It seems, according to the article, that the local energy operator is a bigger problem than just growing demand from AI - they don’t seem to manage the energy transformation competently, and the issues began pre-chatbots.
“In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid”
It is not just one grid operator (though some may be worse than others). Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last 20 years[1] because all growth has been offset by efficiency gains. The same is true in Europe, e.g. Germany[2].
As a result, grid operators and lawmakers in the west have collectively forgotten how to deal with rapid growth of electricity demand.
Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone
How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay.
This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.
Competition is for losers.
I don't see why residents in Oregon would like to compete with big tech dollars for utility services. It is a losing endouver when you are far from the printing presses.
So I guess "fair" is adjusted for access to capital?
A nice idea I've seen is that residential households pay a low amount per kilowatt-hour they consume until they reach some determined minimum "amount of energy this household needs to maintain a basic standard of living", and after that residential users go onto market rate.
Anyone using that energy to make a profit - that is, run a business - pays market rate from the start.
Seems simpler to just use a power law formula to calculate the price for a buyer.
Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards.
Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then
Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.
Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes.
China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"*
* "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc,
while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China
I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation.
Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes?
I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.
> "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said
[citation needed]
The article did go on...
> According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour
But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.
It doesn't detail it in the articles and it's quite hard to find details without looking at a specific bill or a specific provider, but for my provider in NYS, the cents/kwh for electricity cost does not include transmission costs or the fee for being connected to the grid. Those are separate line items that cover the cost of the lines and infrastructure for the community. On a more arguable note, even if you only use "one big line" to connect, you're stil part of the grid and should be shouldering some of the burden to maintain that grid and not just your line.
There is a standing charge which supposed to cover distribution cost and per kWh price which is supposed to cover the energy itself. Almost 50% of my bill is the standing charge (I don’t know how high it’s for PGE though).
If power use is an issue during heat waves, it means the construction of solar capacity was messed up somewhere in the process.
In Poland/EU during summer we have electricity surplus, not deficit.
It just depends on how the electricity is spent. If you have lots of electric heaters and no air conditioning in your country, then the demand is high in winter and low in summer. But if it's the other way around then the demand peeks during heat waves.
Our current solar capacity / peak generation is roughly enough to cover ACs if we had 90% (like US) generation, not 10%. On top of that we have other sources which we need anyway for winter.
Oregon was very slow do adapt solar due to poor regulation and other reasons. It even says so in the article.
Be that as it may, they use up a lot of power and are pushing demand ahead of supply, which can only mean higher prices:
It’s not really disingenuous as distribution from a local substation to individual customers is cheap in most cases. When you start talking 10,000+ homes on say 1 acre lots they collectively use a lot of power in a fairly small area.
Most of the distribution costs occur on the other side of a substation due to efficiency losses with long distance transmission etc. A data center located next to a power plant has some advantages, but still needs power when that power plant is offline.
If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on.
Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
There’s no value in doing more with less?
Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.
>Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
most of the increase in value comes out of getting more output out of the same input, which is what the application of intelligence is supposed to do. In qualitative terms this means dematerialisation. Your pocket supercomputer is more valuable than something that used to fill a stadium not because it applies more energy, but the opposite.
You used to drive your steel car with dinosaur fuel to the video rental store where you picked up plastic boxes to put into your single purpose device, now you send information through a fiber-optic cable, calculate the energy differential for that. Real civilizational progress is doing what you used to do with matter with light instead.
Large data centers may have to go on interruptable power, and shut down servers during peak electricity load periods. Steel mills do that.
How hard would it be to power all data centers via solar panels attached to batteries?
The area of solar panels needed to power data centers is .. maybe 100x the area of the data center?
Only a tiny percentage of the USA is covered by data centers. Maybe 100 million square meters? That would be something like 0.001%.
Then covering 0.1% of the USA with solar panels could power all data centers.
[deleted]
Dyson. Sphere.
Why do we stall human progress and not get started on this end state tech yesterday? It is the key to a functioning singularity.
And the kicker? It’s easy. We already have all necessary parts available off shelf. And it’s green, ain’t no pollution like space pollution.
It seems, according to the article, that the local energy operator is a bigger problem than just growing demand from AI - they don’t seem to manage the energy transformation competently, and the issues began pre-chatbots.
“In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid”
It is not just one grid operator (though some may be worse than others). Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last 20 years[1] because all growth has been offset by efficiency gains. The same is true in Europe, e.g. Germany[2].
As a result, grid operators and lawmakers in the west have collectively forgotten how to deal with rapid growth of electricity demand.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-el...
Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...
How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay.
This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.
Competition is for losers.
I don't see why residents in Oregon would like to compete with big tech dollars for utility services. It is a losing endouver when you are far from the printing presses.
So I guess "fair" is adjusted for access to capital?
A nice idea I've seen is that residential households pay a low amount per kilowatt-hour they consume until they reach some determined minimum "amount of energy this household needs to maintain a basic standard of living", and after that residential users go onto market rate.
Anyone using that energy to make a profit - that is, run a business - pays market rate from the start.
Seems simpler to just use a power law formula to calculate the price for a buyer.
Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards.
Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then
Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.
Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes. China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"*
* "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc, while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China
I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation.
Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes?
I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.
> "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said
[citation needed]
The article did go on...
> According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour
But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.
It doesn't detail it in the articles and it's quite hard to find details without looking at a specific bill or a specific provider, but for my provider in NYS, the cents/kwh for electricity cost does not include transmission costs or the fee for being connected to the grid. Those are separate line items that cover the cost of the lines and infrastructure for the community. On a more arguable note, even if you only use "one big line" to connect, you're stil part of the grid and should be shouldering some of the burden to maintain that grid and not just your line.
There is a standing charge which supposed to cover distribution cost and per kWh price which is supposed to cover the energy itself. Almost 50% of my bill is the standing charge (I don’t know how high it’s for PGE though).
If power use is an issue during heat waves, it means the construction of solar capacity was messed up somewhere in the process.
In Poland/EU during summer we have electricity surplus, not deficit.
It just depends on how the electricity is spent. If you have lots of electric heaters and no air conditioning in your country, then the demand is high in winter and low in summer. But if it's the other way around then the demand peeks during heat waves.
Our current solar capacity / peak generation is roughly enough to cover ACs if we had 90% (like US) generation, not 10%. On top of that we have other sources which we need anyway for winter.
Oregon was very slow do adapt solar due to poor regulation and other reasons. It even says so in the article.
Be that as it may, they use up a lot of power and are pushing demand ahead of supply, which can only mean higher prices:
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/26/fast-growing-energy-d...
It’s not really disingenuous as distribution from a local substation to individual customers is cheap in most cases. When you start talking 10,000+ homes on say 1 acre lots they collectively use a lot of power in a fairly small area.
Most of the distribution costs occur on the other side of a substation due to efficiency losses with long distance transmission etc. A data center located next to a power plant has some advantages, but still needs power when that power plant is offline.
Electricity prices are static since at least the 70s https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...
Total electric production is stagnant over the same period https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity
If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on.
Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
There’s no value in doing more with less?
Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.
>Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.
most of the increase in value comes out of getting more output out of the same input, which is what the application of intelligence is supposed to do. In qualitative terms this means dematerialisation. Your pocket supercomputer is more valuable than something that used to fill a stadium not because it applies more energy, but the opposite.
You used to drive your steel car with dinosaur fuel to the video rental store where you picked up plastic boxes to put into your single purpose device, now you send information through a fiber-optic cable, calculate the energy differential for that. Real civilizational progress is doing what you used to do with matter with light instead.
Large data centers may have to go on interruptable power, and shut down servers during peak electricity load periods. Steel mills do that.
How hard would it be to power all data centers via solar panels attached to batteries?
The area of solar panels needed to power data centers is .. maybe 100x the area of the data center?
Only a tiny percentage of the USA is covered by data centers. Maybe 100 million square meters? That would be something like 0.001%.
Then covering 0.1% of the USA with solar panels could power all data centers.
Dyson. Sphere.
Why do we stall human progress and not get started on this end state tech yesterday? It is the key to a functioning singularity.
And the kicker? It’s easy. We already have all necessary parts available off shelf. And it’s green, ain’t no pollution like space pollution.