While I'm all for solar and batteries, the real answer here is regulation that prevents existing power resources (generation and grid capacity) from being allocated away from existing customers (especially individual humans!) and towards large-scale industrial use.
There are a few types of natural monopolies here. Deregulation only works when the underlying incentives of the market are compatible with the intended goals of the system. It took a strong top-down mandate to get this country wired up [0]. What now seems to be growing is a perverse incentive where utilities would rather sell bulk electricity to industrial customers (easy) rather than the tedious work of maintaining lots of last-mile infrastructure to bespoke customers. But it's exactly those unenumerable small-marginal-use customers where the big distributed-value generation lies!
With a proper mitigation of this perverse incentive, we would see new generation (perhaps even solar and batteries) getting deployed by the builders of the data centers, paying the true cost of their construction rather than externalizing it onto existing grid users.
What is really need is a really huge tax on these data centers for power and water consumption. The amounts collected are passed to residential consumers based upon their bill.
While I'm all for solar and batteries, the real answer here is regulation that prevents existing power resources (generation and grid capacity) from being allocated away from existing customers (especially individual humans!) and towards large-scale industrial use.
There are a few types of natural monopolies here. Deregulation only works when the underlying incentives of the market are compatible with the intended goals of the system. It took a strong top-down mandate to get this country wired up [0]. What now seems to be growing is a perverse incentive where utilities would rather sell bulk electricity to industrial customers (easy) rather than the tedious work of maintaining lots of last-mile infrastructure to bespoke customers. But it's exactly those unenumerable small-marginal-use customers where the big distributed-value generation lies!
With a proper mitigation of this perverse incentive, we would see new generation (perhaps even solar and batteries) getting deployed by the builders of the data centers, paying the true cost of their construction rather than externalizing it onto existing grid users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
What is really need is a really huge tax on these data centers for power and water consumption. The amounts collected are passed to residential consumers based upon their bill.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090
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