As an Ohian, I have become adept at sniffing out corrupt deals made by bought and paid for pols to transfer money from the 99% to the 1% because making those corrupt deals is the sole function of Ohio’s state government at this point. So when I started seeing Ohians complaining about electric bills on Tik Tok and my son told me his IBEW local has 200-some job listings for electricians to build data centers, I knew something was up.
But it’s still important to prove a claim up, and as a simple country lawyer, I’m grateful to these two academics:
A new paper by Legal Fellow Eliza Martin and Electricity Law Initiative Director Ari Peskoe explores how the public is paying the energy bills of some of the largest companies in the world. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other technology companies are looking to secure electricity for their new power-hungry data centers. To provide energy to these new facilities, electric utilities are expanding their systems with new power plants and transmission lines. Because utilities profit by building infrastructure, serving data centers is a lucrative opportunity that is incentivizing utilities to offer attractive rates to Big Tech companies.
The paper uncovers how utilities are forcing ratepayers to fund discounted rates for data centers. Martin and Peskoe explain that government-regulated utility rates socialize a utility’s costs of providing electricity service to the public. When a utility expands its system in anticipation of growing consumer demand, ratepayers share the costs of that expansion based on the premise that society benefits from growing electricity use. But data centers are upending this long-standing model. The very same utility rate structures that have spread the costs of reliable power delivery for everyone are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of wealthy corporations.
The paper is 46 pages long and dense and I wouldn’t be qualified to evaluate the methodology anyway - I’m not “doing my own research” on this. I don’t think anyone is surprised that our greed-crazed, anti-democratic tech overlords are sticking you all with the bill for their AI bubble.
Great issue for Democrats, liberals and Leftists. I suggest they grab it.
