the more I'm debt you get the more you owe them,

Well, in the past (and the present in many places) perpetual unrepayable debts were used as a way to implement slavery without calling it slavery. They call it debt peonage. You know, food for thought.

Short term it pads the companies books a bit more by adding an asset on top of the revenue. Medium term it's a perpetual impairment generator. The executives are just planning to cash out before the inevitable happens.

Same as with RAM prices. There is a limited supply and the datacenters are hogging it, possibly willing to pay extra because the entire bubble depends on MORE MORE MORE, or willing to bulk purchase the entire contingent in advance.

Now if you are a power supplier you find yourself in the comfortable position of being financially courted by the datacenter corps, and you have a captured audience of consumers who rely on you supplying them, who you can now justifiably bleed out, and if they cant pay you just sell it to the datacenter after all.

Isn't a kwh the same price for everyone?

Perversely, no. Large industrial users often get a bulk rate that's cheaper than the household rate.

Happy cake day, BTW.

Definitely a smart move letting those power utilities be privatised, even a regulation forcing cost price power for residents would have been better than full privatisation. I'm so glad my state never got sucked into letting that happen here.

Fortunately, Oregon seems to have figured out how to handle this. This was in my feed, literally right under this post.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/63159063

As the other commenter said, they have a limited supply and are expecting us plebeians to be priced out and go without. It's already happening: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/virginia-county-tells-workers-switch-002400860.html

Isn't a kwh the same price for everyone?

Not sure why you'd assume this

If it’s anything like it is here in Victoria (Australia); the price per MWh is recalculated based on supply/demand on a 5 minute basis:

https://www.aemo.com.au/aemo/data/nem/priceanddemand/PRICE_AND_DEMAND_202607_VIC1.csv

That’s because when supply outruns demand, surplus electricity is basically worthless and wholesalers need to pay someone to take it - we have long stretches of time, even during winter, where our domestic solar production saturates the demand, resulting in our Feed-in tariffs (what homes get paid for surplus production) has dropped to 1c/kWh, except for certain edge cases).

The bulk of the cost incurred is due to peak-energy generation (gas turbine, I believe?) ramping up to cover peak evening times.

These costs are aggregated and amortised over total demand, to balance out people’s energy bills.

This has been a bit of a tangent, but I found this interesting when I first learned it, and just wanted to share!

Replace them. Either recruit a candidate or run yourself. Ignoring your voters should have consequences.

Not to sidestep it, but at what point is doing personal solar a better deal, if you own that is

but could anyone still explain the reasoning they are trying to make customers believe?

That's the neat part, they don't have to bother with that!

probably need to build new power plants while the existing ones are in overdrive

they could handle that diffeently, butt fleecing regular joe is more fun

I don’t really get how the fig leaf of “due to data-centers” is even supposed to work.

It let's them increase their extortionary price hike by more, and blame it on a different extortionist.

If we did, it would be populated by MAGAs who would take bribes to let the power company put ALL the costs on the residential consumers. Except for the wealthy neighborhood. They deserve a break, because they're better.