You are operating with complete ignorance of basic economics and how public utility regulation actually works. Data centers do not pay for all those upgrades. Under standard utility laws, massive capital expenditures like new high-voltage transmission lines and new power plants are added to the utility's ‘rate base,’ meaning the cost is socialized across every single customer on the grid. Captive residential ratepayers are actively paying for the infrastructure that these tech companies require.
Furthermore, comparing a commercial data center to a residential housing development is a ridiculous false equivalence. A single modern AI data center can consume as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of homes combined. When a new housing development goes in, the developers pay connection fees and the new families pay standard rates that naturally fit into steady municipal growth. Data centers represent an unprecedented, overnight demand shock that swallows up entire regional power supplies.
Your ‘Luddite’ label is insulting along with being rooted in the idiocy that you have demonstrated here on multiple occasions. Objecting to families having their monthly utility bills driven up to subsidize the profit margins of multi-trillion-dollar tech corporations is not an opposition to technology. It is an opposition to corporate welfare.”
fireman15 wrote: “You are operating with complete ignorance of basic economics and how public utility regulation actually works. Data centers do not pay for all those upgrades. Under standard utility laws, massive capital expenditures like new high-voltage transmission lines and new power plants are added to the utility’s ‘rate base,’ meaning the cost is socialized across every single customer on the grid. Captive residential ratepayers are actively paying for the infrastructure that these tech companies require.”
You are misrepresenting how that process works. For example, in Florida (the title of this thread), the costs are allocated in proportion to the amount of energy used. BTW, you admitted that one data center can use as much energy as hundreds of thousands of homes meaning that the greatest proportion of the costs fall upon the data centers.
fireman15 wrote: “Your ‘Luddite’ label is insulting along with being rooted in the idiocy that you have demonstrated here on multiple occasions. Objecting to families having their monthly utility bills driven up to subsidize the profit margins of multi-trillion-dollar tech corporations is not an opposition to technology. It is an opposition to corporate welfare.””
The luddite label is completely appropriate since you are making the same arguments made by the Luddites against modernization of factories.
You do realize that without data centers there would be no modern internet which would halt global digital communication, cloud storage, and artificial intelligence development? Data centers are essentially the price of living in the modern world.