I just don’t understand why this is a difficult question. Make the data centers fund their own power needs. End of story.
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Data centers need electricity, utilities need years to build – who should pay?
(theconversation.com)
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.
Make the data centers build their own power plants. Then they get all the risk and all the reward.
In theory it's great. In practice it's "oops we had a big spill and went out of business, guess the EPA will have to use taxpayer money".
Then they will build coal plants.
Mandate renewable energy and van open loop water cooling. Can't afford it? You don't need a datacenter then
This is where requirements as part of the data center zoning and purchase agreements comes in.
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.
The resources are finite whether the taxpayers pay for the construction or the corporation that needs the electric upgrade pays.
Yes and my point is that even if the corpo pays, which it absolutely should, that's not the end of the economic effect when that resource is used to the limit at the moment. We will end up paying too.
Wouldn't the market just expand to absorb the extra demand?
The demand for construction workers? If so, it could, if there's enough unemployment. Otherwise workers from some other industry would have to shift to construction. Creating a shortage in that industry. Switching industries is a more difficult process than getting an unemployed worker to work in construction though. But if there's already a labour shortage in the construction industry, then that answers the question. There isn't enough unemployment or shifting from other industries to fill the demand. And there seems to be one.
If there's underemployment in construction or higher unemployment, then yeah, the construction labour market would likely expand without much effect in housing and infrastructure.
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.
Agreed.
Obviously the public so that a few may get rich
Oh no! A struggling utility! I wonder where excess money is flowing? What could possibly fund these upgrades? -[insert generalized doom & gloom] -
https://energyandpolicy.org/as-customers-struggled-utility-ceos-pay-spiked-last-year/
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?
Deregulation would mean these things can't use public infrastructure.
EDIT: Actually this seems a very fine idea.
As pointed out in the article, because datacenters are pretty fast to build, new power plants need to start construction roughly 1 year before the datacenter starts construction. But that leaves the utilities with alle the risk, unless a robust agreement is in place with the datacenter. What happens if several power plants start construction, but the AI bubbles bursts, and the datacenters are cancelled?
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.
Are you suggesting we use government resources to benefit the masses? Whose side are you on anyway?
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.)
Datacenter. The end.
Datacenters build their own micro power plants for uptime anyway. This is a line item and an investment. Little Timmy's parents need to feed little Timmy... Not finance some techbro or deluded CLevel's fomo into the next big bubble.
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.
According to betteridge's law: No.