Yes. They can pay to build their own sources of power of their own choosing. Or put more resources into doing data centers more efficiently, their choice.

Make the data centers build their own power plants. Then they get all the risk and all the reward.

Make them put the power plant right next to the data center, that way they're not stressing out the rest of the grid. And that way the exact same community that gets the benefits of hosting the data center also gets the environmental costs of the power plant.

When unemployment is low in the construction sector, we can't have them pay. When they pay, they'll outbid us for workers who were previously building homes and public infrastructure. We'd either have to outbid cloud for these workers, or we'd pay by having higher housing prices and crumbling infrastructure, which incurs other social costs. Real resources are finite. The only way for us to not pay is for them to not build the power plants and datacenters. In a truly democratic system we'd be able to say no. In this system, capital outvotes us.

E: I'm not arguing that the corpos shouldn't pay. They should. I'm arguing the economic effect doesn't stop with that payment and we're still fucked.

Then they will build coal plants.

I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we've had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.

It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.

It's actually not as simple as that, assuming they're connected to the grid. Power transmission is costly too, which needs to be accounted for, not just the power consumption/generation. Them being off-grid also isn't really reasonable because they'd need a lot of redundant power sources and backups, which would be better as part of the grid.

They should still be paying for all this, but estimating the real cost is non-trivial.

It's interesting to me that we don't do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.

So our utility came out and said they have to raise residential rates by a rather large amount, largely because so many data centers are demanding so much power they need to upgrade, so residential rates have to fund that..

If you read the article, it's because power companies are monopolies and so we've regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don't make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).

And that's weird, right? It's one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it's being stress tested in a new way.

The question was "who should", not "who will".

Then we get the actual capacity we need at the prices we can afford. Our power grid is disappointing. All that “extra capacity” could stop the random brown outs, rate spikes, and provide some extra capacity for the future.

But that leaves the utilities with alle the risk,

Not if you make the data center pay for it.

If a consumer wants a utility upgrade, the consumer pays all costs upfront. I know this because my neighbor works for the power company and was trying to get gas lines run to our neighborhood. The cost the power company would charge us was hundreds of thousands which even divided by the number of homes meant it would never pay off vs outlr existing cost for propane delivery.

(Made my day that somebody read the article! I feel like these technical pieces flounder in obscurity.)

Oh that's interesting. I hadn't realized the energy sector saw a C-suite pay spike too. Looking around, it seems like they were at or above pay for CEOs elsewhere. Crazy.

We've really seen deregulation under all the administrations, eh?

It is very interesting to me that we don't make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don't put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that's breaking our systems here isn't that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I'm surprised we didn't make 'bring your own power' a rule before; I guess it's infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn't fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?

A funny application of the law. Seems a little silly as an answer here.