- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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I live in NJ, USA. I thought I had missed a payment when my last electric bill came. Nope, just a huge rate hike. about the same amount of electricity as the prior year, double the bill.
Were you recently told your bill is gonna go up again when they put in that massive data center in a year or so? We were told. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ no option to say “fuck you, make them pay their bills.” Nope. PSE&g was like “brace for it bitch.” And that was it.
I probably was. But I also just delete all their emails. They’re the only energy distributer in my area. Even if I contracted with someone else I’d have to pay their increased distribution rates.
Yeah same here. Just bullshit that they’re like “this is happening. Pay us more”
PSE&G told some coworkers of mine their bill would go up by “as much as 20%” shortly before they went up by 150%. One of them got a bill for $800 for their two bedroom apartment
how can they get away with this? Are data centers not paying their bills?
The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.
What? That doesn’t make any sense.
It’s essentially supply and demand. If the data center is willing to pay more, then everyone has to pay more. I hate it.
even under the assumption that they do pay the exact same prices as normal citizens (they don’t). electricity prices will go up the more usage there is, as they mostly rely on limited factors.
Are data centers not paying their bills?
They are. The state has failed to ensure there is adequate supply to keep prices flat.
Look up your local “Public Service Commission”
Then note that everyone on it is a republiQan.
My electric utility just arbitrarily added 170 (~50% of the total) bucks to my bill this month, despite me using 11% less electricity.
The whole point of being a utility is to allow the “efficiency” of a monopoly without the ability to gouge the customers. Frankly, I’m looking to see if there is a lawsuit against the utility at this point so I can join on to it.
Also looking into residential solar. Ideally I can just give my electric utility the finger and disconnect my service. Between them and gas, I’m paying about 400 bucks a month, which could get me a nice loan for a solar array, battery backup, and all electric appliances.
And, funny enough, you would be doing them, the world, the datacenters, and yourself some good.
Yeah the problem is going to be getting the loan, and I would need about 1900sqft for the solar array, which would take up most of my yard. I’d need to elevate it up near the roofline of the house, so the entire back yard would be one big partially shaded patio. Which sounds nice, but I don’t think the city will let me build it.
I think that sooner or later GPT 6 and higher models will become too expensive for most people, and they will moderate their ardor and start introducing restrictions on use without all this circus like, look, we have a perpetual motion machine…
But even weak models are enough to spy on you damn well.
All the models are already too expensive for most people. Most people don’t pay to use them, billionaire investors do. When the AI bubble bursts our retirement funds will collapse and billionaires will simply move money somewhere else.
Well, yes, something similar has already happened, it seems that even some rich people, because of one such bubble, passed away when they lost everything.
I’ve been thinking this for some time. It just seems completely implausible that companies like OpenAI will continue letting the people of the world use their product for free, what with the ruthless material requirements involved in it’s distribution and upkeep.
To me it seems clear that the right to intellectual property and the right to work or contribute meaningfully to a workplace (as if that were actually a right) are currently being blitzscaled. I.e. these guys are running their companies at a loss to allow their product to become a necessity. Once that’s achieved you will no longer have the option not to use it and they will be able to charge whatever they like.
We really need to begin pressuring states and governance to protect us from the predatory business models of these venture capitalists.
Well we don’t have much time, we either need to act now or we could end up in something like 1984 and Mad Max. Although I’m not entirely sure, I’m afraid that we will really end up in complete shit due to crop failure, hunger and, of course, death and poverty, so we may well live like in those works. There seems to be a theory that the world is not run by governments but by corporations and governments are like puppets for the rich.
They will just let people use some micro model that’s basically as good as the current mini one and call it a day
“States feel pressure to act”
First of all, did they interview all the States? Secondly did the states say they “felt” “pressure” “to act”? And lastly, Bull.Shit.
I see white roofs that can be dark themed to reduce the load on the grid.
Wasn’t there a country with too much solar, causing electricity prices to fall too low?
Do they not have any space left for data-centres?That’s probably true but you only get ⅓ of a day on average of power. Demands are still rising so the other ⅔ of the day prices are higher and likely still averages higher on average for an entire day even if ⅓ of it is so cheap.
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.
I’d say you won’t really require batteries for something like this, that will mostly be generating less energy than it is expending at any point of time.
Note that I am only suggesting filling the roofs and not the rest of the area around it.Besides, they most probably have a Double-conversion UPS, so they just need to make a controller that supports a side input channel for charging from the PV output.
