Power company hikes data center bills by 30%, cuts residential electricity costs by 1.3% — Oregon approves change through POWER Act, pushes developments using more than 20 Megawatts of power to pay their fair share
www.tomshardware.com
Residents no longer have to shoulder the costs of developing the grid to accommodate these large power users.
  • Bitswap@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    52·
    8 hours ago

    I have to say this is really shitty reporting by Tom’s and OPB. Sure its a big rate increase, but they left out the part where datacenters are still paying 30% to 50% less than residential customers per kWh.

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      30 minutes ago

      I was thinking that this sounds good at face value, but it could easily just be a throwaway publicity stunt.

      Let’s just make up a scenario, purely for illustrative purposes. Say our baseline is in 2022, customers paid ~100 a month in electricity. Then over the years, data centres came along, they struck deals, and individual consumers electricity bills went up to 200, which we are at today.

      Then, NicePowerCompanyLLC decides to hike the prices for the datacentres by 30%, and reduce the prices by 1.3% for the residentials. That’s still 98.7% higher than the baseline before the datacentres. That’s to say, they data centres are still having their costs subsidized by regular people.

      Ergo, if the prices already got hiked because of the datacentres, this tiny concession is a piss in the ocean. It’s just a publicity stunt to make themselves look better while people are still buckling under the exploitation of having to carry billion dollar industries on their backs, with no real benefit to themselves.

  • BigMacHole@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    551·
    10 hours ago

    This is TERRIBLE! If we FORCE Billionaires to PAY their Bills they Might LEAVE and DROP my Bills in the Process!

    -Republican Voters LITERALLY!

  • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
    181·
    10 hours ago

    I wonder how many data centres have contracts for fixed or predictable pricing agreements

    • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      There are dozens that have their new energy infrastructure costs and even their power usage shared among all the residents of that utility district. They’re hard to find out about because the contracts are often secretive – can’t imagine why – but this was going on for a while before people started to put up a stink about data centers.

      This is a good article from about a year ago, and Benn Jordan has also talked about it on his channel, among others.