Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power

One step further.

Data centers must provide more clean energy to the grid than they remove.

I'd say make them fund the creation of power plants that will produce 200% of their 24 hour usage in 24 hours.

They shouldn't just make what they use. They should be improving the communities where they operate.

Given we have the technology, any new construction should be required to be environmentally neutral at a minimum, ideally with ongoing improvement.

If they need to use millions of gallons of groundwater? Great, go fucking wild, but directly fund managed aquifer recharge projects to replace that groundwater at an equal or greater rate.

Increases in resource consumption should be covered entirely by the data center plus improvements to benefit the community.

No longer should big business be used as a means to siphon the value of labor and natural resources and concentrate it for selfish use by the worst of humanity.

Nah, I think we should give them all the power. All at once.

Free market bro. People have a market and you just show up and take what ya want.

They're not paying for additive demand. If grid updates or plant expansions cost $1b then that's distributed across all customers equally based on their consumption. So let's say there's 1m customers and the utility spread the costs over 10 years... $100 more per customer assuming equal consumption across.

Schiff is proposing the data center itself is saddled with the $1b and all other customers bills are held flat.

Because it's cheaper to bribe officials to make the locals pay for it.

They do pay for their power. The bill would require them to pay for grid upgrades that their usage makes necessary.

We are.

"common sense" doesn't mean legislation isn't necessary, what kind of logic is that?

You mean vulnerable to power outages? Because "sabotage" would be illegal and all of that

Well they're very accident prone. Lots of dangerous rednecks out there in the deserts shooting wildly without knowing what's beyond their targets. So much delicate equipment exposed to the rain of stray bullets. And it'd really suck to work there and find your car's radiator coolant pouring out from a .30 caliber hole.

It's way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they're going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).

I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.

No, electricity bills have been skyrocketing all over the US because electric companies have been passing the costs incurred by AI data centers onto the nearby residents. The AI companies don't want to pay for it.

In most countries, utilities are required to build the infrastructure and offer service.

Even better, they are using OUR money to put everyone they possibly can out of work.

Yeah with all 20 employees. Just gotta filter it a bit

What?

You forgot the /s