So why did they raise my electricity rates and say it’s because of data centers? After a while, they flushed that water out into the lakes, which raised the temperature of that lake.
People who do not understand how utility rates are structured are willfully ignorant. It is part of a regulatory process that the general public is invited to participate in (but rarely does). Rates are designed to allocate the costs of serving a particular rate class to that class, not to others. All rate systems isolate residential and commercial customers and subdivide them into dozens, if not hundreds, of subclasses. Getting regulatory approval for the structure of rates is mind-numbingly boring, but it is open and completely transparent. Anyone who argues that data centers raised their residential rates either does not know or does not care what the truth is.