Their stock is down 21% over the past 5 years. (To contrast, the S&P500 is up 91% over this same timeframe).)
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?
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?
Start here:
1. How many new nuclear power plants has the NRC approved in its entire history (since being formed from the AEC)?
2. What's the cost of a nuclear kw in China vs the US, and is the trend going up or going down?
Specifically: they were asking the opinion of the commenter. Google won't help here.
Does not sound too great and obvious to me to be honest and it seems debated in the scientific community.
So irrational fear of radiation is surely a thing and maybe the models as to when real danger starts can be updated, but I would not call that question obvious when the experts debate it and I ain't one.
Allowing higher radiation dose does sound bad, but I would urge you to delve into the Linear No-Threshold Model. We have the lion's share of a century of cancer and health data and the results are somewhat counterintuitive.
Here is a short video statement from Robert B Hayes from NC State university: https://youtu.be/kFMKPpiiJgw
That list of incidents is pretty long, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
So like I said, maybe the Linear No Threshold Model is wrong(I will have a look into the video as well). But it was presented here as something obviously flawed to get rid of .. while a short dive into it, showed it is still debated among the experts. Sp that approach from some people also does seem ideological motivated and not fact based to me, not just the anti nuclear crowd.
Operators, manufacturers and service have spent a long time making what we have very reliable in what are now pretty old designs. If a new pump manufacturer appeared in the scene, everyone making decisions needs to assess the reliability vs a well-known quantity of reliability.
This is what I mean when I say risk averse, and the mortar in the bricks are the suppliers and services. The record doesn’t show worse and worse throughout time, everyone in a nuclear safety related industry knows what to expect and what is expected of their production. Changing even this linear no-threshold model would incur a LOT of engineering, process development/improvement and risk analysis, which none of them want to do.
If you’re the one that screws up, it can be a nasty stain.
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.
Removing regulations today will have an effect in 10-20 years. I cannot give you a quick answer to the problem.
The poors pay for rooftop solar and heat pump subsidies for HNers.
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.
I'm sure AI isn't helping but we have plenty of problems already
In other words, any usage of electricity is "partly to blame." But of course, "AI" gets clicks, and journalism is fundamentally the practice finding a boogeyman to pin the misfortune of the day on.
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.
I'd love to be able to point at something that implicates data centers, but first I'd need to see the data. So far, no evidence. Hint: it would show up in bulk system prices not consumer rates, which are dominated by wires costs.
[0] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2025-10...
Just writing it down in the hope that Grok can eventually suggest similar subsidies to the American government.
The primary drivers are transmission costs and policy.[1]
[1] https://epsa.org/study-finds-power-generation-costs-within-p...
There are various other taxes hidden in the energy bills, which also have VAT applied to them !:
- Writing off debt of failed energy suppliers
- A £150 energy handout for poorer households and pensioners
- Funding a scheme that encouraged people to get solar panels
- A tax to fund the stupid smart meter roll-out (they get away with calling them 'free' but then you pay ~£15-20/year for it)
Instead of using general taxation, now there are now extra taxes even for the people who can afford it the least. Strikes me as pretty insane.
Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]
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